Sly Dunbar

Slave to the Riddim



The riddim twins. So ubiquitous have their rhythm-driven adventures been on both sides of the desk that Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare have unquestionably earned their moniker. For the better part of thirty years now they have been the quintessential rhythm section.

Best known for their intimate involvement in the progression of Jamaican music since the late 1960’s, this is certainly not where their legacy ends. Sly and Robbie’s trademark rhythms have featured on releases from Grace Jones to Bob Dylan, Howie B to No Doubt. In fact, it would be fair to say the music charts of the 1980s and 90s would be fairly desolate without their multifarious contributions.

Both Dunbar and Shakespeare struggled their way through the ranks of late 60s Jamaican reggae session players. Both found themselves playing in Lee Scratch Perry’s in-house bands, and in 1973 joined forces as the rhythm section for Coxon Dodd’s Studio One band, The Revolutionaries. This was the golden age of reggae, and Sly and Robbie appear on a staggering amount of recordings from that era. As well as being integral to Black Uhuru, Dunbar’s resourceful drumming and Shakespeare’s supple bass-lines grace albums from Culture, The Mighty Diamonds and Gregory Isaacs.

Meanwhile they found time to run their Taxi label, record rhythms for Grace Jone’s Nightclubbing, Bob Dylan’s Infidels and No Doubt’s two recent number one hits, Underneath it All and Hey Baby. When we caught up with them recently, they were touring in Australasia for the first time, with Black Uhuru vocalist Michael Rose – a reunion of sorts that was essentially a run though of back-catalog classics. And even after a recording career of 35-odd years, Dunbar still seems genuinely excited by music technology and the increasing freedom it entails.

One of your most recent successes entailed recording two number one singles with No Doubt. How did those sessions come about?

Dunbar: "It came about through a friend of ours, Brian Dobson. He works at Satellite Radio in America. He called me and asked me if we would like to produce No Doubt, and I said ‘Yeah!’. They flew to Jamaica and recorded at Gee-Jam studio in Port Antonio, it took two weeks, and we went back to this little studio, Sonic Sounds in Kingston, and did a vocal there, with Bounty Killer. And I think they took it back to England where they mixed it. But No Doubt is a great band. They’re fantastic, and like two months ago I went to New York and played a benefit concert with Bono from U2 and there was two drummers and two bass men playing on a song called Sweet Thing, and No Doubt were singing and it was great. It was the first time I’ve done two drummers live you know, it was really wicked."

How developed were the tracks when No Doubt came to Gee Jam?

Dunbar: "On ‘Hey Baby ’ they had a demo as a Pro-Tools file and they took it to Jamaica. It was OK, all we needed to do was put the drums around what they had because what was there was great and we didn’t want to lose any of that. Sometimes on a session you might do something today and can’t get it back tomorrow. So we just put the drums around it and put the tabla in the break. And that was it, we told them it was fine, nothing was wrong with it. I think they were pleased when we told them that!"

In a situation like that, how involved in the song-writing process can you get?

Dunbar: "Sometime they come with their song and we just produce the rhythm for the song, and if there’s no song, we might make the rhythm track and have some little vocal ideas, and the points are split up and shared eventually."

You’ve worked with a vast array of artists from diverse backgrounds, creating different styles of music. Do you approach all sessions in the same way?

Dunbar: "Well, we approach projects differently. When you’re playing with, like Bob Dylan, you approach it not from a reggae point of view. You prepare yourself that Bob Dylan is like a pop, folk singer, and he sometimes take a different kind of rhythm. When you go into the session you approach it with open ears because maybe the musician around the session is not really reggae musician, so it might only be Robbie and myself who are reggae musician. So we can adapt to that kind of music, and sometimes we might keep it a little bit reggae inside of there. When we approach a Jamaica session, a reggae session, it’s different."

So for instance, how did you approach the Grace Jones sessions for Nightclubbing and Warm Leatherette, compared to the work you did with Howie B for Drum and Bass Strip to the Bone?

Dunbar: "Well, with Grace Jones, when we got to Nassau we didn’t know what we were going to do, so we went inside the studio and we said let us go into the studio and learn all of the songs, and then we’ll cut the songs right to tape. So what we do is we went and sat inside the studio and they would play the demo of the songs and then we would try and reconstruct the riddim in a more groovy type of thing, to suit her image. So we went in and did that, and most of those songs were done in one take. The Howie B sessions for Strip to the Bone, we laid down the track, and while we did that he was there moving all the knobs, putting on delays and effects as we go along, you know. That was a very creative session, just to see how he worked it."

Working as you do, as session musicians and producers, you work in many different studios. What is essential in a studio for the way you work?

Dunbar: "To me any good studio is a good studio, in any part of the world. For it to be good the monitor has to be almost perfect, just sounding great, and it must to be very true. I mean the console has to be good to, you know, and you could have some outboard effects in there. You don’t need a lot because if the music’s not right from the beginning the outboard effects can’t help it to be right. Once you have a good sounding room, the monitors sounding very true, I think that’s all one needs, if it sounds great that’s it."

