Last Man Drumming: Larry MacDonald
Photo by Jorge Denning
Larry McDonald is busier than you.
Within the frame of a month, he's gone to Kingston to accept an induction into the Jamaica Music Museum’s Hall of Fame, traveled to San Francisco to perform at a birthday memorial for his late friend Lee “Scratch” Perry, and braved a frigid winter night to gig with an instrumental rocksteady group inside a packed Brooklyn bar.
Larry is eighty six. He plays with an incredible acuity and strength, the result of decades working his conga and a bag of other percussive instruments into the groove. Occasionally, he'll step away from his three sparkly golden congas, loosen his serious funk face and hard hands, and croon with the band. His gentle baritone brings a timeless grandeur to his signature covers of “The Shadow Of Your Smile” and “I Wish You Love.”
“Keeping going is not something I think about. I just do that, because that's how it is,” Larry says. We're sitting on a bench outside his apartment in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town, on one of the last warm days of the fall. He's smoking a thin joint, and regularly lets loose a deep belly laugh. “I won’t retire. I'd have to be, like, unable to put two coherent bars of music together. And even then…”
“Larry Mac” is an elder statesman in New York's multigenerational reggae community and beyond—a key connection between Jamaican music past and present. An extremely active musician, Larry tours with a reconstituted Skatalites, performs with the dubwise Subatomic Sound System, and anchors the aforementioned rocksteady project helmed by saxophonist Anant Pradhan. He also performs and plays occasionally with the NYC Ska-Jazz Ensemble, the Slackers, Dave Hillyard and the Rocksteady Seven, and SunDub.
“All the bands that I'm playing with have a different attitude,” Larry says. “What I've compiled over the years is stuff that I can separate and mold and pick out and graft onto anything that I'm playing.” Whether that's a Jamaican folk rhythm, Rastafari drumming, or a hint of bebop, “you’ll still know it's me,” he says.
As a session musician and on tour, Larry has performed with a great number of reggae heroes throughout his seven-decade career, from Bob Marley and all of the original Wailers, to Toots and the Maytals. In fact, he is possibly the most prolific percussionist in reggae, and is largely responsible for introducing conga into the genre; if you hear the instrument on a reggae album from between 1969 and 1973, it's probably Larry. In 2011, he was honored with the Pioneer Award during the annual Jamaican “Tribute to The Greats” ceremony.
He also has an incredible genre-spanning career, serving as Gil Scott Heron's percussionist for nearly thirty years and working with Taj Mahal, in addition to efforts with Bad Brains, Zap-Pow, Cat Power and others. Larry's longevity as a conga player is owed in great part to his free-thinking nature, ability to listen closely, and respond quickly. He's known for possessing the keen ability to hear what a track needs and fill those spaces.
“When I'm trying to get a gig together, he’s the first guy I call. There's very few people who can even come close to doing what he does,” says Hillyard, a saxophonist who began playing with Larry in the mid-'90s.
Pradhan has been performing with Larry for nearly a decade, and says his friend and mentor is “totally unique as a percussionist“ and a “non-traditionalist in every sense.” The two are the newest members of the Skatalites and also have an eponymous group.
“When I call Larry for sessions, I'm calling him not because he can just play what I like,” Pradhan says. “But because, left to his own devices, he plays things that I wouldn't have thought of or I couldn't have described. I lean on his intuition and his judgment calls in the moment. He also does some crazy, unexpected things that [even Larry] couldn't imagine sometimes.”
“It's kinda like the drums call me”
Larry McDonald was born near Port Maria, Jamaica in 1937 but, unlike many of his reggae contemporaries, he didn't show a prodigious interest in music until he was grown. Through his teens and early twenties, Larry was largely concerned with partying around Kingston. “Considering the way me and my friends used to drink rum, I figured I’d probably be out of here by forty-five if I was lucky,” he says. “We used to carouse, man."
His path to the drums was carved from tragedy. “My best friend died. We were in a car accident—we had just changed seats and, about twenty miles later, a truck hit us. He was sitting where I was.” The incident rocked Larry, who laid low stayed in the country for weeks wondering what he should do with his life.
