Who feels it knows it

Lee 'Scratch' Perry is probably the first guy you hear about when you get into reggae, if it's in more of a serious, and less of a Bob Marley way. He's supposed to be the best Jamaican producer and he is, easily. Guys like Niney the Observer and Lloyd Charmers (Dadawah, Peace and Love) have their moments for me, but Perry simply has many more. Hundreds of amazing songs throughout the 70s, many of them not only produced and arranged by him, but composed as well. His Black Ark was legendary as the heaviest studio around--what you read about it makes it seem like some impossible creative paradise. One day, a couple of African musicians showed up there asking to be produced by Perry. By far the dominant mode in reggae at the time was called roots, and Perry's music was the rootsiest of all--"African blood is flowing through my veins" and such--so it must have seemed like a divine blessing that real Africans had come to work with him. What their sessions produced wasn't exactly reggae but was a near-great album. Island Records didn't see any commercial potential in it, though, so it became one of several rejected records produced during Perry's peak years.

It did get issued in a limited quantity in France, and has been reissued this year on cd by Trojan. But instead of hunting down a mint copy of the French vinyl, Trojan for some reason decided to go back to the recorded-over master tapes, and somehow try to salvage the sound from there. It didn't turn out too great--more like sketches of a lost album than the album itself. Perry's bounce-down production style is so saturated/hazy/ethereal to begin with, there's a sense in which his work can stand up to this loss of definition better than anything else could. But, really, his mixes are so perfectly achieved that it's just a major, major shame. And if Island hadn't wussed out in the first place there'd be plenty of the original vinyl floating around and I would be a happier person than I am right now--it makes you understand why Peter Tosh used to call Island-owner Chris Blackwell, Whiteworst (need to change the subject now...I can go on a lot more boringly than this about all the problems with various Perry re-issues, except for the stuff on Pressure Sounds like Divine Madness...Definitely)

The track below didn't even make the cut with the French label, which is hard to understand. Thus it joins the long line of outtakes, in all genres, that are better than anything on the actual issued album (for two even more essential examples of this: click here for folk, and here for folk-rock). In this case, I decided to edit out the first minute or so of African testifying, but what remains is truly awesome--and less damaged by the spectral sound quality than the rest of the cd because it's arrangement is more stripped-down anyway. In the last two minutes, echoed chants and horns get real soulful, reaching for somewhere near Zion Land. They don't quite make it, but neither has anything else.

Seke Molenga & Kawo Kawongolo--Nzube (edit)