On the Shelf
Steeling beauty
Renegades: The History of the Renegades Steel Orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago
Kim Johnson; Helene Bellour & Milla Riggio (eds.); with photography by Jeffery Chock (Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-73311-8)
Music is a language I do not speak. I can think of few things that are as difficult to write about. Everything that music is seems so far beyond words, an advanced lexicon that shows up the clumsiness and inadequacy of speech.
Every year at the Panorama competition I try to insinuate myself into the middle of the Renegades steel orchestra while they’re rehearsing, just before taking the Savannah stage. Inside that cave of sound, filled with gleaming steel and adrenaline, the music sweeps and swells magnificently before crashing over you like an enormous wave: engulfing, devastating and perfectly controlled. Jit Samaroo, the band’s arranger for a quarter of a century, deals in the grand and the intense. In his arrangements you can lose all idea of where one sense ends and another begins — you feel the sound in your skin.
This book doesn’t tell you that.
It tells the story of the people who make the music, and how and why. Renegades, nine-time winners of Panorama, Trinidad’s most prestigious steelband competition, has existed in one incarnation or another since the 1940s. Theirs is a tale of underworld glamour: poverty, jammettes, bad-johns and concussions. Underdogs of an outcast world, they fought their way — often literally — into brilliance and recognition.
The beauty here is as much in the telling as in the story. Anecdotes are plentiful, picturesque and often hilarious. The narrative voice is distinctly Trinidadian, distinctly loving. As if talking about a cantankerous old relative or troublesome child you can’t but adore, Kim Johnson makes even the most thug-like behaviour seem somehow endearing. The photographs (once envisaged by the editors as the point of the book) have suffered a bit in the reproduction, but they tell their stories still, and these areas real and as unapologetic as the text.
Any faithful history should give you a glimpse of what is past. A well-crafted one can make you long for that past. Renegades gives you both the invitation and the directions to that long-ago place. At the end of the story, even if you can’t quite imagine the sound, you’ll know the depth and fire and complexity of the people who make it, enough to fathom what it must feel like.
On the Web
Exiles find a home online
The Internet is, in theory, the ultimate neutral territory, the equal possession of its millions of users, a virtual no-man’s-land which is thus everyman’s-land, belonging to all of us because it belongs to none of us. So it’s appropriate that multimedia artist Roshini Kempadoo has decided to use the World Wide Web to house her Virtual Exiles project, an attempt to document the experience of migration, with its attendant “histories, identities and journeys”, through a growing collection of images, recordings and texts, some drawn from museums, many of them contributed by the website’s audience.
Kempadoo’s own experience of “exile” — she was born in Guyana, bred in the United Kingdom — was the inspiration for the project, which has been evolving for more than two years now. She started with documents of Guyanese migration to Europe and North America, but there’s a bracing openness to her enterprise; no one knows where it will end, least of all Kempadoo herself.
The “exhibit” itself is strange, elusive, often disorienting. Images flicker out of images as the cursor sweeps the screen. An old photo of Georgetown gives way to a colourful map labeled in German, which in turn yields up video footage of two small children singing. A rusty clock-face marks the entrance to a meditation on the cruelties of slavery. Two Amerindian boys guard an epigraph by George Lamming. As artifact follows artifact and fragment is shored up against fragment, a sense of collective memory emerges, struggling for coherence in an inconstant world. www.mediascot.org/exiles/ve/index.html
Nicholas Laughlin
On the Disc
À la recherche de Malavoi
Légende: Best of Malavoi
Malavoi (Déclic Communication, 8412482)
De Plein Sud à Salambô
Chris Combette (Rituals CO9502)
I spent most of the second half of 1988 in Martinique, a period which changed the direction of my life in so many ways. The soundtrack to that time will always be the music of Malavoi. It occurs to me now that I’ve never actually seen Malavoi perform in Martinique, but somehow the graceful lyricism of their music has seeped into my consciousness and attached itself to my memories of their homeland in the way that music sometimes does. Unlike zouk superstars Kassav’ (from Guadeloupe) — the other group which has exercised a disproportionate influence on French Caribbean music over the last 30 years — Malavoi, with its lush, rather genteel violin-based sound, its biguines and mazurkas and latinised creole jazz, never quite achieved star status outside French territory. Interestingly, as well, the group’s members never went fully professional — though you’d never know that from the air-tight violin lines and the polished sound which became the band’s trademark.
More than 60 musicians passed through the Malavoi ranks over the years, including some who would go on to solo careers, like Dédé Saint-Prix. Along the way, they also found time to write the music for Euzhan Palcy’s film Rue Cases Nègres. After the death of leader and pianist Paulo Rosine, with his tobacco-cured baritone (if a Gauloise cigarette could speak, it would have Rosine’s voice), the group produced only a few albums, the last of which would appear to be 1998’s Marronage. Which makes the classic Legende: Best of Malavoi all the more poignant. Produced way back in 1994, it is not strictly a “best of”, but rather a distillation of material from five of Malavoi’s albums, including the landmark La Case a Lucie (which propelled lead singer Ralph Thamar to fame and an eventual solo career), Jou Ouvé, and Matébis, the last album Rosine recorded before his death. A real “best of” would, of course, have included the 11-minute epic Gram é Gram.
