From Alpha horns to the studio session

David Madden, a trumpeter trained at Alpha Boys School, co-founded the horn-forward band Zap Pow in 1969 and, after it disbanded in 1979, joined The Wailers Band alongside fellow saxophonist Glen DaCosta, contributing to Bob Marley & the Wailers albums including Exodus.

Vin Gordon is a Jamaican trombonist, a session player on foundational rocksteady and reggae recordings across multiple studios. His instrumental "Vix", opening with an easy-jazz introduction before dropping into a rub-a-dub rhythm, was the exclusive dubplate Dennis Bovell played to win the 1974 Battle of Burtons sound clash, cut from a fresh set of dubs Bovell had received from Lee "Scratch" Perry that same day.

Glen DaCosta, an Alpha Boys School saxophonist, joined Zap Pow after military service and became part of the "all-Alpha" horn section, with David Madden and Vin Gordon, heard across Bob Marley & the Wailers' Exodus and Kaya albums.

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.

Richard "Dirty Harry" Hall was a tenor saxophonist trained at Alpha Boys School whose raw, emotive horn sound helped define the Rockers style through work with Augustus Pablo and King Tubby, including Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey (1975) and Peter Tosh's Equal Rights; he also appeared in the 1978 film Rockers.

Bobby Ellis (1932-2016) was a Jamaican trumpet and flugelhorn player, trained at Alpha Boys School, renowned for his horn arrangements and session work across ska, rocksteady, reggae and dub. He recorded extensively at Studio One and played alongside fellow Alpharians in Lynn Taitt's Jets and other leading horn sections.

Zap Pow, formed in 1969 by singer-bassist Michael "Mikey Zappow" Williams and guitarist Dwight Pinkney with Alpha Boys School horn players David Madden and Glen DaCosta, were Jamaica's most jazz-inflected horn-forward reggae band, scoring with "This Is Reggae Music" and, after Beres Hammond joined as lead singer in 1975, "The System" (1978).

Ronald "Nambo" Robinson (1949-25 January 2017) was among Jamaica's foremost trombonists, playing in Count Ossie's Mystic Revelation of Rastafari horn section in the early 1970s before recording with Bob Marley, Dennis Brown, Peter Tosh, Buju Banton and Lauryn Hill, and forming the 809 Band with saxophonist Dean Fraser. He died of a heart attack in Kingston aged 67, on the same day as the singer Ronnie Davis, and was to have played in a band paying tribute to Don Drummond — the trombonist who most influenced him — in early February. His playing is on Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier", the Tamlins' "Baltimore" and Everton Blender's "Lift Up Your Head", as well as records by Dennis Brown and Lauryn Hill.

Lester Sterling (31 January 1936-16 May 2023) entered Alpha Boys School at age six and became a founding alto saxophonist of The Skatalites, recording sides including "Inez" for Duke Reid; he received Jamaica's Order of Distinction in 1998.

The house band that gave ska its shape — a working group of Jamaica's finest jazz-schooled players, most of them alumni of the Alpha Boys School, assembled around 1964 and cutting the instrumental and backing sessions that defined Studio One's era. Tommy McCook, Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso, Johnny "Dizzy" Moore, Lester Sterling, Jah Jerry, Jackie Mittoo, Lloyd Brevett and Lloyd Knibb between them played on an enormous share of the period's records. The original band lasted only about fourteen months before splintering, but its playing underpins the entire ska canon.