“King Tubby’s era brought that cymbal to life” So I said, ‘Let me put a drum set together’.” “The room had a big bass drum, and there was a pedal. “I was an all-rounder.” As the corps’ quartermaster it was his job to look after the equipment in storage.
“I used to play the snare, then the tenor, which we call the tom-tom nowadays, the bass drum and cymbals,” he recalls. He started playing, aged 11, in his church’s marching band, the St Peter Claver Drum Corps. It was Christmas so his friends teased him saying he looked like Santa. The story of how Santa got his nickname is well-known: as a boy he was roller-skating and fell on some hot tar, which made his face turn red. He sits at a table beneath a black-and-white picture of the island’s original super-group, the Skatalites, whose drummer Lloyd Knibbs was a huge influence on Santa – but more of that later. He’s a tall, bespectacled bear of a man with a white beard and an American-tinged accent which becomes more pronounced when he becomes animated. Santa is not slightly built like fellow Jamaican drumming legends Sly Dunbar or Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace. Outside in Chinna’s yard, musicians are jamming – as they do most days.
Santa is back to visit Kingston from California, where most of Soul Syndicate relocated in the ‘80s, and is staying at the home of guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith, the core member they left behind (in 2015 the band reunited and recorded a new album set for release later this year). But what he did create was the backbone to many of his era’s immortal rhythms, which have been passed down through generations.
And, as Carlton has stated repeatedly and with growing exasperation, he did not actually create the pattern, which had been in circulation since ska and even before. In reggae lore he is associated with one of dub’s iconic sounds – the “flying cymbals” – exemplified by Johnny Clarke’s trend-sparking 1974 hit ‘None Shall Escape The Judgement’.Īctually the term is misleading the distinctive hissing comes from the hi-hat, not the cymbal. He’s worked with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff and Burning Spear, and today tours with Bob’s son Ziggy. Carlton “Santa” Davis has been in demand as a drummer since the early ‘70s, when he played in the group Soul Syndicate. In the 1970s, session drummers were to reggae and dub what guitarists were to rock – game-changers who could shift the tide of the music.
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