Sly and Robbie

views updated

Sly and Robbie

Drummer and bassist

For the Record…

The Ordained Meeting

International Attention

Dub Fade and Dancehall Fame

Selected discography

Sources

Although drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare are primarily musicians who play backup on other artists’ albums, they are nonetheless a significant force in the music business and are known as “Sly and Robbie,” or sometimes the “riddim twins.” Their bass and drum work has appeared on not just a remarkable number of reggae albums, but particularly on several of the genre’s milestone productions. They have sometimes been credited with initiating several of reggae’s most successful trends, including “dub” and, mostrecently, dancehall. In 1993, almost 20 years after Sly and Robbie began, Maureen Sheridan described them in Billboard as “the drum and bass duo who define Jamaican rhythm.” In addition, rock legends outside of reggae, including Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan, have sought out the Sly and Robbie sound.

Lowell “Sly” Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare were both born in Jamaica in the early 1950s. They came of age in Kingston, the island’s major city, just as reggae was also coming of age. Like so many young musicians living in the ghetto, Sly and Robbie had no access to formal training or even to written music and were largely self-taught. Sly, whose first drum kit consisted of empty food cans, told Don Palmer of Musician that he “was all the time practicing … in school and playing on the desk.”

Sly played his first set of real drums at the age of 15, when he formed a group called the Yardbrooms. He made a brief try at a “legitimate” job—refrigeration mechanics—after dropping out of school; he soon decided to devote himself to music. Hanging around the Kingston music scene, he eventually became a regular with Dave and Ansell Collins, whose band had a good reputation in the city. The Collins brothers gave Sly his first opportunity to record, including his drums on their 1969 release, Double Barrel. Sly would also play with the Mighty Diamonds and I-Roy before meeting his musical soulmate.

Robbie Shakespeare sought out a mentor to guide his musical education. “I heard Family Man Barrett playing with the Hippy Boys one night,” he recalled to Palmer, adding, “I liked the way he played bass—strong, simple, melodic lines with feeling—so I asked him to give me lessons.” Family Man proved to be a demanding teacher: “When I practiced,” Robbie told Palmer, “I’d cry and play. I had a six-string guitar, and I played it with my big finger till blood came from my finger. If I was looking for a note and my ears weren’t at peak to find the note, I’d cry till I found it.”

Impressed with his protégé, Family Man christened Robbie’s career with his first bass and even allowed the young musician to replace him in occasional Hippy

For the Record…

Sly Dunbar (born Lowell Fillmore Dunbar, May 10, 1952, in Kingston, Jamaica), drums; Robbie Shakespeare (born September 27, 1953, in Kingston, Jamaica), bass.

First played together under the tutelage of Bunny Lee and began Taxi record label, mid-1970s; backup musicians for many reggae artists, including Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Black Uhuru, Gregory Isaacs, Burning Spear, Mighty Diamonds, and Jimmy Cliff; Island Records took over Taxi distribution, 1980, and Sly and Robbie began playing backup for Island’s non-reggae artists, including Grace Jones; played backup for other artists, including Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Joan Armatrading, and Herbie Hancock; focused primarily on solo work, mid-1980s—.

Addresses: Record company —Mango Records, 400 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10003.

Boys and Aggravators gigs. By 1970 Robbie had become the Hippy Boys regular bassist. Other opportunities filled out Robbie’s apprenticeship, including recording two songs with Bob Marley, “Concrete Jungle” and the legendary “Stir It Up,” on Catch a Fire.

The Ordained Meeting

Sly and Robbie finally encountered one another—”It was ordained to be,” Robbie told Palmer—when they were playing at rival clubs in downtown Kingston. “Sly was playing at the Tit For Tat,” Robbie recounted, “and I was playing next door at Evil People’s with the Hippy Boys. At break we’d always check each other out. When I saw Sly, I said, ‘Yes, whenever this drummer touch the recording scene, every drummer have to pack up.’” Sly, who first heard Robbie’s bass on a single in 1972, shared a similar first impression of his future partner: “It was the whole body of the bass, the sound and the way it flowed against the drummer. At a certain part of a tune he’d play like three different lines, change the line on the bridge and the verses after that, and get four different lines.”

Sly and Robbie didn’t actually play together until Kingston producer Bunny Lee brought them both into the studio for a joint session in the mid-1970s. At first, the two tried forming a band with five other musicians. It quickly turned out, however, that only these two shared a real devotion to the music. Banking on the power of that shared enthusiasm, they created Taxi Records in 1974, one of the longest-living of Jamaica’s homegrown labels, and began marketing themselves as producers and a professional rhythm section.

