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Wycliffe Johnson, an innovative composer and producer known as Steely, who held sway over two decades of reggae music, died on Tuesday in East Patchogue, N.Y. He was 47 and lived in Kingston, Jamaica.

The cause was a heart attack following pneumonia, said his daughter Kerry Johnson. He had moved to Brooklyn this summer for treatment of kidney problems related to hypertension and diabetes, she said, and died at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital several weeks after surgery for a blood clot in the brain.

The reggae world knew Mr. Johnson as Steely, a boisterous producer with a larger-than-life personality and a belly to match. Best known for his role in the team Steely & Clevie, he was equally influential in his early work as a sideman, and helped to transform reggae at several stages, from roots to dancehall to digital.

An expert keyboardist who worked with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer, Mr. Johnson worked at seminal Jamaican recording studios like Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One, Lee (Scratch) Perry’s Black Ark and Sugar Minott’s Youth Promotion. By some estimates he participated in more sessions than anyone else in the history of reggae.

Born and raised in the same Trenchtown streets as Marley, Mr. Johnson was largely self-taught. When he was 12, the drummer Cleveland Browne, known as Clevie, invited him home for daily rehearsals with him and his brothers. “We basically learned together,” Mr. Browne said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Steely became like part of the family.”

As a child, Mr. Johnson would hang around Channel One Studio in Kingston, fetching drinks for the influential drum-and-bass duo Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, known as Sly & Robbie. When those two left Channel One, the band the Roots Radics, with Mr. Johnson as keyboardist and chief arranger, became Jamaica’s most in-demand rhythm section.

In the early 1980s Mr. Johnson and the Roots Radics pioneered the muscular, stripped-down reggae sound that would come to be known as dancehall, performing on records like Cocoa Tea’s “Lost My Sonia,” Freddie McGregor’s “Big Ship,” Yellowman’s “Zungguzungguguzungguzeng ” and Michael Prophet’s “Gunman.”

A few years later Mr. Johnson helped revolutionize the sound of reggae again. While other musicians resisted the digital tide of the 1980s, Steely & Clevie embraced it, pushing the technology of the day to its limits. At the studio owned by the producer King Jammy, in the Waterhouse neighborhood, the two worked with the engineer Bobby Digital and the songwriter-producer Mikey Bennett to record a vast catalog of hard-hitting “ana-digital” (part analog, part digital) instrumentals like “Punany,” “Cat’s Paw” and “Duck Dance” — all of which are still recycled by younger producers more than 20 years later.

Mr. Johnson’s digital bass lines and graceful keyboard riffs invested mid-1980s dancehall — in its so-called computerized style —with melody, groove and an unmistakably human touch. The two also laid down rhythm tracks for top dancehall labels like Penthouse, Techniques and Music Works. By their accounting, they worked on 75 percent of the hit reggae records of the late 1980s.

After Steely & Clevie left Jammy’s to start their own record label, bearing their names, in 1988, Mr. Johnson established the Silverhawk sound system, named after a favorite motorcycle. As a kind of mobile discothèque, the system offered a peerless selection of exclusive records, serving both as a promotional tool and as a laboratory for testing street-crowd reaction to songs being considered for release.

Mr. Johnson produced career-making records for luminaries like the crooner Gregory Isaacs and the dancehall star Super Cat, whose hit “Boops” spawned many imitations, including the 1987 Boogie Down Productions rap classic “The Bridge Is Over.”

Signing to a publishing deal with EMI in 1990, Steely & Clevie also collaborated with international acts like Billy Ocean, Heavy D, Caron Wheeler and No Doubt. They scored a Top 40 hit in the United States with their 1994 revamping of Dawn Penn’s Studio One classic “You Don’t Love Me (No No No)” and reached the Top 5 in 2004 with another vintage reggae remake, Sean Paul and Sasha’s “I’m Still in Love With You.”

Besides his daughter Kerry, Mr. Johnson’s survivors include four other children, Shae, Shanice, Daniel and Cailon, and his mother, Alice Johnson.

As shtick goes, Elephant Man’s is durable. His version of dancehall is comic: neon-colored hair, flamboyant outfits, young children performing adult dance moves, plus-size women pulled on stage for the purposes of bawdy humor.

Friday night at the Hammerstein Ballroom he relied on all these gimmicks during his performance, which came near the end of Hot 97’s On da Reggae Tip, an annual celebration of Jamaican music. Hot 97 (WQHT-FM in New York) is the most prominent outlet for reggae in New York but not the most vital. The genre thrives far from mainstream radio, and the handful of hours the station devotes to it each week smack of tokenism.

Still, much in the same way that Hot 97 has something of an obligation to reggae, the genre’s stars owe a debt to the station, and each year they come to tithe. The gravel-voiced Bounty Killer stalked the stage agitatedly as he roughly made his way through “Sufferer,” “Another Level” and several other hits. Beenie Man, Bounty Killer’s longtime antagonist, was charismatic during his set, a slick series of radio-friendly numbers including “Girls Dem Sugar” and “Who Am I.”

Serani, whose hit “No More Games” has been the biggest beneficiary of Hot 97’s largesse this year, was awkward, still acclimating to his fame. He brought out the Harlem hip-hop stars Jim Jones and DJ Webstar, who easily stole his oxygen.

This concert was the first — and probably the most polite — of several multi-artist reggae bills over Labor Day Weekend leading up to the West Indian American Day Parade on Monday. But for the younger artists who performed early in the night, this show provided the opportunity to act out on a major stage.

The young female performer Spice provided some of the night’s raunchiest moments with “Romping Shop,” her salacious back and forth with Vybz Kartel, notable in his absence. (Though that didn’t cheer up his longtime rival Mavado, who was characteristically sullen during his set later in the night.) Earlier Spice dropped into a split while rapping, and transformed Cham’s “Ghetto Story” into her own “Virgin Story.”

She also submitted herself to daggering, the shameless, controversial dancehall dance maneuver that involves rapid-fire pelvic thrusts. Dancehall isn’t just music: it’s gymnastics too.

And, of course, it’s also politics. Daggering has caused another flare-up in what seems to be the perpetual culture war surrounding dancehall. But that didn’t stop RDX, a duo trained in the Elephant Man school of mania and slapstick. RDX’s quick set early in the night was a furious ode to this lewd dance, with songs like “Daggering” and “Bend Over” paired with absurd dances, hypersexualized past the point of eroticism and into the realm of caricature.

At the routine’s most extreme points a female dancer would latch onto a male dancer’s waist, face-down and horizontal, with the result approximating a pornographic sort of Siamese twin. The woman would then undulate as if trying to swim her way around the stage, but despite her best efforts, she remained attached to a man who only held her back