The Skatalites

By 1952, drummer Lloyd Knibb — years before there was a Skatalites to drum for — was climbing into Kingston's Wareika Hills for Rastafarian musician Count Ossie's nyabinghi and burru sessions. Trombonist Rico Rodriguez, who made the same trip, remembered why: "when you play with Count Ossie you have only drum sounds to play off so you're playing from feelings, pure feelings." Knibb carried those hand-drum patterns onto a trap kit. Former Jamaican prime minister and onetime band manager P.J. Patterson put the debt plainly: "it was largely his rhythmic innovation which shifted the emphasis from the first to the second and fourth beats of every measure."

listen: upstream & heresource: Skatalites.com — band history (Alpha Boys' School lineage, naming story, Count Ossie/Wareika Hills, hi-hat figures on 'Addis Ababa') ↗share

1960

Another MosesCount Ossie

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1965

Addis AbabaThe Skatalites

listen forOn "Another Moses," cut in 1960 with Count Ossie's own drummers, the rhythm sits on the offbeat pulse of nyabinghi hand-drumming — no kit, just drums answering a vocal call. The Skatalites' own history page points straight at where that lands on a trap set: "check out his figures on the hi hat, say at the beginning of Simmer Down or Addis Ababa." Cue up "Addis Ababa" and listen to that opening hi-hat pattern — cymbals doing on a drum kit what the Wareika Hills drummers did with bare hands.

Lester Sterling was a trumpeter around Kingston's dance-band circuit — Luther Williams's outfit at Club Havana, the Val Bennett band in 1956 — when something made him set the horn down. "I was originally a trumpet player," he explained years later, "before taking up the sax. When I heard Charlie Parker play, I got influenced right away." By 1958 the switch was final: alto saxophone, bebop's harmonic reach folded into whatever else he'd go on to play. He carried that debt into the Skatalites' front line, one of three saxophonists in a band whose horn section had absorbed Parker's vocabulary long before ska existed.

listen: upstream & heresource: Jamaica Gleaner — Survivors keep music history alive (Lester Sterling's trumpet-to-sax, Charlie Parker quote) ↗share

1945

Now's the TimeCharlie Parker

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1964

Indian SummerThe Skatalites

listen forParker's 1945 "Now's the Time" moves in quick, blues-drenched turns that run straight through the harmony rather than sitting inside it — the vocabulary Sterling names as his conversion. On the Skatalites' "Indian Summer," cut nearly twenty years later, listen for that same fluency in Sterling's alto: fast, singing runs layered over a ballad's chord changes instead of staying inside the melody, the bebop ear working inside a completely different, ska-tempo arrangement.

In 1956, saxophonist Tommy McCook left a hotel gig in the Bahamas and drifted to Miami chasing better bookings. There he heard John Coltrane play for the first time — a night he later told his biographer "changed my life and how I played the saxophone." McCook stopped treating music as a day job; back in Jamaica by 1962, he led a small jazz combo that played straight from Coltrane's book night after night, before producer Coxsone Dodd and drummer Lloyd Knibb finally talked the reluctant McCook into leading the band that became the Skatalites.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1960

But Not for MeJohn Coltrane

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1963

The AnswerThe Skatalites

listen forMcCook named this tune outright — his pre-Skatalites combo, he said, played "shots by Coltrane, 'I Love You,' 'But Not For Me,' and others." Listen for that same harmonically searching tenor on McCook's own "The Answer," cut a year before the Skatalites formed: long, unhurried phrases that keep pushing past the chord changes instead of resolving neatly on the beat, the jazz habit he carried into every ska session that followed.