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Artist
The Cool and Deadly
12+ albums
afropunkrockdubreggaesurfing
about
The Cool and Deadly is a reggae rock band from Brooklyn, NY that adds to the punky reggae legacy of The Clash and the Bad Brains. Having influences as far afield as rockabilly, metal, Latin and Cape Verdean Creole music into a fuzzed-out sound that’s not always reggae and not always rock, but invariably ruff and tuff. They have a unique sound and multicultural background. Lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist Danny Baptista (a.k.a. Danny Zion) had a mixture of hot-rod, punk and skate culture while growing up in a South Shore Massachusetts Portuguese community; drummer/producer Bill “Prince Polo” Szeflinski, a Milwaukee native of Polish descent, and guitarist Harvey Valdes, a first generation Columbian-American raised on his parents’ cumbia records, developed their chops playing heavy metal. “My family came from the Cape Verde islands so I got heavily influenced by West African guitar—lots of reverb!” Danny says. “My dad was a crazy Elvis fan and a rhythm guitar player like myself. He unconsciously filled my head with the crazy mix.” While THE COOL AND DEADLY officially united in 2004, the trio has worked together since the late ‘90s, when Valdes met up with Baptista and Szeflinski’s defunct reggae outfit, Zionix. “With Zionix, we were mixing roots reggae, 80's rub-a-dub and Cape Verdean music,” Danny says. “In our next band, El Knife, we actually switched places—Billy was on guitar and I was on drums. That opened the spectrum to all the surf and skate punk stuff we listened to back
