Augustus Pablo, "East of the River Nile"

I bought this as an import lp around when it came out, maybe 1978. I probably didn't listen to it more than a few times, but it has haunted me for a quarter century. The melodies are simple, serene, meditative, profound with just a touch of half-speed klezmer (?!). Anyway, the thing has recently been re-issued on cd by Shanachie, which has got me listening to the lp again also.

Pablo was a melodica player - the melodica being a keyboard wind instrument with harmonica reeds - that was in the 1960s used to teach music to Jamaican schoolchildren. In fact, Augustus Pablo is perhaps the only professional melodica player I've ever heard, or heard of.

Pablo was a deceptively basic sort of player, and there were never any technical fireworks, only an almost studied simplicity and naivete. I'd compare Pablo's melodica work with the trumpet of Miles Davis or the voice of Billie Holiday, in which the point is not technical facility, but expressive intensity achieved by constriction of means.

Pablo was, meanwhile, an important record producer and innovator of dub, and though there are hints of dub effects on "East of the River Nile," it is basically played through by a band. Or at least, that's how it sounds, though certainly most Jamaican music of the era was assembled in the studio, often using pre-existing rhythms to which one would add the soprano and tenor voices of persons or instruments.

If you don't think instrumental music is capable of stating a spiritual message or creating a spiritual context, go back and listen to Bach. "East of the River Nile," like the other best Pablo records (notably "Original Rockers") is so quiet in its intensity, so still at its heart, that it obviously constitutes a rasta religious discipline. To listen to it is to recapitulate the spiritual experience that created it.

Pablo plays and produces without a trace of ego; the point is never to impress you, only - quietly - to affect you. And that makes you realize how rare egolessness is in music, or among professional musicians. Pablo plays with tremendous restraint and austerity, with a kind of perfect spareness that is meant to create a place of the spirit. This is an ascetic and beautiful music.

Each song seems somehow to have begun at an arbitrary place in an infinite progression, and to stop just as arbitrarily. That's the stillness at the music's heart: every song sounds like a sample of eternity. And if there's one criticism worth making of this album, it's that each song should occupy a whole cd.

Pablo, an ethereal-looking, dignified rastaman, died in 1999 of a nerve disorder.