Dub music

Dub is a genre of electronic music that grew out of reggae in the 1960s, and is commonly considered a subgenre, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae. Music in this genre consists predominantly of instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually by removing the vocals from an existing music piece, and emphasizing the drum and bass parts (this stripped-down track is sometimes referred to as a 'riddim'). Other techniques include dynamically adding extensive echo, reverb, panoramic delay, and occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.

Dub was pioneered by Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Errol Thompson and others in the late 1960s. Similar experiments with recordings at the mixing desk outside of the dancehall environment were also done by producers Clive Chin and Herman Chin Loy. These producers, especially Ruddock and Perry, looked upon the mixing console as an instrument, manipulating tracks to come up with something new and different. Dub has influenced many genres of music, including rock (most significantly the subgenre of post-punk and other kinds of punk), pop,hip hop,disco, and later house,techno,ambient,electronic dance music, and trip hop. Dub has become a basis for the genres of jungle/drum and bass and dubstep. Traditional dub has survived and some of the originators, such as Lee "Scratch" Perry and Mad Professor, continue to produce new material.

King Tubby

Osbourne Ruddock, (28 January 1941 – 6 February 1989) better known as King Tubby, was a Jamaican electronics and sound engineer, known primarily for his influence on the development of dub in the 1960s and 1970s.

Tubby's innovative studio work, which saw him elevate the role of the mixing engineer to a creative fame previously only reserved for composers and musicians, would prove to be influential across many genres of popular music. He is often cited as the inventor of the concept of the remix, and so may be seen as a direct antecedent of much dance and electronic music production. Singer Mikey Dread stated, "King Tubby truly understood sound in a scientific sense. He knew how the circuits worked and what the electrons did. That's why he could do what he did".

Biography

King Tubby's music career began in the 1950s with the rising popularity of Jamaican sound systems, which were to be found all over Kingston and which were developing into enterprising businesses. As a talented radio repairman, Tubby soon found himself in great demand by most of the major sound systems of Kingston, as the tropical weather of the Caribbean island (often combined with sabotage by rival sound system owners) led to malfunctions and equipment failure. Tubby owned an electrical repair shop on Drumalie Avenue, Kingston, that fixed televisions and radios. It was here that he built large amplifiers for the local sound systems. In 1961-62, he built his own radio transmitter and briefly ran a pirate radio station playing ska and rhythm and blues which he soon shut down when he heard that the police were looking for the perpetrators. Tubby would eventually form his own sound system, Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi, in 1958. It became a crowd favourite due to the high quality sound of his equipment, exclusive releases and Tubby's own echo and reverb sound effects, at that point something of a novelty.

Thievery Corporation

Thievery Corporation is a Washington, D.C. based recording artist and DJ collective consisting of Rob Garza, Eric Hilton, and their supporting artists Rob Myers, Loulou Ghelichkhani, Natalia Clavier, Frank 'Booty Lock' Mitchell, Mr. Lif, Jeff Franca and Ashish Vyas. Their music style mixes elements of dub, acid jazz, reggae, Indian classical, Middle Eastern, hip hop, electronica and Brazilian (such as bossa nova).

History

Thievery Corporation was formed in the summer of 1995 at Washington D.C.'s Eighteenth Street Lounge. Rob Garza and Lounge co-owner Eric Hilton were drawn together over their mutual love of club life, as well as dub, bossa nova and jazz records. They decided to see what would come of mixing all these in a recording studio, and from this, in 1996 the duo started their Eighteenth Street Lounge Music record label.

The duo drew attention with their first two 12" offerings, "Shaolin Satellite" and "2001: a Spliff Odyssey" and with their 1997 debut LP, Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi.

Reggae

Reggae (/ˈrɛɡeɪ/) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to most types of popular Jamaican dance music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that was strongly influenced by traditional mento and calypso music, as well as American jazz and rhythm and blues, especially the New Orleans R&B practiced by Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint, and evolved out of the earlier genres ska and rocksteady.

Stylistically, reggae incorporates some of the musical elements of rhythm and blues, jazz, mento (a celebratory, rural folk form that served its largely rural audience as dance music and an alternative to the hymns and adapted chanteys of local church singing), calypso, African music, as well as other genres. One of the most easily recognizable elements is offbeat rhythms; staccato chords played by a guitar or piano (or both) on the offbeats of the measure. The tempo of reggae is usually slower than ska but faster than rocksteady. The concept of "call and response" can be found throughout reggae music.

The Aggrovators

The Aggrovators were a dub/reggae backing band in the 1970s and 1980s, and one of the main session bands of producer Bunny Lee. The line-up varied, with Lee using the name for whichever set of musicians he was using at any time. The band's name derived from the record shop that Lee had run in the late 1960s, Agro Sounds. Alumni of the band included many musicians who later went on to make names for themselves in reggae music. Legends such as Jackie Mittoo, Sly and Robbie, Tommy McCook, and Aston Barrett were all involved with the band at one point or another. Other regular members included Carlton "Santa" Davis, Earl "Chinna" Smith, George "Fully" Fullwood, Ansel Collins, Bernard "Touter" Harvey, Tony Chin, Bobby Ellis, and Vin Gordon. The band recorded Lee's most popular output from the 1970s, with the instrumental B-sides of Lee's single releases on the Jackpot and Justice labels generally credited to The Aggrovators and mixed by King Tubby.

Discography

Albums