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Sly Dunbar, who has died aged 73 after a long illness, was one of the most renowned Jamaican drummers, respected internationally for his precision timing and for the inventiveness with which he approached his instrument.
Crafting non-standard reggae rhythms that drew on funk, soul and disco, Dunbar and his bass-playing partner, Robbie Shakespeare, backed nearly every reggae artist of note and collaborated with an array of admirers, including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Ian Dury, Joan Armatrading, Madonna, the Fugees and Sinéad O’Connor, though many will remember him best for the outstanding hits that brought Grace Jones to stardom.
Dunbar’s powerfully driving beats resulted from a blur of action across the drum kit, harnessing the controlled chaos that contrasted his easy-going nature; a wiry, muscular man who kept garlic to hand to ward off colds while on tour, he was a counterbalance to the mercurial Shakespeare, the immense catalogue they left including many enduring hits.
Born Lowell Dunbar, he was the youngest of three children whose parents both worked at Kingston’s airport. He spent his formative years on Windward Road in east Kingston, and by the age of seven had relocated to Waterhouse, a former sugarcane estate in western Kingston that had become a low-income housing scheme in the aftermath of Hurricane Charlie in 1951.
Obsessed with the Skatalites songs he heard on a jukebox during his lunch breaks while a student at Trench Town comprehensive high school, Dunbar would relentlessly pound the rhythms on his desk and decided to pursue music professionally at 13 after Ken Boothe and the Gaylads performed at the school.
He soon began approaching local acts to try to gain experience. After receiving pointers from the Wailers drummer Carlton Barrett and Mikey Richards of Now Generation, he joined the fledgling act the Yardbrooms, and after sitting-in on a rehearsal with the RHT Invincibles he began recording with the keyboardist Ansel Collins, his debut session generating a sprightly organ instrumental called The Night Doctor, which became popular with skinheads in Britain after Collins licensed it to Lee Perry’s Upsetter label in 1969.
Dunbar then briefly joined the Supersonics, playing on Justin Hinds’s Say Me Say. A subsequent session for the producer Winston Riley featuring Collins and the vocalist Dave Barker yielded the frantic dance groove Double Barrel, which topped the British pop charts in 1971.
The guitarist Bertram McLean then drafted Dunbar into the Volcanos, the resident act at the Colony Club in Discovery Bay on the north coast of Jamaica, where he received the nickname Sly due to his veneration of the American funk act Sly and the Family Stone. Once the Colony Club went into receivership, the band regrouped in Kingston as Skin, Flesh & Bones, which by 1974 became the resident act at the Stables nightclub on Red Hills Road, a few doors down from Evil People, where Shakespeare was playing in Big Relation.
Shakespeare was also active in the Aggrovators, the recording unit regularly employed by the producer Bunny Lee, and after Shakespeare saw Dunbar backing Cynthia Richards, he asked Lee to recruit Dunbar for an upcoming session at the Channel One studio, where Dunbar drummed on John Holt’s adaptation of the Chi-Lites’ Too Good to Be Forgotten.
At the same time Dunbar was reconfiguring the dominant reggae beat as leader of the Channel One house band, the Revolutionaries, and another early collaboration came in 1976 when Shakespeare played the piano on the popular Revolutionaries instrumental MPLA.
The pair bonded more concertedly when Shakespeare included Dunbar in the lineup of the Word, Sound & Power band that would back Peter Tosh on an overseas tour in 1977. Performing to foreign audiences and being on the road together for an extended period resulted in an exchange of ideas between the two, leading them to employ the funk, soul and disco undercurrents that would define their joint productions. But first Dunbar recorded two largely instrumental solo albums for Virgin, Simple Sly Man (1978) and Sly Wicked and Slick (1979).
Sly and Robbie’s Taxi label subsequently enjoyed considerable success with Gregory Isaacs and Black Uhuru; the latter were signed to Island Records in 1979, and Sly and Robbie’s presence helped them to become the most popular reggae act in the world in the aftermath of Bob Marley’s death, culminating in the Grammy-winning album Anthem (1983).
The “Rhythm Twins”, as they became known, performed a similar function for Jones at the heart of the Compass Point All Stars, the house band that Chris Blackwell assembled for his studio in Nassau, Bahamas, where Dunbar’s complex patterns gave striking rhythmic hooks to Jones hits such as Private Life (1980), Pull Up to the Bumper (1981) and My Jamaican Guy (1982).
Gwen Guthrie’s self-titled debut album (1982), Dylan’s Infidels (1983) and Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock (1983) showed the ease with which Sly and Robbie switched between genres in the early 1980s, and when Jamaican production values shifted mid-decade, Dunbar became one of the most sought-after electronic rhythm builders, using drum machines and synthesisers on significant hits for rising dancehall artists, including Chaka Demus & Pliers’ Murder She Wrote (1992) and Tease Me (1993).
A cover of Isaacs’s Night Nurse with Simply Red was another chart success in 1997, and following the Grammy-winning Sly and Robbie album Friends (1999), in 2001-02 they co-produced two No Doubt singles, Hey Baby and Underneath It All.
Dunbar continued touring until Shakespeare’s death in 2021, and remained active in the studio until recently. He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Jamaican government in 2015.
He is survived by his wife, Thelma, and their daughter, Natasha.
