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They say the pioneers get the arrows and the settlers get the land, yet King Tubby was always lord of his musical terrain. The Jamaican sound engineer was a groundbreaking figure who, in the 1970s, invented and developed the hypnotic, mesmeric sub-genre of reggae known as dub.
Tubby, who was murdered in 1989, enjoys messianic status in his field, and one of his most fervent disciples is the Barbados-born, London-based reggae guitarist, bassist and producer Dennis Bovell. Himself a venerable figure, now 70, he has established a tribute evening at London’s Jazz Café to his mercurial musical hero as an annual event.
Bovell divided the evening into two halves, the first of which appeared to celebrate himself more than Tubby. Singing over his own records, such as “Dub Master” and “Champion”, he listed the artists he has produced and remixed: Radiohead, The Slits, The Pop Group. “I don’t like to boast,” he added, a tad unconvincingly.
An avuncular, grey-bearded presence behind a pair of decks, Bovell introduced Nigerian saxophonist Bukky Leo, then a protégé, L Dot, an attitudinal teenage rapper. As she spat rhymes with two pals, Bovell proudly noted, “I’ve been watching them since they were doing that in year seven in my kitchen!”
These two cameos were pleasantly diverting, although it was difficult to discern exactly how they related to King Tubby. It was only after Bovell had growled his own “Half Way to Za-lon” and changed into bright orange Caribbean casualwear that he applied himself to lauding that seminal figure.
King Tubby’s genius, half a century ago, was to turn the recording studio mixing desk into an instrument. He would take reggae tracks and utterly deconstruct them, removing vocals, accentuating bass and drum rhythms, and adding layers of echo, reverb and phased electronic effects to create a whole new entity.
Bovell’s tribute tonight was, in effect, to replicate this methodology on Tubby’s own material. Crouched over a performance controller, he unleashed waves of juddering dub and ground-shaking bass over cavernous, febrile Tubby original tracks such as “Strength to Survive”.
Tubby’s radical reinventing and lengthening of existing songs saw him lauded as the inventor of the remix. Bovell acknowledged this by adding even more layers of echo to his hero’s deep-dub reworkings of “Rainy Night in Georgia” and The Temptations’ “Get Ready”, the latter retitled “Get Ready for the Master Dub”.
Bovell’s fervent enthusiasm for this material was infectious. When he wasn’t yelling “Tubby!” over the seismic beats, he was howling like a wolf. He went particularly spare for Tubby’s reshaping of “Kingston Town”, best known in the UK for its rather diluted, less essential 1989 cover by UB40.
Bovell closed with his own production of Bob Marley’s hit “Sun Is Shining” by Tubby’s contemporary, and fellow pioneering reggae producer, Lee “Scratch” Perry, who died in 2021. “Scratch is still here, just not in the flesh!” he opined, gravely. It was a distinctly quixotic evening: probably, exactly what King Tubby would have wanted.
★★★☆☆
