Last month Neil Fraser, a k a Mad Professor, was playing a concert in the mountains of Brazil, about three hours outside São Paulo. He had brand-new material tailor-made for this audience, electronic "samba dub" remixes that hybridized indigenous Brazilian music with reggae, rhythm and blues, and other Caribbean flavors.
But for reasons he can't fully explain, Mad Professor started tinkering with "early stuff," mixes from his "Dub Me Crazy" series of the 1980s and his "Black Liberation Dub" of the '90s, with some of the songs he remixed for artists such as Massive Attack, Sade and the Orb thrown in for good measure.
"And the crowd went crazy," he chuckled, his satisfaction clear as a bell over the phone from Argentina.
On Monday night, Mad Professor will be in a place far different from that tropical mountainside — the tiny 7th Street Entry in downtown Minneapolis. But one thing won't change: Mad Professor's on-the-spot decision about what to play.
"You never know what mood I'm going to be in," he says.
Now 58, Mad Professor is renowned as one of the leaders of the second generation of dub music artists who followed in the footsteps of King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry. The hallmarks of dub are spacey, stuttering electronic effects, beats and repetitions, either invented whole-cloth or applied to existing pieces of music in ways that can add a mere dash of color or texture or radically transform the entire enterprise. Mad Professor brought dub into the digital age, especially the editing, where layers of sound could be added but still differentiated, resulting in extraordinarily plush, ingenious and invigorating remixes atop the typical reggae and Caribbean musical template.
He was born in Guyana and acquired his moniker as a boy because of his fascination with electronics. He built his own radio from scratch before finishing elementary school, moving between the library and electronic parts stores. Such projects became easier when his family moved to England at the onset of his teens.
"I loved technology before I loved music. That's what led me to music," he says. It was a progression similar to that of his idol, dub pioneer King Tubby, who began as a radio repairman and got into music after fixing sound systems in Kingston, Jamaica. Mad Professor built a four-channel mixer, his first step toward a home studio. He got a job repairing amplifiers and circuit boards, and added echo and reverb to his home studio.
