Apartment riddim goes Hollywood
WHEN Franklyn Irving and the Roots Radics band recorded the Apartment riddim in 1982, Addis Pablo was not born. Thirty years later, they produced a song on the beat that has been selected for a Hollywood movie.
Pablo Inna The Yard is the song which appears in Blue Caprice, a film about the DC Sniper murders in October, 2002. It premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on Saturday.
“It’s exciting to know that after 30 years a movie company pick it up. It shows what can happen when yuh do music in a serious way,” Irving told the Jamaica Observer.
Pablo (real name Addis Swaby) is the son of legendary musician/producer Augustus Pablo who died in 1999. He said the song was pitched to Blue Caprice producers by Barry Cole of Dubspot, a New York school where he studied audio engineering.
“He said they liked the song. They said it was exactly what they were looking for,” Pablo, 23, said.
Two songs on the Apartment will be featured in Blue Caprice. The other song, Inna The Yard, was done three years ago by the deejay/singer team of Derajah and Paketo and released by the independent French company Makasounds.
Apartment was recorded at the Channel One studio, where the Roots Radics were unofficial house band during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Irving, 51, was close to the Hoo Kim family who owned Channel One, while his older brother was studio manager.
Pablo Inna The Yard is Pablo’s second release. His debut was an updated version of Augustus Pablo’s famed Cassava Piece (also known as King Tubbys Meets The Rockers Uptown) beat. His version was produced by Rory Gilligan of Stone Love.
Ten persons were killed in the October 2-22 sniper shootings, which involved Jamaican teenager Lee Boyd Malvo and his American mentor, John Allen Muhammad. They were eventually captured and found guilty of murder. Muhammad died by lethal injection in 2009, while the Kingston-born Malvo is serving a life sentence without parole at a Virginia prison.
In Blue Caprice, Isaiah Washington of Grey’s Anatomy fame plays Muhammad. Tequan Richmond, star of the television sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, plays Malvo.
