Island Jazz Chat: Episode 21 – Anthony Pierre

Anthony Pierre represents a pioneering effort of a Caribbean musician to establish a sustained island jazz presence in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. That multi-decade journey has resulted, by the 1990s, in the formation of the Caribbean jazz sextet Kalabash, which focused on "using the steel drum as a lead voice in a jazz ensemble, while experimenting with the layering of rich jazz harmonies over the folk and popular rhythms of the Caribbean, from reggae, son and salsa in the north, to calypso, soca, rapso and zouk from the Eastern Caribbean." With two albums under the band's belt, the self-titled debut in 2001, and the follow-up, Keep Them Close in 2013, Pierre relates the historical journey to establish a popular contemporary jazz fusion outfit with an island vibe within the metropolitan and increasingly multicultural space that is Canada's largest city. Tue, 26 Mar, 2024.

Music buzz | Reviews (Sep/Oct 2023)ª

The Lone Pilgrim Woods 

(Jamwax)

Trinidadian Wilfred Trevor Woodley — “Woods” to his friends and associates — was a prolific composer, and innovative jazz musician, whose oeuvre was disappointingly never professionally recorded before his death in 2010. His life was one of pioneering creativity, and unfortunate personal tragedy. Beginning with his calypso jazz innovations in the early 1960s UK, he was shunned by media there. And for his audacity to marry a white socialite, he was possibly framed for an uncommitted crime. Aptly titled The Lone Pilgrim, this new three-song EP begins the worthy task of bringing his unique compositions, possibly in the hundreds, to the world. These songs retain the magic of surprise that is a hallmark of jazz, and centres the impetus around an Afro-Caribbean base of rhythm and instrumentation; Jason Baptiste plays steelpan here. This is a heritage keepsake and the start to a promised tribute collection by this international band of devoted musicians.

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Live Mario Canonge Trio

(Aztec Music)

This live album by Martiniquan master pianist Mario Canonge and his fellow high-accolade Antillean musicians — Michel Alibo on bass and Arnaud Dolmen on drums — is a record of possibilities to make the Creole universal. Canonge is a singular icon in jazz circles here in the Caribbean and in France (where he is now based), who has the ability to incorporate the French Antillean rhythms and melodies into a jazz setting that is admirably effective in bringing the region’s music onto a global stage. This new album, his 17th, brings these talented, individual musicians into a collaboration that emphasises their ability to subtly make zouk, gwo ka, bélé, and other French-Caribbean grooves and genres a base for improvisation. Tackling some of his previous compositions alongside new ones in this trio format demands individual talent to shine, yet makes space for sublime musical conversation. One hour’s worth of Caribbean elegance.

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Kula Wroko Kibri Fra Fra Sound

(Pramisi Records)

Fra Fra Sound is an instrumental jazz big band — born in Suriname more than 40 years ago and now resident in the Netherlands — which utilises the native genre kaseko (a complex fusion of styles derived from Africa, Europe, and the Americas) to make its music a tangible tribute to the ethos of Caribbean celebration. The marketing blurb tells us that the album’s title “stands for the process of navigating, creating, documenting and continuation.” Effectively, this new album touches on the musical range of the band over its history, and signifies that the music is still evolving, and still moving people here and there to dance. Songs sung in Surinamese Creole (Sranan Tongo) invite new listeners to discover the richness of Caribbean culture and language. At a deeper level, this album’s music, we are told, is a contemplation of 150 years since the abolition of slavery in Suriname and the Netherland Antilles and, inspiringly, a reflection of another Caribbean.

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1. These reviews appear in the September/October 2023 issue of Caribbean Beat Magazine.

© 2023, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.

Kitch @100: A Caribbean Jazz Perspective

2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of famous calypsonian, Lord Kitchener (Aldywn Roberts). This iconic calypsonian added expanded harmony to the language of calypso — along with double entendre lyrics — with his compositions becoming favourites among calypso jazz musicians. Listen to a Deezer playlist of some musicians who have engaged with the Grandmaster's music. Kaiso, kaiso!

Insomnia by Adan Hagley, an album review¹

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V.S. Naipaul implied that we are a country of mimic men, but our geographic location in the world, our social history makes the pull of myriad sonic and rhythmic influences inevitable. Adan Hagley on his debut album project, Insomnia, has made those connections from his wide listening palette. He cites Michel Camillo and Snarky Puppy, but one hears Ray Holman’s melodic template, Élan Parlē’s early harmonic experiments and the late Raf Robertson’s bold fusion ideas as sonic references that have all contributed to an impressive recording career launch in this music space. The local is not eschewed for the foreign as a model for jazz fusion access and success, and this is a good thing in our context as a region adding to the burgeoning jazz canon.

Adan Hagley returned to Trinidad in 2013 with an undergraduate degree from the important Berklee College of Music, and it shows in his use of an elevated music language and vocabulary that is necessary for serious jazz conversations among soloists and the harmonic ideas that generate that musical interplay.

Island Jazz Chat: Episode 3 - Clive Zanda

The father of modern kaisojazz, Trinidadian pianist Clive Zanda recounts a career spanning from his days in England in the 1960s innovating with the fusion of calypso in the language of jazz, to his return to Trinidad and his collaboration with Scofield Pilgrim, Bajan-born kaisojazz theorist and pedagogue and beyond. The explorations of this new fusion exercise was given "proof of concept" in 1976 with the landmark album, clive zanda is here! "With dat kinda ting": Calypsojazz Innovations. His continuing efforts to create a philosophy for our understanding of jazz and kaiso music in the Caribbean are told with his development of a new book on the music and how to apply music theory to make kaisojazz music more than a niche music but a legacy.

• Programme Date: 25 January 2019
• Programme Length: 01:08:36

Caribbean Beat Caribbean Playlist – July/August 2017ª

Shades of Life Marvin Dolly
(Self Released)

New York–based Trinidadian guitarist Marvin Dolly surprises on this debut album, Shades of Life, with a quiet contemplation of trio-playing featuring just guitar, bass, and trumpet. In an intimate setting devoid of the thump of the drum, the soloists each have room to speak clearly and emotively in this conversation among acoustic instruments. Dolly, along with J.S. Williams on trumpet and John Gray on double bass, mainly, cruises through this set of subdued jazz tunes that harken back to the cool jazz ambience of 1950s West Coast America, contrasting with the bebop bombast of New York of the same era. The music, thankfully, does not wallow in the excess of a similar-sounding ambient lounge or minimalist new-age aesthetic. Dolly’s guitar finds its full voice on the tracks “Calypsonian Dream” and “Short Letters to Mother”, solo and duet guitar pieces, respectively, that make a solid opening gambit for a Caribbean instrumentalist’s voice in the diaspora.

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Sabiduría/Wisdom Eddie Palmieri
(Ropeadope Records)

The Caribbean is a trans-nation of expanded and connected diasporas. Puerto Rican heritage extends beyond its island space to include its famous diaspora citizens. Bronx-born Eddie Palmieri is a legendary Latin jazz pianist, who at the age of eighty may have delivered one of the most sonically and musically endearing albums in his career. Not that he “finally got the formula right,” but with those years of experience as a bandleader, composer, and arranger, and the “wisdom” — sabiduría in Spanish — that comes with that experience, Palmieri can pull together some of the finest talent, young and old, in jazz and salsa/Latin music to successfully and pleasingly blend the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of his Puerto Rican island “home” with the harmonically complex sounds of mainland jazz and bebop. The album also extends the fusion to include bossa nova on “Samba Do Suenho” and Cuban son on “Coast to Coast”.

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1. More Caribbean Playlist reviews appear in the July/August 2017 issue of Caribbean Beat magazine.

© 2017, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.

A Prologue to an Island Opus - Carnival: The Sound of a People at Queen’s Hall¹

In the heat and heart of the Carnival fête season when “we doh business”, Etienne Charles will allow us to imagine what creole intelligence sounds and looks like. On Sunday January 29, he will debut and preview at the Queen's Hall selections of his newest extended piece—a planned 3-CD length oratorio—called Carnival: The Sound of a People that locates the musical response of Afro-Caribbean people within this island space to the circumstances of slavery, colonialism and freedom. Adoption, adaptation and incorporation of the cultural traditions rendered with an ear to the broader musical tradition of the Americas, jazz, has allowed Charles to produce music that recognises local audiences' penchant to move to rhythm, and a global audiences' willingness to discover and be awed by the brilliance of New World African music.

Etienne Charles with 'Slim' and the
Moruga Bois drummers. © Maria Nunes

Errol Hill, in his book The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre, wrote that “Carnival is inconceivable without music.” Music is indeed a central pillar of the Trinidad Carnival. Charles, with the award of a 2015 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, was allowed to research and explore the music of the Carnivalesque processions, the canboulay and j'ouvert, the drum dances, the sacred and secular music with the call-and-response led by the chantwell, and other African cultural survivals in the Caribbean from pre-Emancipation to present. He embedded himself in the communities that retain the traditions of the blue devil, the jab jab, the black Indian, and in the gayelle of the stickfighter to capture the rhythm and song of the kalenda and the caliso.