And on the subject of music from the French Antilles, I recently got hold of De Plein Sud à Salambô, the newly released CD by Martiniquan guitarist Chris Combette, a collection of previously released material repackaged for the Anglophone Caribbean (though the meagre liner notes are in French). I’d been hearing Combette’s name around the Rituals camp for some time, and he has appeared on a couple of albums by other Ritualites, but this is the first time I’m hearing him solo. Combette’s music is hard to describe concisely, but there’s Haitian compas, zouk, folk, jazz, bossa nova, soca and reggae in the mix. This is one of the best things I’ve heard out of the French Caribbean since Haitian singer Emeline Michel’s Cordes et Ame. If I were living in Martinique again today, De Plein Sud à Salambô could possibly be my soundtrack.
Georgia Popplewell
On the Web
West Coast Caribbean vibes
Everyone knows there are thriving Caribbean communities in London, New York, Toronto, Miami — but the San Francisco Bay Area? Apparently there’s a notable concentration of Caribbean expatriates in Oakland; on a recent visit to San Fran I was intrigued to discover a Jamaican restaurant just off Divisadero, a block west of Alamo Square. And Berkeley is home to JahWorks, an online magazine about “Caribbean-based music and culture”, produced by two ex-staffers of the Bay Area’s Reggae Review. There’s a lively selection of CD, concert and book reviews, in-depth interviews with performers like Sean Paul, Monty Alexander and Red Rat, and a surprisingly long list of upcoming reggae, dancehall and soca events in and around San Francisco. (But it isn’t just all fun-in-the-islands; JahWorks also tackles problematic issues like music piracy, the Caribbean’s growing crime rate, and the violent “fire burn” dancehall trend.) What this website makes most clear, though, is the vitality of Caribbean culture, felt even far beyond our shores www.jahworks.org
Nicholas Laughlin
On the Shelf
Remodelling modernism
Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982
Lowery Stokes Sims (University of Texas Press, ISBN 0-292-7750-7)
Arguably the Caribbean’s most influential 20th-century artist, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam was an anomaly in the modernist canon. His uncanny, unmistakable style crossed Cubist austerity with lush Surrealism and the Afro-Caribbean motifs of Sagua le Grande, the small town near Cuba’s north coast where he grew up. “You and I have common blood,” Picasso is supposed to have told him on his arrival in Paris in 1938, recognising the similarity of their efforts to infuse modern art with the bold forms and imagery of non-European cultures. But in doing so, Lam, unlike Picasso, was actually exploring his own native heritage; he was, as Lowery Stokes Sims puts it, “the ‘primitive’ within ‘primitivism’ ”.
Not exactly a coffee-table book — it’s amply illustrated, but mostly in black and white — Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde is a careful, comprehensive study of Lam’s achievements in the context of the international art world, in which he was a much-honoured but much-misunderstood figure. With particular emphasis on his later career, Stokes Sims (director of the prestigious Studio Museum in Harlem) shows how romanticised labels like “master of the fantastic” and “shaman” distracted critics from the true significance of Lam’s work. Quietly yet persuasively, she repositions him from “the margins of modernism” to his own entirely unique centre.
Nicholas Laughlin
On the Disc
Rhythm Roundup
Good News!
The Marionettes Chorale (Sanch, CD 0204)
Lest anyone make the mistake of thinking the Marionettes repertoire includes only Christmas music (and with the Trinidadian choir’s 40th anniversary coming up in 2004, only somebody who really hasn’t been paying attention would do so — though it must be said that their annual Christmas concert is one of the most anticipated events of the season), here’s a fine album to remind us of their outstanding range and quality. Good News! is a well-chosen collection of spirituals, all of them recorded live between 1987 and 2001, plus one national anthem — the only one willingly sung by non-nationals of its home country — South Africa’s achingly beautiful freedom hymn N’kosi Sikele’i Africa. In an era when feel-good music is often based on dubious foundations, Good News! uplifts and moves via both the message of the music and the sheer quality and loveliness of the voices which comprise this award-winning choir.
Georgia Popplewell
Blaksand
Perpendicula (Sky Studios Ltd)
Amalgamating soca, reggae, African music, R&B, and pop, Vincentian band Blaksand’s ninth release is chock-full of swinging originals like Bad Minded, a thoroughly pleasing song with a serious statement, co-written by Grantley Dabreo and Raeon Primus. Gone with the Wind is an excellent road tune, again penned by Raeon. