Reggae Garden Cultural Festival in Kingston Showcases Dub, Studio Traditions, Sound Systems

Clive Jeffrey brought the recording studio to the stage at the Reggae Garden Cultural Festival staged at Kingston Reggae Garden, Golden Spring main road on February 26, 2026, in an artist-forward programme that married live performance, dub-centric experimentation and a sound-system culture presence. The festival foregrounded the musical craft of studio-based dub production and positioned live mixing as the evening’s central act.

Jeffrey, billed on the bill as Dubking, anchored the programme with a lineage-minded approach rooted in his studio work since the early 1970s. “I’m going to do live mixes on stage through a manipulation of tracks. It’s really bringing the recording studio to the stage,” Jeffrey said, and framed the live mixes as a living continuation of techniques from Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Jeffrey added, “I want a new generation to know where dub is coming from. People like Tubby and Scratch weren’t instrumentalists, but they were like instruments just the way they went about making music.”

The billed lineup blended established and emerging voices. Roots singer Micah Shamaiah appeared alongside emerging acts T’Jean, Zhayna, Jah Vezl, Zaudib and Ahpuku, each named in advance of the event. Zhayna featured in promotional copy and shared the bill with Jeffrey in what promoters called a compact showcase of studio-dub techniques translated for a live audience.

Programming at Kingston Reggae Garden emphasised studio technique translated into performance. Organisers staged live dub mixes through onstage manipulation of tracks and paired those mixes with a visible sound-system presence drawn from Kingston’s deck culture. That local context connects to scene venues such as Kingston Dub Club; Gladstone Taylor’s account of the club notes operator Gabre Selassie and describes the drive up to the deck - “the roads wind, twist and turn uphill, the further up the crisper the air became” - and the serene view that frames Kingston’s dub gatherings.

The Reggae Garden Cultural Festival ran in a busy Kingston calendar week. Larger city events were scheduled soon after - the Lost In Time festival at Hope Gardens was set for February 28 and March 1, 2026, with Protoje headlining night one and Chronixx headlining night two - placing the Reggae Garden’s studio-focused remit alongside major arena showcases.

By centering live manipulation and naming pioneers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, the Reggae Garden Cultural Festival staged a practical lesson in dub technique on February 26, 2026, aiming to hand studio traditions to younger performers and to reaffirm Kingston’s role as a live laboratory for dub and sound-system practice.