Having come from a dub reggae background that is grounded in analog tape, what to you are the benefits of digital recording technology?

Dunbar: "The benefit of digital is it is very clean. Because of digital, the editing process, on Pro-Tools and the new end of programs, it works better for a lot of engineers who want to explore, go further with what they want to do. With analog you have to do a lot of editing with cutting the tape, you couldn’t move things around, like cut and paste. What digital has done is make the job easier for record engineers and musicians to work on a complete song and get done in seconds what would take hours with tape. And not every one can splice tape, so you’d have to get a good editor, to cut the multi-track or two track tape."

Dub depends on a hands-on, ride-the-controls method of working. How does this transfer into the digital domain?

Dunbar: "Well, it all depends how you make dub. You have to figure out the knobs. So if you have a digital board you can make it work and make that new sound inside of it. I think with dub it need to go to the next stage. It has been there a long time and I think it can be taken to the next stage digitally. In Jamaica now most studios use digital delays and everything like that. Not everyone uses tape echo you know."

Dub seems to have many meanings now, and gets applied to all sorts of music. What does it mean to you?

Dunbar: "To me dub is just like…in Jamaica it’s a way of life. We see dub as using the rhythm track that is there, and taking out things, using effects, having them running all the way through sometimes. Doing what you feel like, it hasn’t got any rules or regulations. You can do anything, and for once it’s the bass and drums up front."

You’ve managed to stay abreast of music technology innovation, and indeed have led the way in many cases. You began using MIDI Syndrums and drum machines early on. What inspired you to do that?

Dunbar: "I’m the kind of person who likes to go to the next level. Anything I see coming in new music technology I want to see how it works. Even if I don’t have it I want to know what is out there, right. And the first I saw of it was when we used to work with a synth player, Tyrone Jones. When it came to the drum section of it and it said Syndrums, I said ‘Woah, this is serious’. And then there was the drum machine and I started buying all these things. I can use it inside of reggae; with normal drum-kits they’re just there, but with Syndrums there’s work to do, you have to create that sound. I just grow to love it more and more everyday, it’s like it’s a part of me now!"

Was there resistance to drum machines and MIDI amongst the roots reggae community in Jamaica?

Dunbar: "Well, the drum machine has been inside of reggae for a long time because the original version of Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, that’s a drum machine, and Johnny Was a Good Man. When the drum machine became very popular I said to my friend, ‘It can play reggae’, and he said ‘No, no, no, it can’t play reggae’. So I booked some time and I played it, and he say ‘Woah, woah, woah’ and they start believing. A lot of people in Jamaica didn’t want to see me play the drum machine, because they think it was limited, that they couldn’t get the flair that they would like in a song. But eventually they have come around and lot of them are into it you know."

Both you and Robbie Shakespeare played sessions for Lee Scratch Perry. Was that what inspired you to get into production work?

Dunbar: "No I got into production work because of Ansell Collins, he’s the one who took me to the studio when I was like sixteen, and I played on (The Upsetters) Night Doctor, and then (Dave and Ansell Collins) Double Barrel. I wasn’t so interested in the production thing because I wanted to be a musician. But then in Jamaica you go to the studio everyday, and you’ve got an idea for making music and sometimes the producer wouldn’t go for the idea. But this producer by the name of Joe-Joe Hookim, he gave me the green light to play the drum part like the way that I was thinking of and it worked. So then I started getting involved in production, and I said to Robbie, ‘What we should start doing is owning ourselves on tape, have others playing and be in control’. But we still be playing our own music, and recording for everyone on Taxi, we still play for everyone, you know."

What do you remember of the sessions with Black Uhuru and Culture, which produced some of the greatest reggae albums of the Seventies.

Dunbar: "I remember those sessions because with the Black Uhuru session we cut all the tracks in one day. Culture we come in and do the same thing, and they were great songs, the singers were writing extremely good hooks. So once you have good hook you get a good riddim. Today music is good, but I don’t there’s enough good hooks, like there was in those days."

You’ve been involved in so many sessions on both sides of the desk. Have any meant more to you than others?

Dunbar: "As producer and player, every session’s meant a lot to me, because when you approach a session you don’t know if it’s going to be a hit song. And most of the sessions it’s turned out to be that these songs are popular. So I think all sessions and production work is important because you are competing with yourself, you say ‘I play this rhythm and it’s good, I can’t play the next two rhythms and it’s not good’, so you try hard to get that next rhythm sounding much better than this. You’re always in competition with yourself, and I think that is very good. I think to myself, I can do better, I can make a better rhythm than that, so that keeps you going."

In Jamaica are live drum sessions still the norm, or are samplers and drum machines predominantly used for rhythm tracks?

Dunbar: "Now in Jamaica there’s not much live drums. A couple of people sometimes, but the drum sound in Jamaica now is not as good as in those days of Joe-Joe Hookim and Joe Gibbs. Most of the guys now didn’t grow up on the sound of live drums. So there’s quite a few live sessions going on, but the drum machine is being used because you can’t…I won’t say you can’t, but it’s hard to get a good recorded drum sound in Jamaica."

Gavin Bertram.