Browse by Artist: HUDSON, KEITH

Artist:	HUDSON, KEITH
Title:	Playing It Cool & Playing It Right
Label:	BASIC REPLAY (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	BRJT 009CD

This is the first release on Basic Channel's reggae reissue imprint, Basic Replay, founded by Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus. Keith Hudson -- as is Lloyd 'Bullwackie' Barnes, his collaborator here -- was a one-off innovator with impeccably classical lineage: his first studio recording involved former Skatalites; his earliest releases provided solid-gold hits for Ken Boothe ("Old Fashioned Way," 1967), John Holt, Delroy Wilson, U-Roy and the rest. Playing It Cool & Playing It Right was released in 1981 on NYC's Joint International label. It was originally intended that one of Hudson's teenage sons would voice the dubs: in the event the Love Joys, Wayne Jarrett, and most inimitably Hudson himself featured at the microphone. Like Wackies, Hudson was a Studio One devotee -- "I used to hold Don Drummond's trombone for him so I can be in the studio," he once recalled -- and the album follows Coxsone Dodd's strategy of overdubbing signature rhythms. The Studio One sides were aimed at the dancefloor; Hudson's reworks of tracks like "Melody Maker" are more psychological. Here deep Barrett Brothers rhythms are remixed deeper with reverb, filters and other distortion, pitched down, everything; and overlaid with new recordings, often heavily treated, of guitar, percussion, keyboard, voice. Playing It Cool & Playing It Right is legendary, strange, utterly compelling music.

Artist:	HUDSON, KEITH
Title:	Flesh Of My Skin Blood Of My Blood
Label:	BASIC REPLAY (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	BRAT 1005CD

2004 release, restocked. Originally released in 1974 on Mamba, Flesh Of My Skin Blood Of My Blood is the most hallowed of all those reggae albums which remain unavailable, and Keith Hudson's key achievement in a career launched when, as a fourteen-year-old, he recorded members of The Skatalites on his "Shades Of Hudson" rhythm. After a series of solid-gold productions for Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson, John Holt, U-Roy and the rest, this album projects Hudson's removal from Jamaica to London and New York studios and transatlantic audiences, and inaugurates a sequence of albums -- classics like Pick A Dub, Brand, Playing It Cool, Playing It Right -- which show his troubled experimentalism better suited to the LP than the cardinal 7" reggae format. Anchored here by Santa Davis and George Fullwood from the Soul Syndicate -- alongside musicians like Augustus Pablo, Count Ossie and Leroy Sibbles -- Hudson's mood is tormented and dazed, as on titles like "Darkest Night," "My Nocturne" and "Testing My Faith," where he struggles for Black senses of commitment --political, existential, religious -- at its breaking point. Magnificently and deadly serious, hauntingly unique, unmissable and unforgettable.

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