Lee Scratch Perry, Bill Laswell and All-star performers team up on “Rise Again”out May 10

Lee Scratch Perry, Bill Laswell and
All-star performers team up on RISE AGAIN
Eleven all-new songs, mixed in the dub style by Bill Laswell
and featuring:

Tunde Adebimpe (TV on the Radio)
Ejigayehu “Gigi” Shibabaw (Ethiopian superstar)
Hawkman (Methods Of Defiance, Tricky)
Jahdan Blakkamoore
Bernie Worrell (P-Funk legend)
Josh Werner (Matisyahu, Wu-Tang)
Sly Dunbar (Sly and Robbie)
Hamid Drake (master drummer/percussionist)
Aiyb Dieng (Senegalese percussionist)
Dominick James (Angelique Kidjo, Shakira)
+ More

Lee Scratch Perry
“Rise Again”
May 10, 2011
MOD Technologies
File under: crucial dub reggae

Tracklisting
1 Higher Level
2 Scratch Message
3 Orthodox
4 Wake the Dead
5 Rise Again
6 African Revolution
7 Dancehall Kung Fu
8 E.T.
9 House of God
10 Butterfly
11 Inakaya (Japanese Food)

Featured musicians
Bernie Worrell (organ, clavinet, synths)
Peter Apfelbaum (tenor sax, flute)
Steven Bernstein (trumpet)
Josh Werner (bass)
Hamid Drake (drums)

#

I rise again
I rise again to victory
with history, mystery and prophecy…
— Lee “Scratch” Perry

As one of the most prolific, influential and irretrievably eccentric record producers ever, Lee “Scratch” Perry continues to reshape and refine an adventurous style all his own with his latest studio outing, Rise Again. A long-awaited collaboration with New York-based producer Bill Laswell (and a team of talented musicians), the album marks a milestone in the careers of both artists, arriving as it does on the heels of Perry’s 75th birthday, and as a flagship release on Laswell’s own M.O.D. Technologies imprint.

To mark the occasion, Laswell has recruited an A-list of talented musicians who each adds their own unique flavor to the project. This diverse line-up includes vocalists Tunde Adebimpe (frontman for Brooklyn art punks TV On The Radio), Gigi Shibabaw (whose Mesgana Ethiopia was released last year) and Hawkman (co-lead throat for the Laswell-founded group Method Of Defiance); P-Funk legend Bernie Worrell (keyboards); Peter Apfelbaum (tenor sax & flute); Steven Bernstein (trumpet); Josh Werner (bass); and Hamid Drake (drums). It’s a killer studio ensemble that could give Perry’s original Upsetters band (with the Wailers’ Family Man and Carly Barrett) a serious battle for the backbeat.

“I really should have connected with Scratch a long time ago,” Laswell told Bass Player magazine last December. “A lot of it is just about a contact. [Matisyahu bassist] Josh Werner was playing in Scratch’s band, and I had worked with Josh. He suggested trying to create something with Scratch, and I was certain no record company in their right mind would touch it, which is why we’re doing it ourselves. It’s a real production, and really conscious of bringing out Lee Perry. It’s his presence that keeps this thing moving. Is the whole idea crazy? That’s part of what makes it worth doing.”

On Rise Again, Perry still sounds strangely at home on a microphone—a move he first made on the 1978 classic Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread, even though he’d produced countless classic records in Jamaica for more than ten years before that. But Scratch is a natural storyteller, a soothsayer, a space-time traveler and a truth revealer—all aspects of a complex persona he has cultivated over the years, shrouded in Rasta mysticism and church catechism, but completely original and unbeholden to any rules or customs. Scratch does his own thing, on his own time, and if songs like “Scratch Message” and “Wake the Dead” and the title track “Rise Again” are any indication, the quickest way to the center of Scratch’s ethos is to give up trying to understand him and just let his lyrics wash over you.

Meanwhile, Laswell’s tripped-out soundscapes recall the vintage dub sound Perry himself perfected in the ’70s, but with the stereo thickness, clarity and warmth of a true state-of-the-art recording. It’s still amazing to consider that some of Perry’s best dub mixes, like the indispensable Heart Of The Congos album from 1977, were created using a 4-track tape machine, and yet there’s a distinctly analog flavor to much of Rise Again, evident in Bernie Worrell’s organ lines on “Japanese Food,” in the echo-kissed horns and Minimoog belches on “Dancehall Kung Fu,” or in the chimes, flute and found sounds that weave their way through the opening track “Higher Level.”

In the 1990s, Perry became a mentor figure for the Beastie Boys and enjoyed a renaissance with American fans. Since then, he has toured the globe relentlessly as a solo performer, selling out shows from San Francisco to Sydney, New York to Nice. In 2003, he won the Grammy Award® for Best Reggae Album, an honor he was nominated for again in 2008. No doubt he’ll be so recognized this year for Rise Again.

Lee Perry’s documentary portrait The Upsetter, narrated by Benicio Del Toro, will be released in theaters and on DVD in 2011. David Katz’s definitive biography People Funny Boy is currently available worldwide.