Dub: Reggae's most dramatic offspring has its day
With reissues of classics, new music and a continuing presence in local clubs, dub is alive and well in Philly.
February is, of course, Black History Month in the United States, and with that come worthy explorations of African American heritage, politics, art, and culture. In our North American neighbor Jamaica, February also happens to be Reggae Month, a celebration of Caribbean island sounds. This year, rather than focus on the more familiar strains of, say, dancehall, lovers' rock, or the sweet traditionalism of Bob Marley, it's dub and dub-oriented music that's in the spotlight with a number of old (but remastered) and new releases coming.
That's a happy coincidence because dub, after nearly 50 years as a genre, is still esoteric and misunderstood. An innovative, dramatic form of primarily instrumental electronic music, dub's gorgeous, haunting sounds were - as with dance and hip-hop's original 12-inch records - meant to extend a song for dance-floor purposes.
In the head and hands of originators such as Lee "Scratch" Perry, King Tubby, Prince Jammy, and Augustus Pablo, dub became an echo- and bass-heavy bin-rattling brand of experimentalism as free as a Coltrane solo and as dark as a thundercloud.
"Dub is like the skeleton of reggae, its X-ray, really," says Philadelphian Randall Grass, the general manager at Shanachie Records, which late last year released Dread Prophecy: The Strange, a boxed set from the late dub-dancehall maestro Yabby You. "Yabby's dubs often featured a lot of percussion elements as well as horn lines that made them more wide-ranging and sophisticated," Grass said. Considering this sophistication, one is reminded of dub production techniques made familiar (and more palpable to mass audiences) by big rock producers such as Brian Eno (on many a U2 album, for instance) and, of course, Philadelphia expatriate DJ/artist Diplo and his Major Lazer band.
"Dub - Yabby's and such - has expanded the musical vocabulary available to all musicians and producers," says Grass.
Along with Shanachie's dub classic contribution, VP/Greensleeves Records this month reissued Original Rockers, one of dub's most hauntingly identifying discs, from Jamaica's lyrical King of the Melodica, Augustus Pablo. If dub has a bible, Original Rockers is one of its books; its lilting, echoing melodies offer a unique vision of the genre's possibilities. Also rereleased through VP are Glen Brown's Boat to Progress and his crisp Dubble Attack, plus two racy albums by Horace Andy, 1977's In The Light and its Prince Jammy-produced dub companion. Many a reggae artist has released echo-flexing dub companion records for DJs to spin and for heads to bliss out on.
"Dub is reggae's rhythmic and spatial essence," says Grass. "It opens up the possibilities of the music. You can mix a dozen different dubs of the same track, have a dozen different artistic statements with a dozen different perspectives."
Legendary British producer Adrian Sherwood has long had one of those different perspectives. Along with making daring new punky dub albums (like his #N/A collaboration with Japan's Nisennenmondai) and overseeing projects for dub overlord Perry, Sherwood produces and distributes albums through his On-U Sound label.
This month, On-U rereleased albums by dub's most innovative unit of the '80s and '90s, African Head Charge (My Life in a Hole in the Ground, Environmental Studies, Drastic Season, Off the Beaten Track).
Sherwood's nouvelle take on dub is to focus on the texture of individual instruments in the mix and their psychedelic flavors. "What dub does is make you hear things that aren't even there in the track because of the spaciness of it," says Sherwood. He's taken dub's foundations and formed his own aesthetic by studying the use of tone and the uncluttered production of those early dub records, and then "abusing" various effects.
"I was fascinated by equalization changes and foregrounding different instruments, even separating out different parts of the drums, so you would get, say, the high-hat flying in from one direction and the snare somewhere else. "
Fans of modern dub will hear the twists and turns Sherwood speaks of on the new, eerily airy project from Massive Attack and Tricky, Ritual Spirit.
Philadelphia's Grass - a keyboardist with Philly Gumbo, a onetime WXPN-FM host of Roots, Rock, Reggae, and an author who touched upon the history of dub in his book Great Spirits - notes that there's great presence in the area where Jamaican communities are concerned. "West Philadelphia has always been the heart of it in Philadelphia, but it is spread around Logan, Germantown/Mount Airy, and West Oak Lane. In New Jersey, South Jersey, particularly Willingboro and further South Lindenwold, Blackwood, and so on."
Though those areas have deep pockets of families from Jamaica hosting regular block parties, it is nightclubs such as Northern Liberties' Trilogy and West Philadelphia's Festival Lounge where dub is a staple late into the evening. And it's a certainty that wherever DJ Roger Culture or Philadelphia's Solomonic Sound are performing, dub will have a large part on the spinning menu, especially as an evening winds down.
On March 12, Solomonic Sound and the Dubtribe Sound System will take over the new Fishtown warehouse 714 on Girard Avenue. More info here.