How Leviticus’ ‘Burial’ brought jungle’s melting pot of influences together.

Courtesy Of DJ Mag - Ben Murphy - 11.08.26 Full Article Here Released in 1994, ‘Burial’ is one of the biggest and baddest tunes to have emerged out of jungle's first wave. Produced by scene stalwart Jumpin Jack Frost under his Leviticus alias, it hit heavy on dancefloors when it was first unleashed, but equally won the hearts of dancehall fans, rare groove heads and the reggae sound system faithful. This was in a large part thanks to its irresistible vocal sample and omnivorous fusion of genres, demonstrating the anything-goes ethos that would go onto define jungle's evolution. Now, as he celebrates a new reissue of this iconic track on Def Jam, Frost shares its story with Ben Murphy.... “I’ll tell you what the craziest thing about it was — going to the Notting Hill Carnival that year and hearing it on every single sound system,” says jungle / drum & bass pioneer Jumpin Jack Frost, remembering the moment his all-time classic ‘Burial’ was released. “The reggae sound systems were playing it, the soul sound systems... every corner I went around, that record played. I’ll never forget that. It just blew me away, I couldn’t have asked for more.”

Made under the alias Leviticus, ‘Burial’ is one of the foundational tracks of jungle. Released in 1994 just as the style was blowing up and fully crystallising into its own distinct genre, ‘Burial’ had hooks for days, while its addictive blend of dancehall toasting, Detroit techno synths, rare groove loops and rolling breakbeats epitomised jungle’s anything-goes fusion of influences and samples. “Jungle is a melting pot of everything,” Frost tells DJ Mag over the phone. “Growing up here in the UK, it’s all those influences that make the rave scene so special. You know, you’ve got people from all backgrounds that are influenced by different music, and everyone is putting in what influenced them.”

It’s no wonder that ‘Burial’ had such an effect on the Carnival DJs and attendees. Sampling classic tracks that were staples of these sound systems, the tune was a futuristic combination of the various dance music genres innovated by Black musicians (hip-hop, funk, dancehall, techno), which had powered UK club culture for the previous decade-and-a-half.

Still rinsed by DJs 32 years later, and revered by dancers as an instant party starter, its stylistic mixture and smart arrangement provided a jungle / drum & bass blueprint for many others to follow. “Jungle is a melting pot of everything. Growing up here in the UK, it’s all those influences that make the rave scene so special. You know, you’ve got people from all backgrounds that are influenced by different music, and everyone is putting in what influenced them.” — Jumpin’ Jack Frost.

Jumpin Jack Frost – born Nigel Thompson – was born and raised in Brixton, South London. He was surrounded by music and, even at a young age, he was intrigued by how certain records would affect his family members. “I was just very curious about that vibe, seeing the smiles it brought to people’s faces,” he says. “I come from a very strong West Indian background and I always remember that whenever people came in with records, they just seemed overjoyed, you know what I mean? I really vibrated to that. I’d sit down and talk to my uncles, and they’d tell me about the importance of a record by [funk band] Parliament, or stuff like that. It was just fascinating to see how happy they were when they bought these records.”

As he got older, Frost started going to Soul II Soul’s club nights at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden and to local sound system dances in Brixton. Accumulating his own record collection, he’d play at family parties, but it was acid house that encouraged him to DJ professionally. When the genre became huge in the UK in ’88 and ’89, he got swept up in it, loving how it brought people together. “It seemed like home for me, man,” he says. “The acid house scene was just everyone. I got to meet people from all different backgrounds, all colours and classes, and I just immersed myself in the culture. The whole acid house scene was like a massive community.”

