Everett Morton is a drummer and percussionist from Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, most notable as the drummer for the early 1980s ska

Ska

Ska |Jamaican]] ) is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1950s, and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae. Ska combined elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues...

 band The Beat

The Beat (band)

The Beat are a 2 Tone ska revival band founded in England in 1978. Their songs fuse ska, pop, soul, reggae and punk rock, and their lyrics deal with themes of love, unity and sociopolitical topics....

. Originally from the West Indies, Morton is known for his distinctive drumming style that includes syncopation

Syncopation

In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...

 and polyrhythm

Polyrhythm

Polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms.Polyrhythm in general is a nonspecific term for the simultaneous occurrence of two or more conflicting rhythms, of which cross-rhythm is a specific and definable subset.—Novotney Polyrhythms can be distinguished from...

 in a rock beat. His reggae drumming helped give The Beat their characterful sound.

After The Beat disbanded, Morton and Saxa

Saxa (musician)

Saxa is a saxophonist famous for having performed with the British ska band The Beat. He has also played with many early reggae stars such as Laurel Aitken, Prince Buster, and Desmond Dekker....

 formed The International Beat who were fronted by vocalist Tony Beet

Tony Beet

Tony Beet is an English musician best known for being the lead singer of The International Beat...

. The International Beat continued through the 1990s. Currently, Morton has reunited with Ranking Roger

Ranking Roger

Ranking Roger is an English musician. He was a vocalist in the 1980s two-tone band, The Beat and General Public...

 and they perform as The Beat in the UK.

External links

• The Beat official website
• The New English Beat at MySpace
  MySpace
  Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....