After earning money from building amplifiers and repairing electrical equipment from his mother’s house in Waterhouse in the late 1960s, he started his own sound system.[2] He also built equipment for other local systems.[2] After leaving Jamaica to work in Canada for a few years in the early 1970s, he returned to Kingston in 1976 and set up his own studio at his in-laws’ home in Waterhouse,[2] and released a couple of Yabby You productions.[1] When Phillip Smart left King Tubby’s team to work in New York, Jammy replaced him, getting to work with the likes of Bunny Lee and Yabby You.[2] For the first few years of his career, Jammy almost exclusively made Dub. In the late 1970s he began to release his own productions, including the debut album from Black Uhuru in 1977.[2] In the 1980s, he became one of the most influential producers of dancehall music. His biggest hit was 1985’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” by Wayne Smith, with an entirely-digital rhythm hook. Many credit this song as being the first “Digital rhythm” in reggae, leading to the modern dancehall era. Jammy’s productions and sound system dominated reggae music for the remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s.[2] He continues to work as a producer, working with some of today’s top Jamaican artists, including Sizzla. Scientist Brown was introduced to electronics by his father, who worked as a television and radio repair technician.[1] He began building his own amplifiers and would buy transformers from Tubby’s Dromilly Road studio, and while there would keep asking Tubby to give him a chance at mixing. He was taken on at Tubby’s as an assistant, performing tasks such as winding transformer coils, and began working as a mixer in the mid-1970s, initially creating dubs of reworked Studio One rhythms for Don Mais’ Roots Tradition label, given his chance when Prince Jammy cut short a mixing session for Mais because he was too tired to continue.[1] The first hit record that he mixed was Barrington Levy’s “Collie Weed”.[1] His name originated from a joke between Tubby and Bunny Lee. Having noticed Brown’s forward thinking ideas and technical aspirations, Tubby remarked “Damn, this little boy must be a scientist.”[2] He left King Tubby’s studio at the end of the 1970s and became the principal engineer for Channel One Studio when hired by the Hoo Kim brothers, giving him the chance to work on a 16-track mixing desk rather than the four tracks at Tubby’s.[1][3] He came to prominence in the early 1980s and produced many albums, his mixes featuring on many releases in the first part of the decade. In particular, he was the favourite engineer of Henry “Junjo” Lawes, for whom he mixed several albums featuring the Roots Radics, many based on tracks by Barrington Levy.[1][3] He also did a lot of work for Linval Thompson and Jah Thomas.[1] In 1982 he left Channel One to work at Tuff Gong studio as second engineer to Errol Brown.[1] He then emigrated to the Washington, D.C. area in 1985, again to work in studios as a sound engineer.[1] He made a series of albums in the early 1980s, released on Greensleeves records with titles themed around Scientist’s fictional achievements in fighting Space Invaders, Pac-Men, and Vampires, and winning the World Cup.[1] Scientist has alleged in court that Greensleeves records sold these albums without his consent, according to his interview with United Reggae online magazine http://www.unitedreggae.com/articles/n212/092408/interview-scientist Five of his songs from the album Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires were used as the playlist songs on the K-Jah radio station in the 2001 video game Grand Theft Auto 3. Scientist has alleged in court that this album was put on the Grand Theft Auto 3 video game without his consent, according to his interview with United Reggae online magazine http://www.unitedreggae.com/articles/n212/092408/interview-scientist |
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