Senior Allstars, The/ammoye
Soul From Dubtown-darker Than Blue
In spring 2014, when the Senior Allstars were asked by the Hamburg-based dub label Echo Beach to record their interpretation of an existing release (the original was released in 2001), everyone involved assumed that the results would be good. What absolutely no one expected was that the album would be so incredibly "conspirational" and simply bursting with fresh ideas. The album that Darker Than Blue / Conducted by The Senior Allstars is based on is the compilation Darker Than Blue - Soul from Jamdown, which was released in 2001 on Blood & Fire Records. More than ten years later, the mind behind the Echo Beach label, Nicolai Beverungen, had a vision of taking the next, the third step along this path. "From the beginning it was clear to me that I wanted an instrumental band to do the job, and the venerable Senior Allstars, the leading lights in their class, were my top pick", says Beverungen. The results are more than breath-taking; the songs drip from the speaker membranes like honey, bringing in the sun, warmth and happiness, very much in keeping with the original songs - although the lyrics may have been written with other things in mind. The dub remake presented by The Senior Allstars breaks all previous dimensions and conventions set by the history and spirit of this legendary album. The quartet creates an original, collective, improvised and organic live dub that is in the tradition of the original songs and with new versions that fully deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the originals. 2019 - the next step to break the peak and quality of the exciting album - was making it into a VOCAL album and call it SOUL FROM DUBDOWN - DARKER THAN BLUE. The formel was quite easy. They hired the JUNO winner (the Canadian music prize and pendant to the American Grammy) from 2017 "AMMOYE" and amazing voice (she is more in RNB and Gospel than in Dancehall or Reggae..) who was born in Jamaica and raised in Toronto / Canada. A brilliant and crisp album. Get Ready .