It’s important to have a little context when it comes to the legend born as Horace Swaby.
Imagine that after first grade ended, instead of ditching your recorder for a fierce collection of Pogs or half-hearted attempt at Tamagotchi, you were intrepid enough to stick with the thing until it worked. And imagine that it really worked, that because of you everyone was suddenly using the recorder to ornament their music just because you had made it sound that cool. Justin Timberlake would coat his songs in those sick thick notes, and Death Cab for Cutie would insert mid-whine recorder solos because things weren’t already sad enough. Suddenly, Wal-Mart and Goodwill would become retailers of the country’s new most-popular instrument.
If that seems impossible, then you have to imagine harder, because it’s what Horace Swaby did. His instrument, the melodica, is basically a piano that you blow through while you cradle it in your hands. Before Swaby, it was a training tool at best and garbage at worst. He changed that with a brazen innovation that any listener finds in all his work. His vision was guided by sound instead of a tradition, and ironically, by ignoring the old school of thought he created a new one.
He also created a new man-his stage name Augustus Pablo. Like most great musicians, Pablo’s start has a fog around it that begins with a girl. He started playing the melodica when a young girl loaned it to him, and after that he stuck with it instead of leaving it for bigger things. His pseudonym was half stolen and half invented- a few musicians had used the title on their instrumental recordings and, unsurprisingly, young Horace decided that the name Augustus might add a little more swagger to his sets. While he was still in his teens he walked into a record studio and cut his debut, “Iggy Iggy,” the same day. From that point on, he was a career artist working as a musician and producer on some of the most influential albums in reggae.
It can be hard to pin down what makes the melodica appealing. Augustus had an ear for picking out unique, untraditional vocalists to sing in his songs, but ultimately, the melodica was the indispensable voice in his music. Listen and you’ll find background sounds that range from an assenting ghost choir to a bullet rain of percussion all linked by the lonely melodica. It makes you feel like you are walking through a darkened room with only a piece of string in your 
hand, that steady melodica, to guide you from one side to another.
In addition to the melodica’s work as the world’s lightest musical anchor, Pablo’s Rastifari devotees appreciate the spiritual wave that his music creates. Of course, calling any music a “spiritual experience” is a highly subjective process - the most callous and devoted Led Zeppelin fan would happily equate Robert Plant’s howl with transcendence. But Pablo was a genuine Rasta. Most of his albums include dedications to his “co-producer,” Haile Selasse, who you can assume was as close to Pablo’s mic as Jesus was to laying down beats during Tupac’s late period. Selasse, who is a messiah figure for Rastas, was an inspiration for the music, and you can genuinely hear it in the way Pablo plays the melodica, using minor keys when he can and consistently invoking Selasse’s name.
In the same way that a religion formed around Selasse, now Pablo has a cult of followers around him who are deeply influenced by his music. A no-doubt apocryphal MySpace page provides a few good tracks and an index of the devotion around “the king” of reggae and dub. Pablo’s influence isn’t always that direct. Whenever the melodica appears, whether it’s in an Oasis song, Franz Ferdinand, or a new reggae artist’s debut, you can be sure that the way they found out about it, and the way they had the courage to use a children’s toy in their work, was through Augustus Pablo’s otherworldly sound.
Though Pablo died in 1999 from a nerve disease, his influence is as powerful today as if he were alive. While it helps to index the albums that made him famous - the Asian-Jamaican mash up that is, “East of the River Nile” comes to mind, or “King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown”- it’s probably a more accurate measure of his work to listen for the melodica. Whenever it runs through his music or the music of the scores of musicians who admire him, it sings out like Pablo’s music, playing on a children’s instrument that, because of him, represents a deeper voice. 
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September 17th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Great article.