Bob Marley Songs of Freedom

To coincide with the electronica revolution of the late '90s, Bill Laswell remixed a number of Bob Marley records as ambient dub for the Dreams of Freedom: Ambient Translations of Bob Marley in Dub album. If these songs were remixed by any other producer, the results could have been disastrous, but Laswell is one of the masters of intellectual dub – he knows what to take out and what to add, creating a spacious, cavernous mix that is provocative without being extreme. Some longtime Marley fans will balk at the very idea of the album, but the results are undeniably impressive, even if it's a little too restrained and cerebral to qualify as first-rate ambient dub for clubs.

“Songs of Freedom” is not my title. I borrowed it from Bob Marley, one of the world’s greatest musical figures. This album is a tribute to those musicians who established Pop Culture in the 70’s with their mythic songs. So mythic, that they now belong to everybody on the planet and so global that they are World Music i.e. “music the world listens to”. Yet Music is like a bird: once released, it flies to every sky. The Earth becomes rounder and rounder, inviting cultures to chat and soak up one another. Hence, the freedom to make these songs our own. Still lovingly playing these original melodies with the audacity of new arrangements which celebrate the reign of imagination and fantasy.

It's a bold concept; take Pink Floyd's iconic Dark Side of the Moon (Harvest, 1973) and reinterpret it in a big band jazz setting. With upwards of forty million copies sold, every note, every nuance of Floyd's eighth album is so firmly entrenched in the minds of the band's legion devotees that to tamper with the work in any way is to leave oneself open to facile criticism. French-Vietnamese guitarist Nguyên Lê, however, is nothing if not adventurous. Lê has already demonstrated on Purple: Celebrating Jimi Hendrix (ACT Music, 2007) and Songs of Freedom (ACT Music, 2012)—his tribute to classic pop and rock songs of the 1960s and 1970s—that he can breathe new life into old material without being overly reverential.