Scientist (Live) - The Master of Dub

The Jamaican audio engineer Scientist is one of the crucial links in a musically
innovative chain that begins in the late 60s with King Tubby, progresses through
Prince Jammy in the 70s, and falls to a close with Peter Chemist in the mid-80s.
A truly outstanding practitioner who thrived on innovation, Scientist helped dub reach some of its greatest heights of creativity. He became one of Jamaica’s most sought- after engineers at a very young age, his mixing artistry rising up in tandem with the Roots Radics in the late 70s and early 80s. Because of the incredible dub works he fashioned as an apprentice engineer at King Tubby’s studio, many dub fans consider Scientist to be the last of the classical Jamaican dub mixers, yet his overall
contribution to the evolution of reggae is far more multifaceted than most realise.

In fact, Scientist was all over the place as the 70s gave way to the 80s, shaping
significant vocal and dub works at Studio One, Channel One and Tuff Gong at a time
in which reggae was undergoing dramatic changes. Yet the fact that he never really
made the shift to becoming a self-sufficient record producer in his own right, unlike
Jammy and Tubby, is part of what has kept him from gaining rightful recognition for
his full contribution.

Born in 1960 with the unlikely name of Overton Brown, he was raised in Harbour
View, a gritty fishing village located near the approach to Kingston’s international
airport. His father had some knowledge of electronics, and young Overton displayed
an early aptitude in that direction, so by the age of 16 he was already fixing
televisions and building and testing amplifiers for local sound systems.

Scientist has said that during the late 70s he was testing one of these sound system
amplifiers with a ‘flying cymbal’ dub B-side that King Tubby had mixed, and the
startling dynamic of the recorded sound made him want to meet Tubby. As a friend
was doing some welding work for the King, the introduction was made, and when
Tubby realised the youth’s abilities, he soon had Brown repairing amplifiers and
televisions in his workshop. The nickname Scientist came when Brown was
discussing his vision of automated recording consoles with Tubby at a time when
they were not in regular use; the tag references the Jamaican practice of Obeah or
necromancy, known as ‘the High Science’ by its practitioners.

Different accounts of his debut recording session have been suggested, with Yabby
You, Bunny Lee and Roy Cousins all claiming to have been the first to give him the
job, though Scientist himself says Don Mais of the Roots Tradition label was an early
supporter who unsuccessfully suggested that Tubby give him a try. In the end,
according to Scientist, the first to actually let him loose on the desk was Henry ‘Junjo’ Lawes, the former political ‘enforcer’ from west Kingston who had followed Linval Thompson into record production and who was just settling down to cut influential work with Barrington Levy, placing the young singer on rhythms largely cut with the Roots Radics at Channel One. Scientist’s resultant voicing of Barrington’s ‘Collie Weed’ at King Tubby’s was a massive hit in Jamaica which also impacted overseas, its success depositing Scientist firmly at the mixing console thereafter.

In addition to presiding over Junjo’s popular work with Barrington, Johnny Osbourne,
Michael Prophet and the Wailing Souls, Scientist was also making an important
contribution to rejuvenating Studio One. The studio’s late-70s renaissance began partly as a result of the vinyl feud with Channel One instigated by Sugar Minott; formidable new hits followed on revitalised vintage rhythms from singers such as Minott, Freddy McGregor, Johnny Osbourne, and Willie Williams, plus the deejay duo Michigan and Smiley. Scientist’s crisp, experimental mixing is part of what helped some of this work to hit, but proprietor Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd was
displeased that Scientist was working for King Tubby at the same time, which caused a rupture, leading the mixer away from Dodd’s camp in less than a year.

At Tubby’s, Scientist was progressing by leaps and bounds. After cutting some dubs
for Junjo which appeared on the Dub Showdown and Heavyweight Dub Champion sets, issued overseas by Greensleeves, news of his skills spread like wildfire, leading to further instalments in the series such as Scientist Meets the Space Invaders. Other producers were keen to capitalise on the phenomenon, so Scientist dub albums of varying quality were issued by other producers based in western Kingston, such as Linval Thompson, Jah Thomas, Yabby You, Roy Cousins, Al Campbell, and Blacka Morwell, as well as Jimmy Riley and Mikey Dread. Many of these are rightly regarded in retrospect as true classics, though Scientist himself was not always kept abreast of the producers’ plans for release at the time.

Scientist continued to work at Tubby’s studio until 1983, yet by 1981 he had also
become one of the resident engineers at Channel One, mixing work by popular
deejays such as Yellowman and Lee Van Cleef as well as vocal groups like the
Viceroys. He also made a very brief foray into production with an obscure Neville
Brown album, but audio engineering at Channel One was his daily bread. In this
phase, his endless experimentation yielded some unusually dubby vocal work, as
heard on the various Showdown albums cut at Channel One by artists such as Don
Carlos and the Gladiators. As Channel One began to wane in the mid-1980s,
Scientist shifted allegiance to Tuff Gong, where he engineered hits by Half Pint,
Junior Reid, Tristan Palmer and Early B, bringing a downtown ghetto-based clientele
into the uptown facility on a large-scale basis for the very first time.

Unfortunately, despite the sonically brilliant result, as Jamaica fell prey to the
destructive nature of the international cocaine trade, unsavoury elements became
somewhat problematic at Tuff Gong. Pressure was mounting, as daily life became
more precarious in Kingston. Thus, like so many of his peers, Scientist decided to
exit Jamaica and join his family members in the USA.

He began working with Shaggy in Brooklyn and later cut noteworthy work at Lion and
Fox studio in Washington DC; then, in the mid-90s, he moved to California where he
worked with the Soul Syndicate band and Michael Rose, among others. In the new
millennium Scientist made some incredible live performances with Mad Professor,
stretching the very limits of the dub format in a way that has not been seen or heard
before or since. More recent album releases such as Dub 911 and Extermination
Dub, the latter a collaboration with Japanese band the Heavymanners, show that he
remains active, if not nearly as prolific as during his Jamaican heyday.