like my mother used to haunt garage sales. So it was no surprise when I found myself descending the escalator at the Vancouver B.C. Virgin record store, which is dwarfed only by the Virgin store in Times Square. On a wet September afternoon, I took the Sky Train from Burnaby to the Granville downtown exit. I wanted to check out the listening posts in the Virgin world music section and the new releases that had hit the street.
It was a pleasure trip to visit my brother that prompted my romp through this downtown mausoleum of commerce. In between sampling the repetitious Nuevo Flamenco groups then dominating the "posts," I couldn't help but be seduced by the in-store playing of something new, yet sounding like a classic Bob Marley song with heavy dub and ambient atmospherics, teasingly familiar, yet foreboding in mood.
Many minutes later (ten, in fact) I was still hearing the same song. It floated over the heads of customers who were seemingly
unaware of this strange new musical amalgam. It was vintage Marley singing "Rebel Music (Three O'clock Roadblock)," embedded in an undulating electronica. Mesmerizing arrangements sprinkled down on us unsuspecting store patrons, like ocean spray hits Negril Beach in Jamaica. I was shocked!
To bolt back to Burnaby in protest was my first impulse, but the musical sensibilities in my brain had been tweaked! A quick investigation led me to the artsy cover of Bob Marley Dreams of Freedom (Ambient Translations of Bob Marley in Dub) [Island Records], conceived then remixed by studio mixmaster Bill Laswell and reggae/rock label tycoon Chris Blackwell.
Head full of palmas
from New Age-y Flamenco groups and painful Portuguese fados from
in-store headphones, I fled outside to make sense of it all in the fresh Canadian air. If the Brooklyn based recording guru Laswell could do this to Marley's studio masters, is there nothing sacred? Will it be Miles Davis classics in dub versions next? Or, taken to the extreme, how about ambient translations of Big Band Classics? What of the dangers of digital dub pirates? (There are issues here!) Stunned or stunning? I didn't know what to think!
I traveled back home to the San Francisco Bay Area with
the memory of a chunk-a-chunk guitar throbbing out an eight-minute version of "Exodus" with its compressed, cyclone sound, rolling out the refrain. What I remembered most is the ambient traffic noise and gut wrenching bass lines that reverberated in and out during the chorus "exodus...movement of the people..." In fact, everything is dropping in and out--chorus, piano, guitar-- as Laswell's engineers frantically blend the song's various components into a liquid mass, pushing through a trance-like musical elixir until the the sum of the product becomes a synergistic fait accompli.
Haunted, I did what any music lover of deep reggae dub
riddims would do! I bought the cd back in the States from my favorite indie record store...and that was even before I unpacked.
Laswell's studio has managed to thread my Bob Marley favorites into a seamless cloth of part studio tracks, part ambient shadings. He has reformed various reggae classics such as "No Woman No Cry," "Waiting in Vain," "So Much Trouble in the World," and eight nostalgic others, into gorgeous musical apparitions. His genius is apparent as the thought hits me of what lesser dubmeisters might have done given the incredible body of this historic material.
Already criticized by reggae purists and Bob Marley fans,
I must give kudos to the founder of Island Records,
Chris Blackwell, for having the guts to follow through with
this project. (Blackwell, who had become an employee of the Holland-based Polygram after selling Island Records for $300 million, has just been asked to leave by his Dutch Masters over artistic differences.)
Warning! This is controversial stuff. Bob Marley's music and Bill
Laswell's tasteful production of Bob Marley Dreams of Freedom might be one of the best cds of 1997!