Frost started DJing alongside Bryan Gee, Fabio and Grooverider at a regular club event, Carwash, and got a regular show on Brixton pirate station Passion FM. Soon he was appearing on the flyers for huge raves like Telepathy and Sunrise, just as acid house was transforming into breakbeat hardcore in the UK. He loved tracks like Meat Beat Manifesto’s ‘Radio Babylon’ and Jonny L’s ‘Hurt You So’ in particular, but the embryonic jungle of Lennie De Ice’s 1991 track ‘We Are IE’ really caught his ear, and pointed to something new around the corner. As producers began to make a more stripped-down, higher BPM style of heavily chopped breaks, dub-wise sub-bass, samples from across the sound spectrum and studio tricknology, Frost became an early adopter of jungle.

“We started experimenting with breaks,” Frost says. “People were just learning then, so we had these speeded up vocals, Pinky and Perky style, before producers started learning how to do time- stretching. And it just went from there; it was a real journey from acid house to the hardcore and into what we now know as jungle. It was a transition that was really exciting, because it was a bunch of us all together evolving at the same time.”

As well as DJing jungle, Frost started getting involved in releasing it, too. Frost’s good friend Bryan Gee had been an A&R for the Rhythm King label and its associated club imprint Outer Rhythm, but when the label went bust, he took the remaining demo tapes with him. One day, Bryan phoned Frost up to tell him about some exciting new music he’d heard. “He said, ‘Man, you’ve got to come down and listen to this cassette’,” Frost recalls. “It was a demo from these guys Krust and Roni Size. I was like, ‘Wow, these guys are amazing!’ There was a telephone number on it, so we called them up and said we wanted to meet them, and we went down to Bristol. They started playing us all this music they’d made, so myself and Bryan decided to start a label.”

The label, V Recordings, was founded in 1993 and went on to become one of the most influential in jungle / drum & bass. V’s fi rst release, Roni Size’s ‘It’s A Jazz Thing’, was not only a scene and club classic, but paved the way for the more atmospheric Bristol sound. With further releases from Krust and Dillinja under his Trinity alias, V quickly cemented itself as a key jungle player.

Frost wanted to make some of his own music too. Just as he was planning a studio session, his musical career nearly got derailed. “I was a gang member when I was really young,” Frost says. “But obviously it takes a little time to completely get out of it, you know? So anyway, I got arrested in possession of a firearm, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s gonna happen to me?’ I literally came out of the police station and was sitting there thinking, ‘I’m gonna go to jail, and everything I worked towards, I’m going to lose it all’. My head was going all over the place, but I thought, ‘If I go to the studio, it’s going to give me time to get myself together’.”

Gathering 10 of his favourite records, Frost went to the studio of Dillinja, a young DJ, producer and engineer who made many classics of his own, such as ‘Deadly Deep Subs’ and ‘Ja Know Ya Big’. There, Frost pieced together samples into the powder-keg creation we know and love as ‘Burial’ today. “Dillinja was my engineer. I took out the records and said, ‘I want to use this sample, this sample and this sample’, and bam! The next day after I came out of the police station, we made that record. Crazy, I know.”

The A-side ‘Madamoiselle Mix’ of the track starts with dreamy synth strings, the kind you could imagine appearing on a Carl Craig record. These, Frost says, were played on a Roland JD-800 synth. The classic Lyn Collins ‘Think’ break that comes in is then joined by a hefty sub, plus a funky bass and vocal chant sampled from Foxy’s 1978 rare groove classic ‘Madamoiselle’. “I thought it would be great to go as a bridge,” Frost says, “and it just worked.”

But the most prominent snippet on the record and the hook that most remember from ‘Burial’ comes from Jigsy King & Tony Curtis’s 1993 cut ‘My Sound A Murder’, a classic dancehall track. Frost knew the gruff-voiced ragga vocal sample “Big, bad and heavy / Any sound test me tonight dem ah go bury” would electrify the dance. Frost even named his autobiography Big, Bad & Heavy after it more than two decades later.

“It was a real journey from acid house to the hardcore and into what we now know as jungle. It was a transition that was really exciting, because it was a bunch of us all together evolving at the same time.” — Jumpin’ Jack Frost

“I was a massive dancehall fan, I still am, and I just thought it would be great to use the records that influenced me,” he says. “The ‘big, bad and heavy’ sample was so strong. You know what I mean? The actual original version, ‘My Sound A Murder’ is such a strong record, but that hook in particular was so catchy. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna use this’.”

