Various – Studio One Music Lab 2LP Soul Jazz Records

This new Studio collection on Soul Jazz Records delves deep into a melting pot world of reggae and funk and dub created at the music laboratory of 13 Brentford Road, Kingston in the 1970s – an intense collaboration of crack musicians, singers, DJs and engineers under the guidance of producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd.

Here you will find some of the deepest and rawest cuts to emanate out the Studio One factory – truly hypnotic rhythms, powerful funk guitar and bass, soaring horns and more interspersed with occasional vocals and toasting as musicians reach for the highest heights and deepest roots of reggae music. 

Some of these tunes here are rare and classic versions to seminal Studio One vocal cuts from the likes of Horace Andy and Hortense Ellis. There is also a wealth of cuts from simply the greatest musicians ever to come out of Jamaica (let alone Studio One). These include Jackie Mittoo, Roland Alphonso, Cedric Brooks, Ernest Ranglin and the Brentford All-Stars. You will find straight up funk bombs such as Lennie Hibbert’s mind-blowing ‘Go For Yourself’ (sounding like The Meters meets James Brown!), the Brentford All-Stars covering War’s classic ‘The World is a Ghetto’, and Jackie Mittoo showing how to make Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ into a reggae funk bomb! 

All of these sit beside super-deep roots and dub cuts that exemplify together how Studio One was unique in Clement Dodd’s pioneering vision of reggae, the music created functioning with a continuous level of experimentation that blurred the lines between genres and pushed the outer limits of reggae music at all times. This album is deep!

The album comes with extensive sleevenotes by Steve Barker (Wire magazine) and comes as a double gatefold vinyl + download.