Keith Hudson :: “The Black Breast Has Produced Her Best, Flesh Of My Skin Blood Of My Blood” - Mamba
Kingston-born musical prodigy, Keith ‘The Dark Prince Of Reggae’ Hudson, gained his knowledge of music and its wavering ecosystem of business from the streets during his more formative years growing up in Jamaica throughout the 50s and 60s. While attending the Boys Town School in Kingston, his classmates and future icons of culture and music history, Bob Marley, Ken Boothe and Delroy Wilson, would help organize concerts and events to help demonstrate young people’s talents within the local community. Eventually working as a roadie for Skatalite and Jamaican trombone king Don Drummond, Hudson received an exceptional crash course in ‘life on the road’ before settling into a crowned career in dentistry, where he was known to many as the “Ghetto Dentist”. Having worked on the iconic smiles of scene legends like Big Youth, Hudson stowed away his earnings with great discipline and monumental motivation to ultimately initiate something truly groundbreaking and fiercely original. Eventually launching his very own label, Inbidimts, with the masterful debut of 1972’s “Inbidimts Furnace” alongside longtime bandmate, friend and member of the Wailers’, Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett. It was from there that the young musician would go on to pave the way for a legendary status among Jamaican culture that would soon take shape for the whole entire world to hear its radically political jam-driven message during a time in history that still echos the cadence of its vibrational evolution to this day.
“I was a flash little youth.”
Landing sonic success right out the gate with friend Ken Boothe’s song, “Old Fashioned Way”, Hudson became one of the most prominent producers of his generation, working alongside giants and soon to be legends such as Denis Alcapone, John Holt, Alton Ellis, U-Roy and countless others, while simultaneously conquering a trailblazing solo career in ritualistic rhythms, tonal texture and a blissful, barrage of beats and patterns that have single-handedly secured his place in the world of sound and its ultimate connection to the mind, body and spirit. With a staggeringly impressive number of singles released in the early 70s leading up to his full-length albums that finished out the remainder of the decade, Hudson became this highly prolific master during his wayfaring dynasty in the studio as he articulately documented his sonic findings like no other.
With 1974’s classic collaboration with ‘Family Man’, “Pick A Dub” became a historical staple among the community at large with its early fundamentals and developments within the genre, but it wouldn’t be until his immediate follow-up of the highly successful album, “Entering The Dragon”, that Hudson had sincerely tapped into something lawless and cosmically wonderful. That year not only defined the young musician’s impeccable life and career in music, but by the end of it, he had concluded his oscillating output with the politically charged narrative of “The Black Breast Has Produced Her Best, Flesh Of My Skin Blood Of My Blood”, which significantly revealed the stained swaying vail of reality, war and the prioritized production for hope and peace for the island country. Across the album’s 12 tracks of total atmospheric annihilation, exploring this dreamlike landscape of pungent rhythm and timeless timing, Hudson breaths a new life into the more melodically macabre settings found within the familiar layers of Reggae music by taking its electrifying elements even further into the spiritual realm of endless possibilities. Manifesting the intensely complex aromas with a much more heightened sense of drama, Hudson enlightens his listeners with stone-cold evidence of truth within its ancient practices in mystery and angelic adaptation to the hardships of the world we face.