Somehow, the drums called Larry. And, soon, so did a musician friend with a job offer to join a band at a new hotel. As a self-taught conguero armed with influences from jazz and bebop to the sounds of Radio Havana, Larry found the beat in Jamaica's booming tourism industry in the early '60s, joining house bands at the Runaway Bay Hotel, Playboy Club-Hotel, and other hip destinations. He wasn't alone: Saxophone legends and Skatalites founding members Roland Alphonso and Tommy McCook also performed with hotel groups while holding jazz jams on Sundays.
Larry listened widely as he developed his drumming technique, picking up pieces from various performers he saw coming through Kingston and at hotels. “The first time I saw an Afro-Latin band, I almost poured lighter fluid on [my drums],” he says. It was then, perhaps, that Larry realized he would need to expand his setup. “I realized that what I was trying to play on one drum was being played by [a] conga player, bongo player, maraca player, timbale player, guy playing guitar.”
“I came along at a time when there was a radical change in Jamaican music,” Larry recalls. “When ska came along, I didn't have an imperative to play [it] because I had a steady job at the hotels. Nobody was beating down my doors to put congas on their records at the time.”
Larry did find his way into the studio, appearing on Lenny Hibbert's Moonlight Party At The Myrtle Bank Hotel in 1961. That same year, he was rehearsing with Tommy McCook, when Roland Alphonso caught a hit of Larry's drum. “Roland said, ‘You have to give him a mic because what he's playing is swinging the tune,’” Larry remembers. “So I went on that tune, ‘Suavito.’”
Although you can hear Larry on that now-classic Skatalites track — and many others, such as “Hi Bop Ska” and the group's 1980s recordings — as well as genre classics like Carlos Malcolm & The Afro Caribs’ “Bonanza Ska,” it would be several years before his conga would become a fixture of Jamaican music.
“It was like the crucible. S**t was coming from every angle.”
Conga isn't a traditional Jamaican instrument and, as such, commanded little respect in the burgeoning ska and reggae scenes. In fact, Larry can only identify two other conga players—Jerome Walters and Noel Seale—who were active in Jamaica at this time. Yet, driven by a divine calling or, more likely, a stubborn single-mindedness, he worked diligently on figuring out how to get conga into the mix.
“My challenge was playing indigenous rhythms on the conga, and playing them well enough that people would be listening a while before they realize that it’s congas,” he says. “People didn’t know what to tell me to play [so I had to find my own way into the song].”
For all the challenges he faced, Larry was incredibly fortunate to be walking through the primordial ooze that would form the basis of some of Jamaica's most legendary music. “We were all coming through at the same time,” Larry says, adding that he played with most of the key musicians in popular Jamaican music—from ska and rocksteady, through reggae and dub. “I might play with Tommy here, Roland is there. Ernest [Ranglin] might be there.” Bob Marley, Toots Hibbert and the Maytals, Alton Ellis and Max Romeo were all emerging from the same milieu, and shared the stage or studio with Larry at some point.
“Those days, no artists had their own band,” Larry reflects. “A promoter would book a show, and he’d hire a band to play all the tunes by all the artists. I always found myself in company that I didn't even deserve to be in the same room with. But they accepted me, mainly because nobody else was trying to play the instrument in those circumstances. And, somehow, I had enough on the ball to make them give me the chance to play it to see where I [could] take it to.”
When Jamaica’s tourist season ended in 1967, Larry joined a mento group playing in Mexico. He spent two years in-country performing, fathering a son, and missing much of the rocksteady movement. By the time Larry returned home in '69, reggae was coming on; his first taste of the genre came in the form of The Pioneers’ “Long Shot Kick The Bucket,” which he heard in a taxi from the airport heading back to Kingston.
Soon, Larry was playing with the Boris Gardiner Happening, a new band at the Courtleigh Manor hotel that featured Toots and the Maytals percussionist/bandleader Paul Douglas, guitarist Fox Brown, Keith Sterling on keys, along with Gardiner on bass and vocals. When the band fell out shortly after, Larry went solo—taking his congas from session to session.
“This was the days when it was like the crucible. Shit was coming from every angle,” Larry says, casually. “I had a little run there for a moment.”
It wasn't uncommon for Larry—or many reggae musicians, for that matter—to play multiple sessions in a single day, running from studio to studio across Kingston. Listen and you'll hear Larry on the Fabulous Flames’ “Holly Holy”; The Slickers' “Johnny Too Bad”; Eric Donaldson's “Cherry Oh Baby”; Derrick Harriott & The Crystalites’ The Undertaker; Boris Gardiner's “Every N— Is A Star” (which, four decades later, was prominently sampled on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly); productions by Harry Mudie, Bunny Wailer and Clancy Eccles; and the conga break on Toots and the Maytals’ “Funky Kingston.” It was also around this time that Lee “Scratch” Perry tapped him to play on early sessions at his Black Ark studio.