HomeGrown, an album by Dominant Seventh CalypsoJazz Band - a review¹

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In 2016, the idea of a calypso jazz band recording reminiscent of those pre-combo dance band records of the late 1950s to the early 1960s comes as a shock to the tendencies of modern local musicians to follow the faddishness of this new generation of music consumers. Trumpeter Rellon Brown along with his young Dominant Seventh CalypsoJazz Band, on their new CD HomeGrown, peel back the pomp and gloss of current tropes to resurrect the idea of creole dance band music. The music, recorded live in the studio, serves as a kind of instigator for moving hips and feet, and as a beacon of native pride in what worked and what did not.

Recently launched at a concert at the Little Carib Theatre, the album's fare runs the gamut of progressive post bop on Trackers to cloying songcraft on a cover of the Ralph MacDonald-written classic Just the Two of Us. The broad mix gives the impression that this debut its trying to be all things to all men. It certainly fulfils the ambition of showcasing local song writing and indigenous musicianship; Ralph MacDonald was the son of early Trinidadian calypsonian Macbeth the Great and identified with his heritage.

That Happened last night: Vaughnette Bigford at Kaiso Blues

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It happened last night. I have known Vaughnette Bigford for a while now as a superb singer in the style of those smoky voiced songstresses from a bygone jazz era reborn in the 21st century. Abbey Lincoln “reborn” as Cassandra Wilson. Nina Simone, however, is the template I see when I see Vaughnette. Another is Miriam Makeba. Them two born she! VOH'net! Our Vaughnette is the modern creole chanteuse, the New World African queen. Not a diva, but the real thing imbuing a Trinidadian ethos missing from many young interlopers singing jazz here. Vaughnette has been a star for many years. A star who has her own in-demand splendid concerts in the south, Shades of Vaughnette. I have written about her three Shades concerts over the years. (I, II, III) I had hosted her at Jazz Artists on the Greens in 2009 before she made her live debut as a SONGBIRD in that series later that year at Aura Restaurant (now Town on Cipriani Blvd.). I recognise her worth. I know that when Vaughnette sings, an audience expectation of a fulfilling experience will be met and exceeded. I know that she will deliver at a level of professionalism that supersedes even stars in other genres. 

A riff on Raf! (Expanded)

Raf Robertson, 1952 - 2015. Photo by Maria Nunes. All Rights Reserved.

It all started with the theme song for a radio programme on 610 Radio in the late 1990s. A mid-day current affairs talk show with a female hostess and call-in section. I can't remember the name, but it always piqued my interest, not solely because of the topics, but because of that damn theme song. It sounded local, but it sounded "foreign." Just an instrumental snippet about 30 seconds long that celebrated, what I later came to find out was the genius of Kitchener. The song snippet was from "Branches," the title track of Raf's second album recorded in Toronto by Eddie Bullen. That sound. That was a modern sound that signalled that we were on the right track to globalising our music; a catch-phrase still in use by government state enterprises looking to diversify the economy, which really means "to sound foreign enough to satisfy non-native ears," I am told. That album came out in 1994. Recorded with ex-pat Caribbean folks. We have come full circle.

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.

"Jazz" is the new after-Carnival music option in Trinidad and Tobago

Jazz options in T&T

Trinidad and Tobago's music operates within a seasonal cycle that would intrigue music lovers or music business observers outside these islands. Christmas has it's music, obviously, as does Carnival, and those limits must not be breached out of tradition, or plainly, because the public's appetite is prescribed by habits not easily broken, despite some soca creep. The recent Carnival gives way to what is a wasteland for all other musics in this island to battle for the appreciation of the consumer and the fancy of the music programmer. Jazz, or more specifically jazz in the Caribbean, including pan jazz, seems to have the commercial and aesthetic appeal of a wide cross-section of the community.

I Am Élan Parlē: A declaration of Independence

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Liner notes for élan parlē’s 2013 CD, I Am Élan Parlē

In 2000, I was living in the US capital, Washington DC, some five hours driving south on the I-95 from the mecca of Caribbean –American cultural existence, New York, and five hours flying north from Trinidad; remote, yet within reach. Howard University, Georgia Avenue, the T&T Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue: district landmarks of connectedness for a homesick soul. Caribbean musical heritage peppers the shelves of the Library of Congress, at the Smithsonian Institution, in the many book stores and those ubiquitous mementos from that age, the record & CD store. The sounds of Trinidad, the echoes of having fun were silently present in this international city.