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.
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.
For those who are counting, Vaughnette Bigford sang 21 songs at her sold-out Live in Concert event at the Central Bank auditorium in Port of Spain on Saturday 9 November 2019, and in those 21 songs, the world outside of Trinidad and Tobago opened up to us.
That world of music that has become a staple of Vaughnette's concerts is alive and accessible. We, as audience members and patrons who are open to the possibilities of future engagements with The Creole Chanteuse, have an opportunity, and dare I say, an obligation to engage with the higher sensibilities of our nature as we recognize excellence.
21 songs took us on a journey that we have made before. The jazz, local and World Music songbooks of decades were again laid open for us to enter with an assurance that we would come out on the other side enlightened. That journey in 2019 held the surprise of discovering the new beyond the vapid leitmotif of the familiar “pop songs done jazzily.” 21 songs of enhanced harmonic promise were laid bare. Ennui was eschewed, elation ensued.
Caribbean jazz, like its North American precursor, has been a collaborative effort: a musical conversation, despite singular stars in the pantheon. Ijó, out of Trinidad, seek to fulfil the role of eminent conversationalists within the context of the myriad musical influences that bathe their island nation. This new band on the Caribbean jazz scene is made up of top individual session musicians, a kind of supergroup that does not disappoint on their first effort. Orisha drumming is captured on “Black Rose”, alongside a hint of the transplanted Indian presence in “Nari” and world fusion gone mad on the track “Ijó” — just some of the soundscapes one may traverse on this album. Long in gestation, Grafted takes its time to grow on the listener. So powerful are the individual voices that the “accents” are sometimes hard to decipher within the elegance of the melodies and harmonies.
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.
Elan Trotman, Boston-based contemporary jazz saxophonist from Barbados discusses the business of jazz with Jazz in the Islands. In 2019, he released his new album Dear Marvin, a saxophone tribute to the late great Marvin Gaye on the Woodward Avenue label. We get the Caribbean-American perspective from this Berklee College of Music alumnus about the significance and possible advantage of label distribution in enhancing the brand via radio and physical sales. This year also marks the sixth anniversary of his Barbados Jazz Excursion, a major destination festival in the islands where contemporary jazz meets the sun, sand and sea.
When wanderlust coincides with discovery, great things can happen. When it is your job to travel to perform, it should be your duty to discover all that you are in the context of new vistas. Saxophone sideman to the stars Godwin Louis has travelled to over one hundred countries, and focused his discovery on the history of African and diaspora music across the world. His aptly titled debut album Global, a two-CD package, features “compositions that emerged out of research that he performed in Africa and Latin America on the music exported out of Africa, to the rest of the world via the transatlantic slave trade.” Audacious in scope, adept in execution, this Haitian-American has compiled a record featuring jazz syncopation that juxtaposes with African rhythm and Latin American voices and Antillean grooves, making this a testament to the idea of connectedness in modern music. By joining all the musical dots, Louis spiritually finds his way home.
MDR Jonathan Michel
(Imani Records)
Haitian-American bassist Jonathan Michel calls his debut album MDR “an entry into the world of music as me. I think it’s a great representation.” And with that declaration, Michel, along with drummer Jeremy Dutton and vibraphonist Joel Ross, plays trio-based jazz that becomes an extension of the live gig scene this musician has been a part of for much of his career. The album touches on a range of genres that identify with the Caribbean-born in the diaspora. Jazz, spirituals, Haitian folk songs, R&B are all distilled through that enhanced prism with small-unit playing; bass and drum anchor a space for the vibraphone to resonate. The bass is never far away, and we hear why Michel is the leader on this album, with the old Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water” taking a frenetic spin in tandem with the improvisations of the vibraphone. Fellow Haitian child-of-the-diaspora Melanie Charles adds her soul-inspired voice on the bookend tracks.
Cimarrón Josean Jacobo & Tumbao
(E7 Studios)
Pianist Josean Jacobo has been heralded as the “Ambassador of Afro-Dominican Jazz,” and with that understanding, the listener must negotiate a minefield of ideas and ideologies on “Dominicanness” and the image of the island as a tourist playground. On Cimarrón, Jacobo, along with the band Tumbao — a unique combo of two saxes, drums, and percussion — present a solid interface of music born in the American melting pot of New Orleans and traditional folkloric rhythms from African-descended natives of Hispaniola. His piano soars and floats on the ten songs here, while the polyrhythms of the hand drums and other percussion give credence to a history of solid representation of the music of African souls who have mingled and transformed Spanish-derived sounds to create what we today know as salve, congos, bachata, and more. The language of jazz has broadened in this context, and this album is a distinctive beginning for new listeners.
