Contents - Beth Lesser

‘Billie Jean’ was released on an African Loves 12 inch in 1984, with the B side
‘Mama Used to Say’, a cover version of a Junior Giscombe song. The third
version he voiced was ‘The Lady in My Life’, another Michael Jackson cover.
It took Family Man a while to figure out how his original rhythm that he
thought had been lost in the Black Ark fire had made its way onto the reggae
charts. But, it turned out selector Jah Wise had taken the rhythm from Lee
Perry and brought it to New York to help with the Shinehead production.
Family Man recalls, “Years later, I run into Shinehead’s manager and I said
to him, ‘Who do you pay royalties to this rhythm here?’ And he told me, ‘Lee
Scratch Perry.’ And I just smile.”
jazzBo’S ‘home’ STudio
Prince Jazzbo makes the quite plausible case that the very first all-computerized
song in reggae was his production of Horace Ferguson’s ‘Sensi Addict’,
released in 1984. Jazzbo admits that the drum machine appeared in many
earlier Lee Perry releases, but claims that he was the first producer to combine
it with keyboard generated bass.
After he returned from his three year stay in England, Prince Jazzbo began
working as a resident producer in Channel One. In exchange for the work
he did, Jazzbo got free studio time to work on his own productions. While
working there in the early ‘80s, he got friendly with many of the Channel
One roster of upcoming singers including Michael Palmer, Frankie Paul and
Horace Ferguson. Horace, with his sweet, Horace Andy style falsetto, started
working with Jazzbo right away. The original (non-“computerized”) version of
the song Sensi Addict was recorded at Channel One in 1981. Jazzbo offered
it to the Hookims, but they weren’t interested in releasing it. So, Jazzbo left
Channel One, taking the tapes of his own material to try and re-record it in
his own way, on his own limited budget. Ever resourceful and determined,
Jazzbo began experimenting with using pre-programmable instruments in
his ‘home’ studio in an abandoned building at 8 Olympic Way, Kingston,
a “capture land” in the heart of a no-go zone. There, Jazzbo set himself up
with a studio and a record shop and began working on his digital rhythms
with electricity conveniently borrowed from city wires. (“We ran the electricity
underground,” Jazzbo commented. “There’s many ways to get electricity
without paying for it.”) To do the actual voicing and mixing, he still had to
rent time in the big studios, but he didn’t have to pay for a band and most of
the preliminary work could be done at home.
As early as 1983, Jazzbo was making music that was fully programmed
on the drum machine and keyboard, like the Sensi Addict album he did with
Horace Ferguson. “When I started working at Channel One, Channel One
296 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall