like those other two originals, revolutionized pop music in his own singular image, transforming a regional mutant product of Caribbean rhythm, American R&B and African mysticism into a personalized vehicle for spiritual communion, social argument and musical daring. Others, including his fellow founding Wailers, Neville Livingston (a.k.a. Bunny Wailer) and the late Peter Tosh, were party to his revolution. Yet it was Marley, with his rootsy integrity and mainstream-pop savvy, who largely initiated and greatly accelerated reggae's coming of age as a music of the world, as opposed to simply world music. He still casts a long shadow over reggae because his peers and disciples can still find much to love, and learn from, in his legacy.

Talkin' Blues is a crucial addition to that legacy. Like many posthumous collections, the album is a motley assemblage of previously unissued concert recordings and studio outtakes, linked by short excerpts from a 1975 Marley interview conducted by Jamaican journalist Dermot Hussey. But the live material's uncompromised physical kick and the narrative unity provided by the interview segments belie the album's patchwork makeup. (Listeners who have trouble deciphering Marley's tapioca-thick patois can order a free transcription of the interview from Island.)

Actually, the seven tracks taken from the Wailers' legendary October 1973 radio broadcast on KSAN, in San Francisco, are sufficient cause to celebrate. These vintage, deliciously raw performances, which feature Tosh and noted Jamaican vocalist Joe Higgs (subbing for Bunny Wailer, who had just quit the band), are as vital as those on the epochal 1975 album Live! and capture Marley's riddim rebellion at a critical juncture, just as he began to take Babylon by storm.

The light, scattered applause on the KSAN tracks (there are only half a dozen people in the studio audience) lends an air of poignant, familial intimacy to the proceedings. The haunting clarity with which Tosh and Higgs raise their voices in tortured harmony on the "weepin' and a-wailin'" chorus of "Burnin' and Loot-in'" evokes images of a destitute family crying in the darkness of a Kingston tenement yard. On that tune, and on ferocious readings of "Slave Driver" and "Get Up Stand Up" from the same session, Marley's voice shivers with tangible fear and wounded defiance, echoed by the argumentative chatter of Tosh's r