World of Jamaican Music

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An illustrated map of the creators of Jamaican music and how they are connected.

Remembering Derrick Harriott (1939-2026), rocksteady singer and producer. Read his story →

Lloyd Brevett

Artist. Ska, rocksteady

Active
1950s-2004
Sunrise
August 1, 1931, Kingston, Jamaica
Sunset
May 3, 2012, Kingston, Jamaica
Also known as
Lloyd Brevette

Lloyd Brevett was the founding bassist of the Skatalites; with Lloyd Knibb's drums, his bass was the high-powered engine of the group.

Taught to play, and to build double basses by hand, by his father, he was one of the young players, with Knibb, Tommy McCook and Jackie Mittoo, who challenged Drumbago's rhythm section in the early 1960s and did much to set the new ska beat. He played in the never-recorded Cavaliers band with Johnny Moore, Mittoo and Knibb, and from it they picked the core of the Skatalites, formed at Studio One in 1963.

Bradley credits him, once he took up the electric bass, with rebalancing arrangements: he slowed his playing, marked out a more syncopated pattern that left room for counter-rhythms, and so began the bass's long reign as a lead instrument in Jamaican music, a legacy Bradley ties to the birth of rocksteady. Bunny Wailer said that all his own bass lines came from Brevett's, and Herbie Miller of the Jamaica Music Museum called him the "true father of Jamaican bass," who "popularised how we hear and understand that instrument in music today."

The old band came together in 1975 to back him on the album African Roots, not issued until 1997, and when the Skatalites were being reassembled for Reggae Sunsplash in 1983 the organizers found him working as a mason on the building of the Conference Centre in downtown Kingston. He played with the re-formed Skatalites from the 1980s, including on their Grammy-nominated albums of the 1990s, until a dispute with newer members led to his removal in 2004. He suffered a stroke in March 2012, two weeks after his son Okine's life was taken outside the family home, and departed in Kingston that May. He is buried at May Pen Cemetery.

Last updated November 5, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 42.
  2. Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 94, 158.
  3. Johnny Moore's account in Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 25; Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 37; Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 100.
  4. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 158, 159. Bradley also says he "disappeared from the scene after the Skatalites broke up."
  5. "Skatalites' Bassist Brevett Dies in Jamaica at 80," Associated Press, in Pollstar, May 4, 2012, https://news.pollstar.com/2012/05/04/skatalites-bassist-brevett-dies-in-jamaica-at-80/.
  6. Quoted in Jesse Serwer, "R.I.P: Lloyd Brevett, 'True Father of Jamaican Bass,'" LargeUp, May 4, 2012, https://www.largeup.com/2012/05/04/r-i-p-lloyd-brevett-true-father-of-jamaican-bass/.
  7. Augustyn, quoting the Sunsplash organizer Ronnie Burke in the Gleaner, 2012: "We found him covered in cement on the site": Heather Augustyn, "Skatalites Reorganized in 1975," SkaBook (blog), January 15, 2016, https://skabook.com/2016/01/15/skatalites-reorganized-in-1975/.
  8. "Skatalites' Bassist Brevett Dies," Pollstar. The AP dates the Skatalites' founding to 1964; the books give 1963.
  9. Heather Augustyn, "Maypen Cemetery," SkaBook (blog), October 4, 2013, https://skabook.com/2013/10/04/maypen-cemetery/.

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