What a Saturday night…Jazz! Song! Performance! Fête!

Oh Lawd! Wat a night! Wat a night!
What a Saturday night!
Oh Lawd! Wat a night! Wat a night!
What a Saturday night!
—"Linstead Market". Lyrics according to Walter Jekyll's 1907 book, Jamaican Song and Story

A busy Saturday night it was. Cool and dry, thank God. The 15th of November was busy with the simultaneity of entertainment options for the like minded.
Jazz! Song! Performance! Fête!
An inspiration. A revelation. An investigation. A celebratory coda.

I: Chantal's Vision

Chantal Esdelle is doing what few others have dared to try by launching a jazz studio—a home cum studio for creativity and improvisation—in her grandmother's home. The jazz salon is alive. I remember the Boothmans—Mike, David, Roger, Pops—had private jazz salons in their home. An effort to bring a select audience into direct contact with the creative energy of the local jazz musician is an inspired endeavour. The jam session, "the jazzman's true academy" according to writer Ralph Ellison, was being allowed to take root again after a few years of stasis. It serves as the jazz equivalent of networking events and that aspect is wanted if we are to build a viable industry beyond simple talent.

The din of nostalgia: The Keate Street Jazz Octet at Martin’s Piano Bar – a review¹

Aidan Chamberlin, assistant professor at UTT informed the small audience of about a couple dozen at Martin’s Piano Bar that the performance they were about to witness that cool Friday night (3 October) was the debut public performance of the newly formed Keate Street Jazz Octet conscripted from the staff of UTT Music department with Alea Nicholson sitting in as guest pianist. Their agglomeration was inspired by a visit earlier in 2014 by the Michigan State University jazz professors including Trinidadian trumpet ace Etienne Charles, and students. The Americans showcased the possibilities of big band and especially the octet ensembles in the context of jazz: four horns and a rhythm section can swing.

In the context of jazz in Trinidad, the audience was in for the uninspired reading of stock music charts of the jazz greats. With almost sonic perfection—one would expect no less from UTT music instructors—especially from the horn section of Chamberlin on trombone, Anthony Woodroffe, Jr. on tenor sax, Yevgeny Dokshansky on alto sax and Errol Ince on trumpet, the octet moved through a selection of early- to mid-20th century jazz standards ranging from Gershwin (Fascinating Rhythm) and Fats Waller (Ain’t Misbehavin’) to Erroll Garner (Misty) and Dizzy Gillespie (Night in Tunisia).

Caribbean Beat Reviews – July/August 2014ª

Jazz Racine Haïti Jacques Schwarz-Bart

Guadeloupean tenor saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart, as a child heard Haitian vodou ritual songs played by his mother and celebrated author, Simone Schwarz-Bart, as a soundtrack to their life of literary idyll in the Caribbean. That memory of the music, and his own yearning to create jazz that is reflective of his French-Caribbean heritage propelled Schwarz-Bart to first perform and later, to record Jazz Racine Haïti as a document of the spiritual journey beyond Haiti all the way back to Africa. To re-arrange vodou music for this band featuring jazz musicians and two houngans (vodou priests) was an exercise to engage with the greatness of this music. “That dialogue with silence [music] creates a doorway to the unknown.” “Legba Nan Baye” fuses, in real time, ritual music and jazz, voice and tenor sax. African-Caribbean grooves that drive this music beyond spirituality achieve a synergy where modern jazz and vodou are one.

  

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TriniJazz Project Various Artists

Michael “Ming “ Low Chew Tung is the architect of 21st century jazz recording and performance in Trinidad and Tobago, following on from mentors like Clive Zanda and Mike Boothman, prolifically producing original music to add to the local canon. Now, he acts as mentor and producer for a new generation of young jazz musicians and singers with a new CD, TriniJazz Project. Polished arrangements and smooth jazz elements shouldn’t suggest any sell-out to the aesthetics of Caribbean luxe tourism or middlebrow leisure culture, but in the hands of the players, Tony Paul (sax), Rodney Alexander (bass), Modupe Onilu (percussion), Dean Williams (guitar) and smoky voiced chanteuse Vaughnette Bigford these ten tunes are a celebration of how we sing, dance and live in these islands. The reframed calypsoes of Bigford, the rhythmic pulse of Onilu, and the improvised joy by the others say “trinijazz” is the definition of accomplished.

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1. More Caribbean Playlist reviews appear in the July/August 2014 issue of Caribbean Beat magazine.

High Notes and a Bright Future: 2012, a Year in TT Jazz¹

In the dwindling days of 2012 when there was a hubbub over the creative industries and the planned state enterprise model for its growth, we had the pending fall-out over the government's counter-strategy of using its favoured soca son to drive the local music industry. These conflicting regimes by separate ministries to make our music global ignored the fact that the industry of music happily went along, dynamic and fluid, all the time improvising to the changes in the nature of attribution (copyright), distribution and now global exploitation. Improvisation is a key element of jazz, and here in TT, that niche of the local music landscape reflects some of the bigger issues that plague and guide that industry.

The demise of the only local terrestrial station dedicated to jazz, WMJX 100.5 FM and its subsequent conversion to an online format a couple years ago would have put the nail in the coffin of a less cherished musical heritage. Jazz and certainly its Caribbean variant, however, continue finding its centre via concerts and a few new CD releases by those dedicated artistes challenging the music genres outside of soca, calypso and parang.

Young lions of TT Jazz

For the first three weekdays in August, young lions in the sphere of jazz music in Trinidad preened and pointed the way for musicians of other genres and generations to duplicate. On Monday, Aug 3, Etienne Charles launched his new CD Folklore at a listening party at the jazz-themed restaurant, Satchmo's in Woodbrook. In anticipation of a short live set, the crowd grew larger than the dining room that hosted it as the night moved on. Etienne, and fellow young lion, saxophonist, Tony Woodroffe, Jr., recently back from studies at Leeds University, played their instruments with a maturity belying their ages.

Etienne's music represents the genesis of a transformational moment that comes in generations. Back in 1956, Sparrow and his Jean and Dinah marked that kind of generational shift that propelled calypso forward through the shortened zenith of the Belafonte's Calypso age a year hence. Trinidad and the diaspora are richer for Charles' and Woodroffe's sojourn into the musical spaces that exist for local musicians who are brave enough to go into them without fear of the rhetoric of failure. Folklore is an impressive achievement, and solidifies in my mind that Etienne is at a place musically where most local musicians have not even seen much less entered. Things can only get better with more interaction with this artist of both profound intellect and subtle style who uses the canon of local rhythm and melodies to create the new.