A comprehensive history of Jungle / Drum and Bass would fill up at least 20 large encyclopaedic size hardcopy books. Additionally, such is the nature of Drum and Bass music that once the work had been completed, the music would have once again twisted and evolved so much that a new volume would probably be well overdue. However, for the purposes of this course we have two pages to cover the story so far before we crack on with the production techniques you are here to learn – so here is a ‘Concise History of Drum and Bass’!
There is much debate as to the actual birth date of Jungle/Drum and Bass and which tune can take the title as the first drum and bass record. It’s fair to say though that it started somewhere in 1992. Tunes like A Guy Called Gerald’s ’28 Gun Bad Boy’ took the already inherent breakbeat element that was part of the UK‘s “Hardcore & Jungle Techno” rave scene and stripped back most of the elements, highlighting the actual Breakbeat itself. These tunes pushed the drum programming and drum patterns to the forefront as the main focus and carrier of the music.
A Guy Called Gerald – 28 Gun Bad Boy
It is from this point that the rave scene truly started to diversify, predominantly in 2 directions: some producers stuck to the four to the floor patterns of the previous Hardcore and Techno scenes whilst others picked up on the new ‘breakbeatcentric’ genre, starting to push the envelope and create a whole new kind of music which today we know as Jungle.
Deep Blue – Helicopter Tune
By late 93/94 the Jungle sound had become huge, eclipsing what had come before and gaining massive amounts of UK press exposure both within the underground scene and later mainstream. Jungle Raves saw sell out Roadblock raves with queues calling for London streets to be closed and Jungle took over the charts with Mbeats Incredible reaching No 8 in the UK chart , Major labels queued up waiting to sign up the pioneering artists, waving check books and clambering to cash in on the UK’s latest music phenomenon and Jungle truly made its stamp on the UK Music landscape.
At this point the music had become heavily influenced by the Ragga scene that had in turn influenced many of the scenes producers previously and the music borrowed heavily from many of the defining factors of Jamaican soundsystem culture and whilst still enjoying huge success in all corners of the UK (and now whole world) over the next few years a combination of increasingly bad,naïve, ignorant and hugely distorted and incorrect press twinned with the scenes own backlash at the majors’ true financial intents and treatment of the music, the scene pushed itself back to its underground roots and back to its origins.