‘Burial’ was made mostly with the Akai S950, a sampler that was standard issue in dance music at the time and which unlocked new possibilities for bedroom producers. It was one essential element that helped usher in jungle. “I don’t think you can get them anymore,” Frost says. “That was such a good sampler. I know the memory wasn’t great, but everyone used it at the beginning.”

In order to release ‘Burial’, Frost knew he needed a flip-side for the record. Rather than write a whole new track, he decided to make an alternative version. When Frost heard his sister Yolanda singing, he had an idea. He asked her to come to the studio to sing a snippet from the Jill Francis UK soul / lover’s rock song ‘Make Love To Me’.

Play Video

“We never sampled it, my sister re-sang it,” he says. “I just went to her and said, ‘I need you to sing something’. She’s not really a singer, but she’s got quite a good voice. So I dragged her to the studio, and I remember we drove over from Brixton to what was then called the Roller Express, in Edmonton, to record. All the way over there, she’s saying, ‘What am I gonna sing, what am I gonna sing?’ And I said, ‘I’m not telling you until we get there, because you’re going to overthink it. I just want you to be natural.’ She did it in one take.”

Engineered by Optical, who would go on to his own fame in the drum & bass scene making tracks alongside Ed Rush, the ‘Lover’s Rock’ mix of ‘Burial’ included a catchy section of Yolanda singing “first you say yes / then you say no”. It was yet another great hook for a song already loaded with them. Though the two versions were brilliant, Frost was a little nervous about playing them to people to start with. “You think it’s a good record yourself, but you just don’t know until other people hear it, you know what I’m saying?” Frost says. “I sat on it for about a month and just listened to it myself. Then I played it to Bryan Gee and said, ‘I’ve made this record, but I don’t know, what do you think?’ He was like, ‘What are you talking about, man?’”

Bryan, of course, loved it, but the style of ‘Burial’ didn’t fit exactly with the atmospheric sound they’d cultivated on V Recordings, so they devised a new label, Philly Blunt, for harder-edged jungle tracks. ‘Burial’ was the first release, and as soon as they heard it, DJs couldn’t get enough. “I played it to people like Grooverider and Fabio, and everyone was like, ‘Give it to me, give it to me, I wanna play it!’” Frost says. “And then after that, everyone wanted it, and then we decided that we were going to put it out.”

Once it was released, ‘Burial’ blew up. When jungle became huge in 1994, big labels started to take notice, and it was reissued by FFRR in ’95. The record hit No.6 on the UK dance chart and even made it into the official pop chart, reaching No.66, helping jungle crossover (briefly) to the mainstream. The tune’s blend of funk and dancehall elements catalysed jungle’s shift away from the bombastic synth noise of hardcore, towards something more soulful. Already a major DJ on the scene, ‘Burial’ helped cement Jumpin Jack Frost’s status as a jungle / drum & bass pioneer, synonymous with the genre, and he started a hugely successful show on Kiss FM that ran till 2001.

Both V and Philly Blunt are still going strong now, while Frost continues to tour the world and play across the UK, championing drum & bass. Coming soon is a Jumpin Jack Frost album, his debut, featuring a host of guests that includes UK soul royalty like Omar and Terri Walker, plus K-Ci from R&B legends Jodeci. “The album’s great. It’s multi-genre, there’s so many great artists on there.”

In July, venerable US hip-hop label Def Jam re-issued ‘Burial’, including an amapiano mix from Supa D. “To be coming out now on such an iconic label as Def Jam, it’s unbelievable,” Frost says. Most intriguingly, there’s set to be a whole new vocal from “a massive dancehall artist”, but their identity is under wraps for now.

Looking back on the success of ‘Burial’, Frost is still astonished. “Even now 30 years later, it’s still a massive record and people still play it. I had no idea that it would go on to be as big as it did.”