One of reggae music’s best-known session bands, The Revolutionaries frequently evolved as a collection of the island’s finest session musicians during the roots and early dancehall era of the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s, with members including Earl ‘Wire’ Lindo, Radcliffe ‘Dougie’ Bryan, Ansell Collins, Bobby Kalphat, Lloyd Parks, Uziah ‘Sticky’ Thompson, Bongo Herman, Stanley Bryan, Bo Peep, Eric ‘Bingy Bunny’ Lamont, Errol ‘Tarzan’ Nelson, Skully Simms, Robbie Lyn, Mikey ‘Mao’ Chung and many others. But the group’s enduring core lies undoubtedly in the formation of the legendary rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare, and the formation of The Revolutions marked the first time this incomparable duo worked together.
The group recorded these rhythm tracks sometime in the mid-1970s at the famed Channel One Recording Studios on Maxfield Avenue in Kingston, with arrangements by unsung reggae master Ozzy Hibbert. Ozzy would move to Maxfield Avenue in early 1975, just as Jo-Jo and Ernest Hookim’s studio was opening. Ozzy was himself a respected session musician in the late 1960s and early 1970s (playing keyboards for Bunny “Striker” Lee and Keith Hudson, and also in another foundational session band, The Soul Syndicate), and was initially recruited by Jo-Jo to be a band member of The Revolutionaries, but soon took on the role of studio producer, engineer and talent scout, responsible for selecting artists for the studio.
These tracks were recorded by Hibbert around this time for Winston Jones, the original singer and composer of Stop That Train (later made world famous in the Keith & Tex version) and his Spanishton band, on Prince Buster’s label in the early 1960s. Jones had moved from Jamaica to New York in the early 1970s, where he founded and ran the Flames label. The label would become a core part of the Brooklyn reggae scene from the mid-1970s through to the early 1990s, but Jones often used his hometown’s Channel One, Hibbert and the Revolutionaries to record rhythm tracks for his own records. So the Meditation in Dub LP is essentially a collection of excellent dub versions of the early Flames 45s Jones produced and released in the mid-to-late 1970s, including many essential takes on the popular rhythms of the era. One of the holy grails for any self-respecting dub LP collector, with originals fetching up to £400, we were kindly assisted in sourcing the audio for this new cut, which is now issued under licence from Texas-based Jones with RB at DKR helping out.
