Session bands built the reggae sound

Jamaican records usually named a singer and a producer, but the sound itself came from small studio bands whose members rarely appeared on the label. From the Skatalites in the ska years to the Firehouse Crew in the 1990s, these session players defined each era of the island's music.

Two names on the label

A Jamaican single from the 1960s or 1970s usually carried two names: the singer's and the producer's. The musicians who built the track — who worked out the bassline in the studio, set the tempo and voiced the horns — were rarely listed anywhere. Yet the same small pool of players stands behind thousands of records, and each shift in the island's sound can be traced to a particular band in a particular studio.

Session work was paid up front — a per-session fee, or in some studios a weekly wage from the producer. Whatever a record earned afterwards — and some rhythms were versioned and recut for decades — the players who created it saw nothing further. The arrangement made Jamaican music extraordinarily productive, and it kept the people most responsible for its sound close to invisible.

Ska and rocksteady

The Skatalites existed under that name for little more than a year, from 1964 to 1965, but they played on a vast share of the ska recorded in Kingston. Several members, including trombonist Don Drummond and saxophonist Tommy McCook, had trained at the Alpha Boys School. At Clement Dodd's Studio One they and their immediate predecessors backed nearly every singer on the roster, including the teenage Wailers, while also cutting instrumentals of their own such as 'Guns of Navarone' and recording for rival producers across town.

When the tempo cooled into rocksteady, the centre of gravity moved to Duke Reid's Treasure Isle studio and to Tommy McCook and the Supersonics. Between 1966 and 1968 they backed Alton Ellis, the Techniques, the Melodians and the Paragons, whose 'The Tide Is High' later became a number one for Blondie on both sides of the Atlantic — in the UK in November 1980 and in the United States the following January. The band's unhurried, horn-lined arrangements are the rocksteady sound.

At Studio One the successor bands — the Soul Vendors and then the Sound Dimension — worked under keyboardist and arranger Jackie Mittoo, with Leroy Sibbles of the Heptones widely credited for many of the basslines cut there. Instrumentals such as 'Real Rock' and 'Full Up' became foundation rhythms, versioned hundreds of times since. 'Full Up' alone underpinned Musical Youth's 1982 chart-topper 'Pass the Dutchie'.

Reggae's engine rooms

Lee Perry's Upsetters took an instrumental, 'Return of Django', into the British top five in 1969, during reggae's first UK chart boom. The band's core rhythm section, brothers Aston 'Family Man' Barrett on bass and Carlton Barrett on drums, moved from Perry's sessions to become the permanent rhythm section of the Wailers — a reminder that Jamaica's most famous group was itself anchored by session players.

Bunny Lee owned no studio of his own, so he built his sound around a band instead. The Aggrovators, a shifting pool of Kingston's busiest players, backed Johnny Clarke and Cornell Campbell through the mid-1970s and popularised the 'flying cymbal' style, its hissing open-and-shut hi-hat pattern heard on Clarke's 'None Shall Escape the Judgement' in 1974.

The label had room for a singer and a producer; the sound was made by names that never fit.

Rockers to dancehall

At Channel One on Maxfield Avenue, the Hoo Kim brothers' house band, the Revolutionaries, recut Studio One rhythms with a harder, militant drum sound that became known as rockers. Drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare drove records such as the Mighty Diamonds' 'Right Time' in 1976, and went on, as Sly and Robbie, to become one of the most recorded rhythm sections in popular music.

The Roots Radics, formed in the late 1970s around bassist Errol 'Flabba' Holt and drummer Lincoln 'Style' Scott, slowed the pulse again and became the defining band of early dancehall. They backed Gregory Isaacs on 'Night Nurse' and laid the rhythms that engineer Scientist stripped down into a celebrated run of dub albums.

The tradition ran on. Bassist Lloyd Parks led We the People Band from the mid-1970s, for decades the band behind Dennis Brown on record and on stage. In the 1990s the Firehouse Crew, house band for Philip 'Fatis' Burrell's Xterminator productions, played on records by Luciano and Sizzla, proof that even in an age of digital rhythms a live session band could still define a label's sound.

Reissues and researchers have since restored many of the missing names, and musician credits now appear on compilations of records that originally listed none. The correction matters because it changes the story: ska, rocksteady, reggae, rockers and dancehall were not simply eras. Each one was a band.