Etienne Charles: The Road March in Concert – a review²

An edited version of this article appeared in the T&T Newsday as, “Etienne Charles celebrates road march history in concert"

Etienne Charles’s engagement with the Carnival and its music is ongoing — his albums Kaiso (2011) and Carnival: The Sound of a People, Vol. 1 (2017) and the subsequent live performances here, the evolution of Carnival music on the road with his music/masquerade band Riddim, Brass & Mas, his recording kaiso/soca collaborations with Kes, Terri Lyons, David Rudder — and on Thursday, February 1 at Queen’s Hall in Port of Spain, he delved deeper into the magic of this music that moves a society and defines celebration. The Road March in Concert was a review of those songs that are the most popular song on the road, at Carnival competition spaces, in fetes.

The concert began as a historical showcase of the chants, lavways and leggos of Emancipated folk, and almost sequentially moved towards a veneration of popular calypsos and soca tunes, highlighting the personalities who made these Carnival music hits. It was a timeline; what began as a contemplation of music history, ended in celebration and the cheeky marketing of Charles’s 2024 Carnival band, Magnificent. And that was a good thing as it targeted the two aspects of an audience in search of Carnival entertainment outside the sweaty jam of modern fetes. That juxtaposition of contemplation and celebration is at the heart of Carnival and was the ultimate ethos of the event. 

Meet the Artists Live Concert Series: Tony Paul celebrates Lord Kitchener and Ralph MacDonald

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After the 2 year shutdown and restriction of the live music industry, Production One Ltd (POL) is returning to live music and jazz concert production. As the company prepares for the relaunch of its signature event, Jazz Artists on the Greens ™ in 2023, it introduces The Meet the Artists Live Concert Series. First up is Trinidadian saxophone jazz lion Tony Paul (Anthony Woodroffe, Jr.), in concert on Saturday, May 7, 2022 from 6:00 PM at the Queens Hall, St. Ann’s.

This popular, in-demand saxophonist and senior instructor of music at UTT-APA will perform two themed sets honouring and celebrating the music and legacies of two of Trinidad and Tobago’s greatest composers, Lord Kitchener and Ralph MacDonald. KITCH, A Centenary Celebration, is a recognition of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Grandmaster in 1922, and in this set, Tony Paul relives those tunes that made us jump and prance, and had steelbands singing; "Pan in Harmony", "Sugar Bum Bum", "Pan in A Minor", "Margie", and more. He notes that, “the difficult thing, sometimes, is to take something that people know so well and re-envision it in a way that people are not going to be like, ‘why did he do that?’ There’s really a lot to work with where Kitchener’s melodies and even the progressions. I’m really looking forward to it.” He adds, “connecting the traditional with the contemporary is one of the ideas I am playing with. In terms of the team, it’s a lot of really really excellent young musicians. So, it means that, as much as these are classic songs, we are able to use some of our youth — I’m probably like the oldest one in the ensemble — to connect it with a modern spin. I’m really excited about the arrangements, I’m really excited about working with these guys and girls.”

Jazz in Trinidad and Tobago: An Improvised existence in the Islands

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I was recently asked to present a paper at a panel on "History, Difference, and Resistance in Post-Colonial Musics" at the 40th Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association in New Orleans, LA, May 25-29, 2015.

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Abstract

The native music of Trinidad and Tobago was first recorded on disc in 1912, some five years before jazz music was recorded. Over the next century, the fusion of ideas and the invasion of influences have morphed that local music into various genres like soca, but those musicians who steadfastly maintained that improvised music was the domain of the Americas have created a new sub-genre of calypso jazz that thrives tenuously in the economic space on the island and within the diaspora. This time line of the development and dispersion of the music catalogs its growth, its commercial appeal beyond the border and its true significance within the economic and cultural space of the Caribbean. 

Keywords: calypso, kaiso, jazz, Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, jazz fusion, steelpan, calypso jazz, kaisojazz

Jazz in Trinidad and Tobago: An Improvised Existence in the Islands by Nigel A. Campbell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://www.academia.edu/12835158/Jazz_in_Trinidad_and_Tobago_An_Improvised_existence_in_the_Islands.

De Riddim of Tings! A 2012 Overview

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
"Infinite Stupidity: A Talk With Mark Pagel." Retrieved 15 December, 2011.

To say that riddim is king in soca 2012 would be partly true. All the breakout hits in the first week of parties and significantly on the radio have been riddim-based. But history has shown that the big winners of Carnival 2011 and before have been those unique soca compositions not shared with other artistes: Wotless (Kes The Band) and Advantage (Machel Montano), to name a couple. That's not to say that Benjai, hot off his "Give Away" riddim driven Ah Trini did not have an extended bumper 2011 with Wine to the Side on the "Honeycomb" riddim shared with Machel Montano and Lil Bitts. Riddim is it, and if you look sharp, a handful of riddims could dominate a TT Carnival season.