Contents - Beth Lesser

was a different era,” Jazzbo explains. “We never used to use ‘computer’ * at
Channel One. That time I had to hide to make ‘computer’ music. I couldn’t
do that in Channel One. I had to hide and go somewhere where nobody
would see me. People would say I am doing foolishness.” At first he used
Wailer’s keyboard player Tyrone Downey to build the official rhythms in a
little studio up by Mountainview Avenue called Creative Sound, but later
began to rely on Tony Asher. By 1987, he had moved to Tuff Gong and was
making rhythms like Horace Ferguson’s ‘The General’ with veteran keyboard
player Winston Wright.
Sly and roBBie
In the ‘80s, technology began taking up more space in reggae. Sly Dunbar,
of the original ‘Riddim Twins’, had been purchasing new electronic devises
abroad and bringing them into the studios in Jamaica. First he brought in the
Syn-drum, which became part of the signature sound of Sly and Robbie’s Taxi
label in the early ‘80s. Next, he showed up with the Simmons drum kit which
he proudly displayed in Channel One. Sly had been using the Simmons in
the Compass Point studios in Nassau while working on the Black Uhuru LP,
Anthem, for Island Records. “According to Dunbar, the plans were to make
the new [Black Uhuru] album more acceptable to a rock crowd in the United
States so the sound, and in some instances the songs, would be different from
the group’s previous records. ‘We decided to step up the production and we
bought the Simmons drum,’ Dunbar remembered. ‘It had a different sound
which was fresh…’” **
The Simmons contained five drums - bass, snare and three tom-toms,
and settings for 40 complete “drum kits” (20 factory and 20 programmable
presets). It was designed to replicate both the sound and the feel and of an
acoustic drum in its sensitivity and response. At that point, musicians still
wanted the electronic instruments to sound as acoustic as possible, as if using
a programmable or preset instrument was ‘cheating’, as if it carried some
moral stigma. In 1983, audiences still felt that musicians ought to be playing
instruments, so the bands that used the new technology tended to disguise it
under a heavy, otherwise manually generated, rhythm track.
Sly Dunbar happened to be in the studio experimenting with a new drum
machine that included a programmable bass, when Sugar passed through
and heard him playing. “Sly Dunbar was just licking things - weird rhythms,
man. I heard Sly with this thing that was different from all kind of rhythm
- you never heard a rhythm like that before. It was like chu chu chu chi chuchuchuchu.
It was just like another version of ‘Heavenless’, in a computerized
* By “computer”, Jazzbo, like other Jamaican artists and musicians at the time. meant pre-programmable
instruments like drum machines and electronic keyboards that could be set – by a human-
to play certain patterns.
** Jamaican Observer, Wednesday, February 27, 2002, Howard Campbell
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