Augustus Pablo

I always thought Pablo's great album was King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, also due for enhanced reissue, but that was just his great dub album, because unlike most frequenters of the void that separates all notes, he also had a gift for whistling in the dark. Generally he pursued this pastime on his faithful melodica, but as someone who learned his trade sneaking into the school chapel to doodle on organ, he sometimes found a keyboard more melodic. Where his early hits were catchy novelties, by 1978 he was a natural mystic, and his first all-instrumental album sounds it. A strange, simplistic mood-music masterwork--calming, childish, and inexplicable. (Grade: A)