Blogarhythms

I spent an unfortunate amount of time over the last year looking for my 7” 45RPM copy of Augustus Pablo’s “East of the River Nile.” I’d taken it with me to the radio station for a dusty set a few years ago, slipping it into the sleeve of a Lee Perry dub album for safe-keeping, and it hadn’t been seen in the interim. Since I’d pulled a few Lee Perry records out for featuring here on Records at Random I’d expected to find it. But no dice.

A few weeks ago when I was moving some records around I found a copy Pablo’s East of the River Nile full-length, which, in my fervor to find the 45, I’d totally forgotten that I owned. I set it aside in a stack of records I intended to come back to to pull Records at Random candidates from in the future, but was non-plussed by the absence of the 45 from my collection. As luck would have it though, as I was moving another stack of records (one which has occupied a portion of the floor here by my desk for months) the “East of the River Nile” 45 slipped out of the very Lee Perry sleeve I’d reached into and not found it in on numerous previous occasions.

Relieved that I’d finally found my missing prize I decided it was high time to send my Records at Random readers on a trip to the mellifluous lands found “East of the River Nile.”

Renowned as a devoted Rastafarian, prolific keyboard player, composer/producer and the first professional musician to make serious use of the melodica (until then looked upon as a toy instrument) the man known as Augustus Pablo (born Horace Swaby) began making a name for himself (after a string of singles) with the release of “East of the River Nile.” The song’s strikingly funky uptempo bass and guitar groove — which sounds like Jamaica’s answer to the J.B.’s — and the haunting melodies of the reverb-drenched melodica lead are as senses-shattering today as they surely were to listeners back in 1971. So, there’s no room to wonder at Pablo’s immediate impact on the Reggae genre or his lasting legacy.

For whatever reason the full-length bearing the title of his breakout hit wouldn’t come to fruition until 1977, but the compositions collected on the LP retain that tune’s sense of seminal immediacy, and savant-like expertise in songcraft, instrumentalism & production/recording technique, and more often than not sound just as groundbreakingly otherworldly as his early hit. “Sounds From Levi” (and it’s extended Dub, titled “Chapter 2″) for example sounds as if Pablo and company are splitting the difference between the liturgical music of the Biblical Holy Land, baroque harpsichord-fueled chamber music, American Jazz & Ragtime and Jamaican Dub, all while prefiguring more modern forms of music with rapid-fire hi-hats, snare rolls, a choppy drum beat and layers of effects.

“Addis-a-Baba” boasts an eerily pretty lead keyboard that meanders melancholic through melodic twists that echo the sort of paranoid tones favored in the weird balladry of Parliament/Funkadelic and Psyche-Rock bands like The Doors and Moody Blues. While songs like “Upfull Living” and “Unfinished Melody,” both of which were recorded with The Upsetters band, meld slow & heavy Dub rhythms, atmospherically enchanting instrumental flourishes from chimes & bells and light & airy Pop melodies that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on ’60s and ’70s radio.

Still other tunes like “Jah Light,” “Natural Way,” “Memories of the Ghetto” (another Upsetters number) and “Africa (1983)” build tuff rhythms around Pablo’s signature melodica soloing, sounding like the dramatic theme music from some lost Ennio Morricone soundtrack to Jamaican cowboy movies (beef patty westerns?) that were never actually made. Often these songs benefit from subtle Soul, Jazz and Funk influences, like gurgling clavinet or alternately silky/plucky guitar lines, and almost all of them feature spectacular keyboard riffs or spacily sinister lo-fi synths, the likes of which wouldn’t come to prominence in popular music for two decades.

Sadly, Pablo, whose health had suffered due to a nerve condition his entire life, passed away in 1999 at the young age of 40, but not until he’d built a reputation as one of the Reggae genre’s most indelible figures. East of the River Nile is a monument to his greatness, and an essential artifact, not just for Reggae fans, but music archivists and vinyl historians in general.