STORY · REGGAE
From Alpha horns to the studio session
Well supported
A reform school on South Camp Road quietly supplied the horn section for most of reggae's biggest records.
Alpha Boys School's brass-band discipline turned out generation after generation of saxophonists and trombonists who ended up on Studio One, Treasure Isle, Black Ark and Bob Marley sessions alike.
A reform school's unlikely export
Alpha Boys School took in wayward and orphaned boys and gave many of them, almost as a side effect of discipline, a brass instrument and a bandmaster. The result, across decades, was an unbroken supply line of horn players into every studio in Kingston.
Lester Sterling entered Alpha at six years old and came out a founding saxophonist of The Skatalites; a generation later, trumpeter David Madden and saxophonist Glen DaCosta met at Alpha and carried its brass-band training into Zap Pow, Jamaica's most jazz-literate horn band, before both joined Bob Marley's touring group.
Not every horn player who shaped the sound passed through Alpha's gates, but two who worked alongside its alumni show how thoroughly that training saturated the session pool: Richard "Dirty Harry" Hall, whose raw tenor sound helped define the Rockers style with Augustus Pablo and King Tubby, and Ronald "Nambo" Robinson, whose trombone runs from Count Ossie's Mystic Revelation through to Lauryn Hill's Miseducation crossed nearly thirty years of Jamaican and international recording.
Ask a horn arranger who taught them, and Alpha's name comes up more often than any producer's.
The through-line from a 19th-century industrial school to Exodus and Kaya is one of the odder inheritance stories in Jamaican music - and one still worth an editor's fuller reconstruction, alumnus by alumnus.