Etienne Charles & Folklore: Jazz…with a West Indian Accent

© 2010, Maria Nunes

“...Etienne Charles exhibits both an authentic preservation of the music of his native culture of Trinidad as a composer and bandleader, while broadening our scope of understanding through the collaborative sound of American jazz as it meets new colors, new textures, and new motifs across the world. It will certainly bring more of our public into the jazz audience”
–Marcus Roberts, world-renowned jazz pianist and recording artist.

On a large stage in front of large crowd by a sandy beach, Etienne Charles delivered the first part of his prodigal return to Trinidad and Tobago. A hot night for hot jazz. The listener's mind is relaxed in the Tobago air, but alert enough to discern excellence at the "Experience." The posture says, "I come back home", the sound says, "I reachin'."

The attitude is there: the stingy brim fedora on his head, like the porkpie hat of Lester Young or the Sinatra fedora in the '50s, acts as a crown, a signpost and symbol of differing superiority, a trademark. He is jazz with a West Indian accent. Meanwhile, there exists a cabal of whiners claiming jazz in Trinidad and Tobago, musicians really, but only complaining. Periodic performances never in juxtaposition with excellence hence the stasis of the third world is their burden. Etienne is on another plane(t?) literally and figuratively.

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.