Gavin B.

I generally don't sit and listen to an album of dub music from start to finish because most of the songs are longer and it can get tedious hearing the entire album in one sitting. That's especially true with dub music where deejays have very distinctive sound board signatures which they use over and over.

The strength of dub music is that it wears well with repeated playings because you keep rediscovering things in the mix that you didn't realize were there. Dub cuts that appear to be unremarkable upon the first listen often flower into exquisite musical jewels after several listens.

Unless you're a hardcore fan of the performer it's hard to sit through any album on a single listen, especially an instrumental album. If I purchase an album it will often take me a month or two to listen to it entirely. I spend a lot of time with each song to fully absorb the content.

I'm a big fan of Charles Mingus but to this day I can't sit through an entire playing of one of his albums. Mingus' compositions are so emotionally demanding that listening to four or five Mingus songs in a row can be an exhausting experience. I'm more intrested in figuring out how I work a single Mingus' song into a set list of dance music so more people will get a chance to find out what he was all about.

When I make a sound system playlist, I use dub riddims and other insturmental music as segues into otherwise abrupt changes in genre or tempo.

What I'll do, for example, is play three consecutive roots rock songs, and use a dub instrumental as a segue into a three song set of early punk rock, then use a surf instrumental to segue into a set of three soul music songs and then use a brazilian insturmental to segue into a three song set of roots reggae to wrap the set.

One of the tricks I learned from sound system selectors in Jamaican dance halls was the mystical power of the triad. The best Jamaican deejays always select music in sets of threes. By structuring a set of music using triads I learned that you could generate a lot more excitement to your sound system song list.

It also helped that I spent a year or so in a Boston night club setting doing live dance hall deejay clashes with Jah Prince who was the was the leading reggae deejay on the East Coast in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Jah Prince was kind enough to let me share the booth with him at his own Thrusday night spinning gig, but he didn't need me to draw a crowd. You really do learn the technical skills and trade tricks to drop a smokin' good set of music, if you serve an apprenticeship with a highly skilled deejay with a good pair of ears.