Alpha Boys School

The Kingston charity school that trained a remarkable share of Jamaica's horn players, and did it almost by accident, as a by-product of discipline.

Justina Ripoll, Sister Mary Claver, opened the Alpha Cottage on 1 May 1880 under the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy. It was an industrial school for orphaned, abandoned and so-called wayward boys, and music was not the point of it. The music came in stages: a drum and fife corps in 1893, then a gift of brass instruments from the Roman Catholic Bishop of Jamaica in 1908, which became the Alpha Boys' Brass Band. What the school was actually teaching was precision, repetition and routine — and a brass band is an extremely efficient way to teach those things to a hundred boys at once.

The consequence is the most quoted fact in Jamaican music history. Sebastian Clarke wrote in 1980 that "99 per cent of the horns men who came from Jamaica and became famous overseas or at home, served their apprenticeship at Alpha"; the Gleaner said in 2003 that Alpha had produced more great musicians than any other institution in Jamaica in the preceding century. Don Drummond, Tommy McCook, Rico Rodriguez and Lennie Hibbert all came through the band room, and the Skatalites are in large part an Alpha alumni band.

The other half of the legacy is less celebrated and follows from the same discipline. Alpha has been a training ground for the state's bands as much as for the studios: in interviews conducted for Sandra Richards Mayo's study, all three bandmasters in Jamaica — military, regiment and police — were Alpha graduates, and close to three-quarters of the members of the military and police bands came from the school. The same regimen produced the horn section of ska and the horn section of the constabulary.

Alpha still runs, as an industrial school, music academy and children's home.