The Congos

Heart Of The Congos

VP. CD/DL/LP The pinnacle of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Black Ark artistry has a 40th anniversary update.

Heart Of The Congos remains a perfect symbiosis of heart and science. Producer Lee Perry is rightly hailed as its genius technical conduit, but the raw material was already supernatural: the falsetto/ tenor voices of Cedric Myton and Roy Johnson, augmented at Perry’s behest by baritone Watty Burnett, on a clutch of remarkable compositions – Open Up The Gate; Can’t Come In; Ark Of The Covenant – suffusing Rasta theology and nyabinghi rhythms with a melodic delicacy that belied Jamaica’s political turbulence in 1976-77. The CD of this latest three-disc edition features the impossibly rare original mix that Perry released on his Black Art label but soon substituted for the version that became renowned. It lacks Scratch’s more quixotic flourishes (Children Crying’s ‘lowing cattle’, which was actually Burnett and a cardboard tube), but the divine songs abide in any context. This is reggae’s highest of the most high.