Joe Gibbs & The Professionals – African Dub-All Mighty – Chapter One

Producer Joe Gibbs took the credit for the four discs released in the mid-’70s under the title African Dub All-Mighty, but the musicians were in reality a shifting aggregation of members of the Soul Syndicate, We the People, and Revolutionaries bands, and the man actually working the mixing board was famed sound engineer Errol Thompson.

On this first instalment in the four-volume series, the dub mixes are actually quite tame – there are none of the challenging sonic gestures that characterized the work of colleagues like King Tubby and (especially) Lee “Scratch” Perry during the same period. But as mood music, Chapter 1 is a fine listening experience — note in particular “Campus Rock” (a dub version of Dennis Brown’s “Let Me Live”) and “Treasure Dub,” which is a version of the Jamaicans’ rocksteady classic “Ba Ba Boom.”

Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue