Headlong, fierce, banked rasta drumming fit to discombobulate any kind of system, with sweet, jazzy trombone riding it down, bubbling bass driving it home, and all of it classically dubwise.
Wareika Hill Sounds is the contemporary roots reggae project of Calvin Cameron — mainstay of the original Light Of Saba line-up, the genius behind Lambs Bread Collie — who to this day lives above the headquarters of the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari, in the Wareika Hill district of Kingston, Jamaica.
In the great pedagogical traditions of the multi-cultural Light Of Saba, and before that Count Ossie, this new recording runs together two JA musical traditions — a kind of drumming (and drum) brought from the Congo, and the island’s variation of calypso — into a thundering grounation charge. As always, the Skatalite’s trombone-playing is majestic: deadly, gripping, deeply cultivated.
The dub is tremendous, too.
Expertly mastered and cut at Dubplates And Mastering in Berlin, and beautifully pressed at Pallas, for maximum soundboy worries. With a lovely printed sleeve, designed by Will Bankhead.
‘From the college where you get your musical knowledge,’ as I-Roy would say, in a Leninist style and fashion — ‘shower on the hour every hour… Knowledge Is Power.’