Lee "Scratch" Perry's Upsetter's 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle 1973

 

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. 

    

Reading Music: Julius Eastman

I listen to a lot of music reading. Used to be I listened to more or less anything. This was maybe because I was simply younger and could multitask better than I can now, or at least thought I could. Or maybe I used to spend more of my reading time with newspapers and magazines (or doomscrolling the internet) instead of reading books. At any rate, while reading books now I find words, or English words, too distracting, so my reading music tastes have developed some. No words or non-English or indecipherable vocals are a prerequisite condition of my musical selections for reading now; long, slow developing musical pieces are a preference. Brian Eno's rule that ambient music should be as easy to ignore as it is interesting usually fits my needs. Although my favored reading music can be calming it doesn't have to be. I actually find some intense minimalism, like Julius Eastman, and some free jazz, for another example, as mentally invigorating as coffee. Eastman was a bad boy (see song titles) of the art music scene of the 1970s and 1980s, African American, palled around with Arthur Russell of downtown NYC experimental-disco reputation, and reportedly lived in terrible impoverished circumstances at the end of his life. I've discovered at least three posthumous albums dedicated to his music that I adore as reading music right now: Femenine; Volume 2: Joy Boy; and this one, Three Extended Pieces for Four Pianos: