Deep soundtrack to A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James searing and sprawling 2014 novel about Jamaica in the 1970s and violent crucible of gang cultures and colonial control and CIA guns and a Jamaican diaspora.
Actually, the whole album, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, and arguably the first dub album (1973), is a grower and a complex affair. Soundtrack music expansive and subtly orchestrated. Five drummers, three bass players (including "Family Man"), four guitar players, three organists, two pianists, melodica (Augustus Pablo), trombone, trumpet (New Orleans in the house), three more percussion guys (including Noel "Skully" Simms and Uziah "Sticky" Thompson), and Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby engineering the sound system, mixing and matching uncannily simple and impossibly Island-time seductive "riddims" with echoey accents and dub reverb into this moody vanguard vortex of exquisite sufferers lamentations and ebullient keep-on-keeping-on Blackboard Jungle Dub groove power. I've picked up gossip somewhere that Perry gets too much credit for the production that should go to King Tubby. I don't know about any of that other than to note Perry is listed as a musician (percussion) and Tubby isn't. Always with the office politics, I'm afraid. Well, despite or because of the these frictions the record is grandiose and sentimental but humble and organic and catchy and undeniable and absolutely bravura in its indelible studio dub music soundtrack to Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s. An homage to The Black Ark studio in Perry's backyard. And deep backdrop to James' epic story of Bob Marley's Jamaica.
And if this 1970s Jamaica story interests you at all you gotta know Timothy White's epic biographical treatment of Marley, Catch a Fire, latest edition because it never stopped expanding until White's early death in 2002.
Blackboard Jungle Dub. One of the great world pop sounds of the 20th century, which is one of the things the last century did have going for it. Lots of great popular music.
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