Sly Dunbar, whose drumming brought complex beats to reggae, dies at 73

Sly Dunbar. Rolling Stone ranked him No. 65 in its list of the 100 greatest drummers of all time and, because he was widely sampled, “quite possibly the world’s most recorded musician.

By CLAY RISEN

Sly Dunbar, who as the drumming half of the Jamaican rhythm duo Sly and Robbie brought driving, rock-influenced beats to the island’s reggae sound while also playing with some of the biggest names in rock music, including Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Madonna, died last Monday at his home in Kingston, Jamaica. He was 73.

Guillaume Bougard, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said the cause was cancer.

For nearly 50 years, Dunbar and his partner, bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who died in 2021, single-handedly shaped the various music styles — ska, reggae, rocksteady, dancehall — coming out of Jamaica’s heady cultural ferment of the 1960s.

By the early 1980s, Sly and Robbie had their own production company and label, Taxi Records, and were in demand by artists whose style reached far beyond their reggae roots — among them Carly Simon, Jackson Browne and Sinead O’Connor. Shakespeare estimated that he and Dunbar had worked on 200,000 recordings.

Rolling Stone in 2016 ranked Dunbar No. 65 in its list of the 100 greatest drummers of all time and wrote that “due to how frequently his riddims have been sampled” he “is quite possibly the world’s most recorded musician.”

Of Dunbar’s 13 Grammy Award nominations, he won two in the best reggae album category, for his work as drummer and producer on Black Uhuru’s “Anthem” (1984) and for the album “Friends” (1999) with Shakespeare.

In the 1970s, the duo burst into the global mainstream as the rhythm section for Jamaican reggae star Peter Tosh, joining him as he opened for the Rolling Stones on part of the band’s 1978 U.S. tour.

Dunbar was known for his precise, propellant and somehow also relaxed drumming. After mastering the one-drop rhythm, a reggae standard that leaves out the kick drum on the first beat of a 4/4 measure, he pioneered the rockers rhythm, which deploys the drum on the first and third beats, and the snare on the second and fourth, making it even more danceable and energetic.

The rockers rhythm challenged the reggae orthodoxy of the 1970s. It fostered new genres like dancehall and made it easier for adjacent styles, like R&B, funk and rock, to incorporate reggae influences.

“R&B, hip-hop, African, pop — I’m always searching,” Dunbar told The Scotsman in 2009, “always looking for the sound that I think people want to hear, and then what I do is merge everything with reggae and get some new flavor in there.”

As a producer, he was an early adopter of digital technologies like MIDI sequencers and electronic drum machines — a contrast, he said, with many Jamaican drummers, who insist on analog.

“We’re always trying something new, always experimenting,” he told Billboard magazine in 1999. “If someone says, ‘Try this,’ we won’t say no. If it doesn’t work, we move on.”

Lowell Fillmore Dunbar was born May 10, 1952, in Kingston, where his parents worked at the city’s international airport.

He was a self-taught musician, watching professionals and then practicing on tin cans and other ersatz drums at home. He also drank in the music coming over the radio from North America, especially Booker T. & the MGs, whose drummer, Al Jackson Jr., became a personal hero. Dunbar loved Sly and the Family Stone so much that Sly became his nickname.

He found early success in clubs that were a crucible for emerging sounds like rocksteady, ska and reggae and appeared on seminal reggae albums, like “Double Barrel” (1971) by the duo Dave and Ansel Collins.

After he hooked up with his fellow session musician Shakespeare, they formed the core of the rhythm section of the Revolutionaries, the house band at Channel One studios, and in 1976 they joined Tosh’s backup band, Word, Sound and Power. Their prominent role on another reggae classic, the 1976 album “Right Time,” by the Mighty Diamonds, elevated Sly and Robbie to the top of the Jamaican music scene.

They continued to work with Tosh and other local artists even as they made connections in North America and Europe through Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who brought them in to backup Grace Jones on her 1981 album “Nightclubbing.”

They played on two albums by Dylan — “Infidels” (1983) and “Empire Burlesque” (1985) — and on Jagger’s solo studio debut, “She’s the Boss” (1985). In 2008, they worked with Madonna on remixes for her song “Give It 2 Me.”

Dunbar’s survivors include his wife, Thelma, and their daughter, Natasha.

After Shakespeare’s death, Dunbar continued playing on his own and, despite an illness, he worked in 2025 with the Argentine reggae band Nonpalidec and vocalist Micah Shemaiah on the single “Revolución.” He also contributed to the Mighty Rootsmen, a reggae supergroup.

“Just this last Saturday, although he was extremely weak, he wanted me to bring him the new MPC drum machine,” Bougard said. “He woke up at 6 a.m. and started punching beats.”