Creole Christmas 2.0: Venezuelan Roots – a review

In a season of annual Christmas pageants and choral events that get local audiences excited, Etienne Charles’s return to the stage for the 2.0 version of his Creole Christmas celebration, subtitled Venezuelan Roots, on Thursday, 5 December was a needed fillip for the entertainment options here in Trinidad and Tobago that seem to veer away from the contemplation of local art towards the experience of a festive adventure. However, in this case, the two are not mutually exclusive, but integral to showcasing Charles’s Caribbean perspective on the important music of and inspired by the Christmas celebrations. 

Quite literally, this concert presents the idea that people in Trinidad and Tobago are part of the wider Americas, and specifically, in the Caribbean, they engage with music and the season not via the depictions on a Hallmark postcard or the co-opted Coca-Cola image of Santa Claus, but by the rhythms of musical collaborations from their past, by the celebration of old friends meeting and singing the songs and dancing to the drum beat that pulses in their veins informed by the African-Caribbean heartbeat.

Creole Christmas 2.0: Venezuelan Roots – a further localising of Christmas

Etienne Charles is a musician who believes in and lives by a tradition that is grounded within his creole soul. The blood that runs through his veins carries the DNA of a Caribbean life infused by Spanish, French and African ancestries all within a modern music industry milieu that recognises art, folk and popular music with equal commercial importance.

On Thursday, December 5, Charles will again engage with a local concert audience, this time at the 1,200-seat Lord Kitchener Auditorium at the National Academy for the Performing Arts in Port of Spain for his Creole Christmas 2.0 ~ Venezuelan Roots. His goal is to revisit the original idea of finding the Caribbean perspective to the annual Christmas celebrations and its music, but with the twist of wider collaboration with musicians steeped in the language of improvisation and the knowledge of traditional music from this region. 

Ah Comin’ Home!

Creole Christmas returns the native gaze to local audiences.

Derek Walcott in his Nobel lecture back in 1992 posited a view of how tourists see the Caribbean:

“Winter adds depth and darkness to life and literature and in the unending summer of the tropics not even poverty or poetry seems capable of being profound because the nature around it is so exultant, so resolutely ecstatic, like its music. A culture based on joy is bound to be shallow.” 

The tourist gaze has been described by some as the dominant way of observing or making sense of the world. Etienne Charles clearly is not going in that direction.

In his movements around the world, Charles has been a leader in situating the “native gaze” to his music by channelling the “new colours, new textures, and new motifs” of his creole soul, his Caribbean spirit into a collaboration with and celebration of the New World music called jazz. Tonight, we celebrate the reflection and return of the native gaze to local audiences in need of an antidote to artificial snow.

Charles has journeyed back home with his band of Yankees (no pejorative meaning implied) to do that necessary collaboration with island favourites, collaborations of culture, language, ethos that spark an improvisation of mood, spirit and music.