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The productions on Bertram Brown's Freedom Sounds label are indelibly linked to two of Jamaica's greatest talents from the mid-70s: King Tubby and the Soul Syndicate Band. Brown started the label in 1975 and worked exclusively with those two entities, both then at the absolute height of their creative powers. It was a fairly short and intense spurt of quality recordings that by 1979 largely dried up.

In listening to the Freedom Sound productions, everyone references concepts like "tough" and "heavy" in describing the roots sounds, and that they are. It’s an obvious connection to think this in keeping with the stark ghetto conditions of the Greenwich Farm neighborhood of Western Kingston that Brown and his assembly of talents largely hailed from. Most striking to me is that there's a power in these recordings that is the tightest fist of Jamaican sound possibly to ever ball up and stand up for itself. All original rhythms is what Brown got from the Soul Syndicate. Guitarist Earl "Chinna" Smith was frequently in wah wah mode writ-large, and always melodic and deft in combination with Fully Fullwood's economical and driven bass.

And then there's the dubmaster himself, King Tubby. The dubs are obvious enough to note, but check out Prince Alla's "Only Love Can Conquer" and the foreboding sheet of a rhythm guitar chord, descending like a slamming door and reverberating as Chinna's lyrical guitar weeps in counterpoint. On "John Saw Them Coming" Tubby indulges in one of his favorites, the dubbed out sax. Tough, taut and minimalist, but always humanistic – these were the Freedom Sounds recordings, and with Tubby’s touch they flirted with experimental bravados.

Brown was a neighborhood businessman originally, another story in the forever ongoing interplay of the music men with their enablers. Nonetheless, I think Brown knew what he had here. The Freedom Sounds aesthetic felt like a distinct marker in the sand, above the heads of any polite societies or foreign markets. It’s such stamps of authorial integrity that are forever in short supply.

– Mark Williams

King Tubby
“Dub the Right Way”
Freedom Sounds in Dub
Blood & Fire, 1996 (1979)