31.3.07

Debt Of Gratitude




Dub. It's a sound we're all familiar with. But it's impossible to measure its impact on contemporary music. British dance music culture developed around its (and reggae's) sound system culture. Jungle, drum & bass, and dubstep owe it an obvious debt of gratitude. It's also interesting how the UK became the epicentre for dub in the early 1980s when its homeland of Jamaicaa was turned onto the new school digital sounds of dancehall. More on that later.

Mad Professor, the man behind Ariwa studios, has been touring the UK. His last date is in Edinburgh tomorrow at Cabaret Voltaire. Otherwise it's June before he's back in the UK with a Jazz Cafe date. Apparently his studio is down the road from sunny Brixton in a terraced house in South Norwood. Which interestingly is not far from where DMZ crew of Mala, Loefah and Coki are from. Is it a conincidenc that old school dub and new school, 21st century electronic dub have major roots in suburban(ish) south London.

Here's a preview piece that should have run in Scotland Metro on Friday

GIG

Mad Professor

Dub pioneer Mad Professor (50-something Neil Fraser), arrives in Scotland as part of a 60-date tour that began last December and takes in Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, America and India. Its scale is an indication of the global affection for dub, some 20 years after British dub’s late 1970/early 1980s heyday, when artists such as Mad Professor, Manessah and Jah Shaka continued the Jamaican sound’s traditions.

Initially an engineer for amps and mixing desks, Fraser began to play around with the circuitry of this studio equipment, creating his own dub sound, earning Fraser the ‘Mad Professor’ moniker from his school friends.

Little did they know that Fraser’s dub experiments were integral to dance music’s genesis in Britain: its raves were built around soundsystem culture, and the music itself drew heavily on dub’s emphasis on bass and drum, or ‘repetitive beats’.

Dub’s influence is palpable in jungle/drum’n’bass, though it’s perhaps current buzz sound dubstep, that’s maintaining its core tradition of feeling – not just hearing - the music and its vibrations shaking your core.

Mad Professor’s Ariwa label and studio (hand built Fraser), is world-renowned and over the years he’s worked with greats such as Horace Andy and the master, Lee Scratch Perry, as well as Massive Attack and The Orb.

Mad Professor’s shows champion positive conscious sounds, mainly dub but also lover’s rock and reggae, bringing people together under the banner of music, and enveloping you in a warm comforting blanket of bass and good vibrations. So it seems Mad Proffesor’s friends were half right: Fraser’s far from mad but is a visionary academic of music in the purest possible sense.