King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller in a Tenement Yard

AMG Review of King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller in a Tenement Yard

Jeff Tamarkin
All Music Guide

The creative talents of two reggae titans converge on this previously ultra-rare, somewhat frustrating but ultimately fine collection. The late King Tubby is generally considered the architect of dub, the practice of stripping the vocals off of a reggae record in the studio, then slicing up the remaining instrumental tracks and pasting them back together in a spacy, stretched-out, echoey, often very trippy pattern to create a new whole that often bears little resemblance to the source material. Some of the greatest dub albums ever recorded have been the work of King Tubby, who had toyed with the music of the late Jacob Miller prior to making this album -- released in Jamaica on a small label and virtually disappearing from circulation -- circa 1976. Most notably, Tubby reworked Miller's "Baby I Love You So" as the title track for the landmark King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, credited to Augustus Pablo but created alongside Tubby. Miller is best remembered as the lead vocalist for the underrated Jamaican vocal group Inner Circle(in its pre-"Cops" days), but he'd already logged a number of memorable singles on his own before joining that band in 1976, among them "Tenement Yard" and "Forward Jah Jah Children." His quivering, mesmerizing voice was one of the most unique in reggae, and the virtual absence of that voice in Tubby's remixes (except in the first bonus track, "Dub the Weak Heart"), gives them something of an emptiness. Granted, that is the nature of dub; it is largely an instrumental genre that exists to create atmospheres, not to convey lyrics or spotlight human vocals. And on its own terms, the project succeeds: the backing tracks played by the Fatman Riddim Section gave Tubby plenty to work with, and there are some deep grooves within (i.e., "Judgment Yard Dub," which draws on "Tenement Yard"). But although this project is consistently intoxicating overall, King Tubby produced more satisfying work in his lifetime.