Sly and Robbie soon became regulars all over the reggae circuit, playing with more and more of Kingston’s heavyweights, including Burning Spear, the Mighty Diamonds, Jimmy Cliff, Big Youth, and reggae’s greatest legend, Bob Marley. Musician’s Palmer declared of Sly and Robbie in 1983, “One or both their names appear on probably half the reggae albums in any record store.” Robert Santelli wrote in Modern Drummer that Sly’s “sparse yet crisp beats practically defined the Jamaican brand of drumming in the ’70s and ’80s.”

Peter Tosh, second in stature only to Marley, offered Sly and Robbie their first real break in 1976 when he invited them to play rhythm on Legalize It. As Word, Sound and Power, the pair went on tour with Tosh in 1978, winning new fans wherever they played. “The Sly and Robbie thing started from there,” Robbie told Billboard’s Sheridan. By 1984 they were so important to the Jamaican music industry that their ten-year anniversary prompted a concert celebration at the National Arena that took over the city and featured most of the reggae greats of the day, including Black Uhuru, Gregory Isaacs, Jimmy Riley, and Yellowman.

Sly and Robbie launched Taxi Records with a single by Gregory Isaacs, “Soon Forward,” which claimed the Number One spot on Jamaican music charts. Taxi gained a foothold outside of Jamaica with Red, a 1981 album by Black Uhuru; the LP has remained one of the landmark releases in reggae’s history. While Sly and Robbie played backup for many of the artists who recorded at the Taxi studios, the pair also used the label to present their own music—recordings on which they headlined an ensemble of guest artists. As of 1980 Taxi’s international distribution was prospering in the hands of London-based Island records, which managed Taxi through its Mango/Taxi subsidiary.

International Attention

Sly and Robbie’s second album with disco diva Grace Jones, Nightclubbing, constituted the pair’s first significant excursion into pop music. During the same year, 1981, they cut several more releases with British and American pop notables, consolidating their crossover from exclusive reggae celebrity to mainstream acclaim; not only Jamaica, but also Great Britain and the United States were in love with Sly and Robbie. By 1983 they had added Great Britain’s Joan Armatrading and the United States’ Bob Dylan to their list of international pop-star connections. When Musician’s Palmer interviewed Sly and Robbie in 1983, they were “the Jamaican rhythm section whose rise to the brink of international stardom has been just the mortal side of meteoric.”

Despite their fame and their tremendous currency, Sly and Robbie remained modest. They were known as highly effective musicians who loved their music and even felt it as a spiritual force, but who avoided all manner of music business drama. Writing for Melody Maker in 1981, Paolo Hewitt commented that Sly and Robbie “go in, create consistently high quality music, then go out again. No artistic traumas. No drug or record company problems. Almighty God provides the inspiration.”

What made Sly and Robbie “great” wasn’t just their love of music or their professionalism. Rather, listeners discovered an unparalleled artistry in their work. Alan di Perna identified “rapid-fire, one-take creativity” as a “Sly and Robbie trademark” in Musician in 1987. Di Perna focused in particular on Robbie’s bass, noting that he “approaches it much as a jazz soloist would a familiar melody, producing infinite and subtle variations that transform, but never obscure, the riff.”

“[People] said whenever Sly and I played togedder, we di’nt need d’rest of d’band,” Robbie told Roy Trakin in a 1984 Musician interview. “Bass and drums are like a foundation for building a house,” he continued. “Me and Sly each play melodies, though, on our individual instruments. If y’listen to Sly drummin’ alone, y’could dance off dat. If y’listen to bass alone, y’can dance off dat. The secret is playin’ somet’ing dat’s locked in when you’re both together, but, at de same time, de parts stand by demselves, too.”

As early as 1983, Palmer described Sly and Robbie as “innovators and codifiers of rhythmic traditions.” He summarized that innovation, listing their achievements: the pair has been “credited with popularizing a fleet, insistent cymbal style (flyers ), founding the stepping, martial drum patterns of rockers (a deceptive rhythmic variation marked by an eight-to-the-bar bass drum that, coupled with Sly’s cymbals, give the impression of acceleration while the tempo is actually slowed), and creating a languid, fluent bass style that is percussive and melodic.”

Such innovation, and especially a willingness to play with non-Jamaican pop, was part of the Sly and Robbie magic and had been from the beginning, as Robbie told Billboard’s Sheridan. “I can tell you one thing,” he explained, “from the early part when Sly and myself used to share a room.… We wouldn’t sleep at night. We would always talk music; arrange the songs we were going to play, and decide how we were going to do it, without rehearsing it, just by talking it.… We would buy dozens of cassettes to hear the difference between American music and Jamaican music, how it was mixed. And after being exposed to all that, we would experiment with our sound.”