“I can find something to play to anything, pretty much,” Larry says nonchalantly, though his voice belies a healthy skepticism of his own importance. “Sitting down with these guys, I was totally terrorized, because you don’t want to fuck up. I lived in stark terror for most of my playing days because the conga player was the last hired, and the first fired. I never really forgot that feeling.”
“I just wanted to be the conga player”
In 1973—ostensibly the year that reggae broke through to the U.S. and the mainstream—Larry McDonald came to America.
At the behest of Bill Barnwell, an American jazz saxophonist living in Jamaica, Larry joined the Indianapolis-based International Jazz Library, traveling with the band to Hilton Head, South Carolina. “We were doing fine until the bandleader threatened to kick the entertainment managers’ ass,” Larry says with a knowing laugh. The act broke up by July 1974.
The charismatic Larry had a girlfriend who was living in New York and worked for the Jamaica Tourist Board. On a trip to visit her, Larry connected with someone who knew Taj Mahal. The Bay Area blues legend had just released Mo’ Roots, which featured covers of “Johnny Too Bad“ and Bob Marley's “Slave Driver” (which Marley and Aston “Family Man” Barrett helped produce, and Barrett also performed on), and was looking for a percussionist for his Intergalactic Soul Messengers Band.
The very next day, Larry packed his bags, and boarded a 3:30 p.m. TWA flight bound for the West Coast. Taj picked him up from SFO, and whisked Larry away to rehearsal. Larry would record and tour with Taj Mahal for several years, until international performances presented trouble for Larry's visa status.
His early work with Mahal also put Larry back in the orbit of Bob Marley. Without much direction about how to do so, Mahal sent Larry to Jamaica to get Earl “Wire” Lindo, Marley’s keyboard player, and bring him back to the Bay to tour. It seemed like stealing—from under the nose of a rising Jamaican icon. “I couldn't do something like that and not say nothing to [Bob],” Larry says, incredulous.
Although Larry and Marley never performed together after their big-band ska days, they remained friendly. “Every time I [would] run into Bob, he [would] always say, ‘Don't worry mon, you and me gonna do something.’ He’d be off on the road, I’d be in some other country…and we’d see each other in between,” Larry says of Marley. “Even now, when somebody says that to me, it sound[s] like they shouldn’t be saying that. It’s like his phrase to me.”
“Most nights when he got on stage, he could fry you”
After Larry broke with Taj Mahal, he started a reggae group in the Bay Area called Ridd'm. And, as one project tends to beget another, Larry ended up producing an album for Los Angeles-based singer Ernesto Browne, who asked Ridd'm to record as his band, Obeah. Synth pioneer Malcolm Cecil was engineering that record, and had also produced and engineered Gil Scott-Heron's last three releases. Larry remembers Cecil encouraging Gil to add a reggae vibe to a track on his forthcoming Reflections album, and together they pulled Larry into a session for what would become the 1981 LP’s opening track, “Storm Music.”
“When [Gil] put it out I almost laughed, because it sounded exactly how I thought a bunch of brothers from [the States] would sound trying to play reggae,” Larry says, chuckling at the memory. “But I was serious, and the money was good—it was a rough time. I was glad to get the work.”
Larry—fast-talking, opinionated and intuitive, and by now unafraid to let his opinions on the sound of reggae (and conga's place in it) be heard—encouraged Gil and Cecil to add additional guitar parts to “Storm Music.“ Then, with a bold casualness, he offered more of his services.
“They say ‘We have this tune that we haven't put out because it needs something; we don't know what,’” Larry remembers. “So I said, ‘Let me just go into the booth and play. Anything that I do that you like, stop me right there.’ I just started playing some shit and they liked all of it.” With Larry, “Gun” reached its final form.
Larry joined Gil Scott-Heron's band, Amnesia Express, beginning with support dates for Reflections. The group had about twelve members and multiple drummers when Larry first joined; eventually, he found himself the sole percussionist and one of its rhythmic anchors. He recalls playing with a particular lineup—Ron Holloway on sax, Rod Youngs or Kenny Powell on drums, bassist Rob Gordon, keyboardist Kim Jordan, Ed Brady on guitar, and Gil on piano and vocals—with a sparkly-eyed reverence. His gaze shifts to somewhere in the distance.
