Jamaican Riddims

[tightbidness]

I posted about this under awesome dub recordings but maybe it deserves its own thread. Wikipedia has this entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddim

So there may be hundreds of riddims, named after the initial tune recorded over that rhythm track. It seems like a vast body of common knowledge. Is there a place to start learning the riddims? Do musicians call out specific riddims the way musicians call standards at a jazz jam?

[master-bit]

sorry, no real answer to your thread,....when I first heard about the whole riddim thing I was really shocked, cause I was really hyped about the gentleman cd confidence,...I thought it was all his music until a freind told me about riddims and that heonly sang over the tunes

...well, don´t know where to start learning them,...I made a guitar pro file with basslines of many songs of the confidence album...don´t know how these riddims are called originally,...I´ll upload the gp file now

[master-bit]

http://jens.ion-net.de/hypertension/confidence.gp4

..so, if you´re interested

[dlloyd]

My take on it is that it's not so far removed from the way standard chord progressions and basslines are used in rock and roll and blues.

There's no requirement to know hundreds of standard riddims although it pays to learn as many tunes as possible.

[brianrost]

It's really no different in rock, blues and jazz. Go to a jam session and people will call out "Chuck Berry in G", "Killing Floor groove in A", "Texas shuffle in E" or "rhythm changes in Bb".

Where riddims differ a little bit is it's not uncommon to take a finished instrumental track and simply record new vocal melodies over it to create new songs.

[floopy]

Originally Posted by brianrost

Where riddims differ a little bit is it's not uncommon to take a finished instrumental track and simply record new vocal melodies over it to create new songs.

Yeah, it happens most in dancehall, but even back in the 60s and 70s the MCs like I-Roy and U-Roy would take an existing cut and add their vocal. The Jamaicans were into recycling long before samplers

Here's the BBC radio Dancehall page - plenty of good stuff to be found:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/dancehall/xtra/

[tightbidness]

Originally Posted by floopy

Yeah, it happens most in dancehall, but even back in the 60s and 70s the MCs like I-Roy and U-Roy would take an existing cut and add their vocal. The Jamaicans were into recycling long before samplers

Here's the BBC radio Dancehall page - plenty of good stuff to be found:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/dancehall/xtra/

That Website has a lot to watch and listen to. Thanks for posting it.

Regarding your first comments, the more I learn about Jamaican music the more it seems that country has been ahead of the curve. . . possibly even the place of origin for many musical trends over the past 20 years.

[teleharmonium]

Originally Posted by tightbidness

Regarding your first comments, the more I learn about Jamaican music the more it seems that country has been ahead of the curve. . . possibly even the place of origin for many musical trends over the past 20 years.

I think this is true. I've been listening a lot to "Under Heavy Manners" by Prince Far I the last week or so, which IIRC is from '77, and noticed that it has a lot of things that are common in hip hop now - like multiple vocalists, sometimes overlapping and dissonant, lots of quick cuts, Far I staying on the same rhyme a lot of times in a row, his superimposing of other 1/1 and 4/4 ideas over the nominal beat with his vocals, self-referencing by stage names, and the obviously spliced, studio based composition. Also I think the Jamaican way of taking liberties with grammar was influential to hip hop. Now, most hip hop unabashedly goes into full blown Ebonics (to the point where if there was a hip hop record that used Oxford perfect grammar, it would be taken as a parody), where that was less the case in older black pop music and even in early rap (the Last Poets sound like college professors next to pretty much any reggae vocalist).

Overall the music is kind of dense and is not intended to sound like it could have been a live performance, and Joe Gibbs was open to some non harmonious combinations of things and wasn't going for restraint. If he had a space, and a piece of tape he wanted to use, he would throw it in there. I'm not saying he wasn't concerned with how it would sound, but rather, he wasn't constrained in ways that many others would be. Lee Perry has a lot of those qualities, especially his openness to all things out of tune. King Tubby seems to me like the opposite; he always seemed to have a composer's way of making decisions, as if he were a longtime trained musician, even though he wasn't.

[tightbidness]

Originally Posted by teleharmonium

King Tubby seems to me like the opposite; he always seemed to have a composer's way of making decisions, as if he were a longtime trained musician, even though he wasn't.

The same thing struck me the other day while I was listening to a King Tubby dub. Lately I've been trying to dissect the mixes and figure out the technical side of things. But on one tune he simply dropped out the drums, brought them back for a bar and then dropped them back out. It was such a simple move and probably completely improvised but brilliant and in service to the song as a whole.

[teleharmonium]

More evidence of that is that Tubby suggested to Augustus Pablo (so I read, anyway) that he should stick more to minor chords when playing his melodica, because it suited the instrument.
That's such a simple thing to say, but to think of it back then, seems to me practically genius and I think it shows Tubby had a great musical ear.

[floopy]

Originally Posted by tightbidness

Regarding your first comments, the more I learn about Jamaican music the more it seems that country has been ahead of the curve. . . possibly even the place of origin for many musical trends over the past 20 years.

Yeah, they are the creative masters as far as sound and records are concerned for me. And can you imagine the equipment Lee Perry etc had to work with in the 60s?

Part of it is that their scene has mostly always been about records and dances, rather than 'live' bands. They applied their creativity to the production of records and squeezed every possibility out of what they had.

Teleharmonium I agree with you (sorry, don't know how to quote two different posts in one reply!) about King Tubby, his 'musical ear' is fantastic. Perry's genius to me is his creativity and his utter madness He now tours (as a vocalist), I managed to shake his hand at a small gig a couple of years ago