A shift in the reggae sound in the mid-1980s, however, initiated the end of British and American audiences’ affair with reggae. As more and more Jamaican musicians, including Sly and Robbie, immersed themselves in the new “dub” trend, more and more white listeners lost interest, and reggae’s overseas fashionability faded.

Frank-John Hadley, reviewing Reggae Greats: Sly and Robbie for Down Beat in 1985, described the new sound with typical disappointment. He argued that “their booming, uniform dub … makes for a trying listening experience.” While Sly and Robbie’s work as two of the industry’s most valuable back-up men suffered no setback, their efforts as solo artists and on the behalf of reggae in general did suffer. They had hoped to see reggae continue to expand as an international music force; instead, they saw its influence narrowing.

Dub Fade and Dancehall Fame

Mat Smith wrote in Melody Maker in 1987 that “working with Sly and Robbie has become the accepted seal of approval on any artist’s career.” Alan di Perna described them in Musician as “supporting players” who have “become as recognizable and popular as comic book superheroes.” Despite their impact on milestone albums across musical genres, the pair had never yet had a hit with one of their own albums. Solo pieces released only in Jamaica fared well enough, but those marketed to a wider audience never traveled beyond reggae connoisseur circles.

Eventually Sly and Robbie’s music gained more popularity, but only as general tastes changed. First, the pair had to discover a strong mentor in producer Bill Laswell, with whom they began working in the mid-1980s. The three first worked together on a Mick Jagger album, She’s the Boss, and soon after, Laswell was recruited to help Sly and Robbie get more out of their solo efforts.

The first LP with Laswell, Language Barrier, encountered a lukewarm reception after its 1985 release. 1987’s Rhythm Killers, however, produced a hit single in Great Britain, “Boops (Here to Go).” In an effort to draw in those listeners outside of reggae’s consistent market, Sly and Robbie heightened their experimentation with non-reggae sounds, emphasizing funk in particular and tossing in some early hip-hop thoughts. “We’re trying to get new fans,” Sly told Musician’s di Perna. “Once they come into the funk, they’re going to have to come into the reggae, because that’s where we’re going to take them.”

Rhythm Killers won the press attention that had eluded Language Barrier. “I listened to this on the fourth of July,” wrote a reviewer for High Fidelity, “and … didn’t care that I missed the fireworks.” Melody Maker’s Smith described the album as “enthused and fused with a … schizophrenic art of noise attack all lashed around a non-stop rhythm that bumps each track nose to tail tight.”

Sly and Robbie followed Rhythm Killers with The Summit, in 1988, and earned a rave review from Musician, which called it “pure pulse.” The real breakthrough, however, came with 1990’s Silent Assassin, on which the pair solidified its collaboration with hip-hop. “Maybe Silent Assassin can bring some attention back to reggae again,” Sly mused to Modern Drummer’s Robert Santelli. “That is what we’re hoping will happen: to bring reggae, modern reggae, back into people’s ears.”

To achieve this, the pair worked with a host of rap’s most favored artists, including KRS-One from Boogie Down Productions, Queen Latifah, and Young M.C. “Dunbar and Shakespeare make the full plunge into rap and hip-hop,” declared Santelli, “resulting in the duo’s most exciting record in years.”

Sly and Robbie were already paving the way for the next wave in reggae—the combination of American rap and Jamaican dub comprising the new “dancehall” sound. After breaking the barrier with Silent Assassins, the pair released Sly and Robbie Present … DJ Riot in its wake, helping to kick off the dancehall frenzy that spread into the United States in the early 1990s. They filled out their own pioneering rhythm work with the vocals of nine dancehall deejays collected from clubs around Jamaica.

“Sly and Robbie,” wrote Down Beats Dan Ouellette, “bring alive the kinship of reggae and rap.” Dancehall would, in fact, finally achieve what reggae artists had been seeking for years: an audience for Jamaican music among African-American listeners. When “Murder She Wrote” hit the American charts in 1992, creating one of the first major dancehall hits in the states, Sly was credited not only as a producer, but also as the inventor of its “new reggae rhythm” known as “bam bam.”

“Reggae will be mixed with every other rhythm of the world,” Sly predicted at the end of the pair’s interview with Billboard’s Sheridan, “Japanese, Korean, African, Indian, all kinds of different musics, a mixture of everything so that everyone can dance. As long as there is a groove, that is the key.”