Ode To Joy – Cornell Campbell meets Soothsayers – Alchemy Dubs 12″ 12", New entries, Reggae, Vinyl

Here’s the story of the record in David Katz’s own words: “Travelling to Japan was the culmination of a longstanding dream, the maiden voyage undertaken in 2013 on the invitation of Masaya Hayashi of Drum ‘n’ Bass Records, Osaka; Masa arranged for me to play at his club, Night Wax, and at a warehouse near Nagoya, with my debut gig in Tokyo taking place at Club Open, a basement dive in Shinjuku, where I played til sunrise to an enthusiastic underground crowd. I was fortunate to return for more gigs in 2014, the longer stay allowing exploration of other parts of the country, always encountering reggae in unexpected places and being introduced to various traditional forms of Japanese music and culture. This sparked a plan for me to graft traditional Japanese instruments onto original reggae rhythms, which a small Arts Council England grant finally allowed in the spring of 2016. Haruyasu “Big H” Kudoh, who runs Open and who has worked with Dennis Bovell and other reggae greats, connected me with the openminded musician, Ras Kanto, who arranged to rent a three-stringed shamisen, a taishokoto or Nagoya harp, which uses typewriter keys to vary pitch, and a series of wooden temple blocks, or mokugyo, which Big H augmented with an ancient hard-carved mokugyo which is a family heirloom, along with temple bells. Armed with three rhythms provided by my friends, Soothsayers, the Brixton-based hybrid band drawing from reggae, dub, jazz and Afrobeat, whose album Nothing Can Stop Us was created with Jamaican legend Cornell Campbell, I arranged for Kanto and Big H to overdub the traditional instruments onto the rhythm tracks in a marathon live session at Open, conducted over the course of an afternoon and evening. I later arranged for the Osaka-based engineer and dub master Ruv Bytes to conjure individual dub mixes of each of the tunes, the first of which, “Jah Jah Me No Born Yah,” was released in 2018 by Riddim Chango Records, together with alternate mixes by OBF, Ticklah and Bim One. Now the second track from the collaborative sessions, “Ode To Joy (Babylon Can’t Control I)” is here presented in a custom-made limited edition by Alchemy Dubs, with Ruv’s dub mix complemented by individual re-castings from Ojah. Listen and enjoy the melding of disparate worlds…”. David Katz (www.davidkatz.tk)