Sly Dunbar, reggae drummer and half of Sly and Robbie, dies at 73

Sly Dunbar, the Jamaican drummer who as one half of the rhythm duo Sly and Robbie helped bring driving, rock-influenced beats to reggae, died overnight on 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 Mr. Dunbar and his partner, the bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who died in 2021, shaped ska, reggae, rocksteady and dancehall from Jamaica’s 1960s musical ferment. By the early 1980s they ran a production company and label, Taxi Records, and worked with artists beyond reggae, including Carly Simon, Jackson Browne and Sinéad O’Connor; Mr.

Shakespeare estimated that the pair had worked on 200,000 recordings. Rolling Stone in 2016 ranked Mr. Dunbar No. 65 among the 100 greatest drummers and wrote that “due to how frequently his riddims have been sampled” he “is quite possibly the world’s most recorded musician.” He had 13 Grammy nominations and won two awards in the best reggae album category for his work on Black Uhuru’s Anthem (1984) and for Friends (1999) with Mr.

Shakespeare. Mr. Dunbar mastered the one-drop rhythm and pioneered the rockers rhythm, which places the drum on the first and third beats and the snare on the second and fourth, a pattern credited with making reggae more danceable and easier to blend with R&B, funk and rock.

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