“That band, on any night, I'd like our chances against anybody you could bring,” Larry says, calling those experiences some of the greatest of his career. “We were so freakin' not only tight, but so attuned to Gil that he literally couldn't make a mistake. Because we'd sense what was coming before it came on. When he got there, we were there.”
They experimented and jammed, turning tracks like “Angel Dust” into thirty-minute epics. “You'd like to live in that space, but you can't,” Larry says. “You’d fry your circuits. It's too intense – at least for me.”
Larry continued to perform and record with Gil—whom he considered a friend, even as addiction rattled the singer on and offstage. “When he started getting a little funky and stuff like that, I stayed,” Larry says. “I just thought when he looked around on any given night, he needed to see at least one person who he [knew] for sure got his back. It wasn’t no martyrdom. I was faced with the decision of leaving one of the greatest playing experiences of my life. People ask me why I don't write the book; [it's] because everybody's gonna want [it] to be about dope stories. 'Course there was that, but it wasn't all bad. Most nights when he got on stage, he could fry you—regardless of his condition, he could blast your mind. Especially when we were groovin’. You’re so hyper aware, it's like another level of, dare I say, consciousness.”
“If you look at his arms, they’re like tree trunks”
Larry toured with Gil Scott-Heron through the '90s and into the 2000s; their last record together was 1994's Spirits. “I miss Gil because the shit that's happening now, he would have a field day,” Larry says. “He was one of the greatest people I’ve met. His shit was so original, but yet so accessible.”
Around this time, he'd also sit in with the Skatalites during their New York shows. At a Knitting Factory performance in the mid-’90s, Larry's playing caught the ear of Dave Hillyard; the two began talking and dreamed up a band that would play jazz just as much as ska—and Dave Hillyard and the Rocksteady Seven was born. From there, Larry joined another of Hillyard's groups, the long-running ska/rocksteady ensemble the Slackers, playing on the majority of their releases since 1997's Redlight.
Hillyard and Larry continue to perform together regularly. “I think he plays better in his eighties than when I first met him in his sixties,” Hillyard muses. “I suspect he's always thinking and editing, building up his chops. If you look at his arms, they’re like tree trunks. He’s super strong.”
In 2009, Larry McDonald released his first and only album under his own name. Drumquestra put the things Larry loved most—drums and voice—front and center, and featured a bevy of OG collaborators including Stranger Cole, Bob Andy and Toots Hibbert (with whom he'd recorded the GRAMMY-nominated Toots In Memphis album in 1988) on experimental reggae, spoken word and even house tracks. Yet the impact of the record, and why it remains Larry's only solo recording, remains murky.
“It was pretty important to me. It felt like I exercised quite a few demons,“ he says. “Because of circumstances, I just left it alone. I'd like to one day be able to get all those people, or people of equivalent capacity, together and do that live.”
Several years later, he would reunite with another Jamaican legend: Lee “Scratch” Perry. First linking via Dub Is A Weapon, Larry joined dub collective Subatomic Sound System to record and tour Perry's 2017 Super Ape Returns to Conquer, on which he's credited for “congas, percussion, baritone vox, and ancient wisdom." Larry toured with Subatomic until Scratch died in 2021, and continues to perform with the project; their latest effort is in support of Mykal Rose—a collaborative album featuring Hollie Cook titled Rockin’ Like a Champion, which is slated for release in July.
Larry and Scratch’s bond was reflected in the striking, percussion-heavy performances they did together across the U.S. over the last decade of Perry's life. That bond also enabled Larry to follow Scratch's whims with a bit more ease. “Scratch would come in [to a dressing room] and say he wants to play a song, and it might be something that we haven't played with him ever,” Larry recalls with a laugh. “When he says he want to do it, he means he want to do it at the show tonight.”
While Scratch's varied career gave birth to a litany of crucial and now-classic productions, his final years were filled with half-baked collabs with people like Andrew WK as well as a public persona that often delved into caricature. Larry was one of few collaborators— if not the only one —who connected him back to the start of his career in Jamaica.
