STORY · REGGAE
Keys behind the riddim
Well supported
The organ's upstroke and the piano's bubble did as much to define reggae's feel as any bassline.
From Jackie Mittoo's Studio One organ to Sly and Robbie's Taxi Gang, a small circle of pianists and organists supplied the "bubble" and skank that make a riddim instantly recognisable.
Skank and bubble
Two keyboard patterns carry most of reggae's harmonic identity: the choppy offbeat "skank" usually voiced on organ, and the rolling triplet "bubble" usually voiced on piano - a pattern so central that keyboardist Franklyn Waul's own nickname comes from it. Both patterns were standardised, refined and exported by a small circle of session players.
At Studio One that circle started with Jackie Mittoo and Gladstone "Gladdy" Anderson; by the 1970s it ran through Ansel Collins and Winston Wright at Channel One and Randy's, and through Robbie Lyn and Keith Sterling, both of whom moved fluidly between Now Generation, Word Sound and Power, We The People Band and, eventually, Taxi Gang and The Wailers Band.
Franklyn "Bubbler" Waul took that same vocabulary into Joe Gibbs' Professionals, playing on Dennis Brown's "Money in My Pocket" and Culture's "Two Sevens Clash"; a later generation, represented here by Handel Tucker, carried reggae keyboard fluency into 1990s pop-reggae crossover production for artists like Maxi Priest.
Change the singer, change the producer, keep the bubble - and dancers still know the riddim.
The keyboard chair, more than almost any other seat in a Jamaican studio band, is where reggae's rhythmic grammar was actually written down - one session at a time, by players whose names rarely made the label.