“Scratch was a motherfucker,” Larry says. “He was pretty temperamental, but I could always talk to him. I can always talk to the insane ones. I suspect [because I’m crazy too].” Scratch once paid him the ultimate compliment. “He said, ‘Larry you play that fuckin' drum like a piano, mon!’”
Around 2020, Larry officially joined the Skatalites. Though the group does not have any original members who performed on their seminal 1960s recordings, '80s revival or reunion tours, Larry's inclusion adds an additional legitimacy; he is the only true representative of the era from which the band was born. (OGs Doreen Shaffer and Vin Gordon are no longer regular featured performers.)
Ironically, Larry now tours the world playing music he had little interest in at the time of its inception; music that didn't see the power of the conga. “I don't feel bitter. I'm more incredulous that they couldn't see it,” he says. “That it took me sixty years to come back, and drop it in the middle of the fucking Skatalities and make it sound like it was there all along. I won,” Larry says with a deep laugh.
“I was really there, in the heat of the battle”
At most any gig he plays, musicians, DJs, collectors and fans will come up to Larry to say “hey,” and pay their respects; invariably, he greets them with warmth, casualness and a joke. Give him a mezcal or some herb, and his smile will widen even further. Larry just has presence, Hillyard says.
“He blows people's people's minds when he plays,“ he says. “I've seen it happen for decades now. He brings people in and convinces them with his playing.”
Larry also remains humble about the esteem with which he's held among reggae aficionados. “[Whether I had an influence on the sound of reggae] is one of the things that I've wondered about for a long time,” he says. “Because you just like to know somebody’s listening. That’s why you play.”
It was only in 2016 that Larry first heard a fellow percussionist call him an influence. “This young cat Hector Lewis played with Chronixx. I got a call from him one day—I don’t know who this is—[and] he says, ‘Uncle! I hafta come check you.’ He came from the Bronx down there, and we chopped it up for quite a while man. He said one of the things that interested him was the sound on ‘Cherry Oh Baby.’ Wow.”
Lewis is one of a handful of musicians, who are young enough to be Larry's children and grandchildren, that now study at his feet. Larry's instrumental rocksteady project with Pradhan—which covers songs by Roland Alphonso, Cedric Brooks (a friend of Larry's and one of the few OG horn players to embrace conga) and others—has become another avenue for the percussionist to stretch his legs and educate a younger, eager generation.
“They want to hear all the old-time stories,“ he says. “I have to accept the fact that I was really fucking there, in the heat of the battle, at the beginning of the whole thing. And I know a lot of shit that they'd like to know or explain. To get this level of respect from the younger crowd —and not Jamaican musicians—it's gratifying to see that they know so much about it. So whatever they ask me, I’ll tell them what they want to know.”
For Pradhan—who released a reggae-fied version of “Sally's Song” from The Nightmare Before Christmas with Larry on New York label Names You Can Trust label in 2022—working with Larry on multiple projects has been a blessing in more ways than one.
“Larry’s as close to me as any family I have,” he says. “He's like a friend and father figure, a grandfather figure, all rolled into one. The number of times I've leaned on him for professional advice, relationship advice, or family advice…”
“Given the same condition, I probably would have done the same thing”
Larry McDonald is one of the few remaining members of his musical generation, those who saw the music unfold, who contributed to its creation and evolution, and remain living archives of its history. But he doesn't ask after people anymore. His age comes with the burden of having seen many friends and colleagues pass.
“I’m at peace with the fact that I actually became the conga player around here,” he says. “That’s what I wanted and I got it,” he says. “I love it. As long as I can play to a certain level, I'm gonna do this.”
Seven decades into his career, Larry says he still retains a “defensive posture” about being seen as extraneous to a project. He also deals with the perils and pitfalls of being a working musician—from little pay, to lugging three congas to gigs, or even braving freezing temperatures while playing outside during two COVID winters.
“The good makes me endure the bad,” he says. “The bad part makes me live until tomorrow when I know it’ll be better. If I had to go through that all over again, faced with the same choices, given the same condition, I probably would have done the same thing.”
Outside of his Stuy Town apartment, Larry has finished his joint. The sun has set, and a chill is stiffening the air.
“Nobody thought that I'd get this far with the whole thing,” Larry says as we walk to the edge of the maze-like complex, one of New York’s largest. “But I'm actually trying to get this far and beyond, you know? [I want to go] as far as the drums will take me.”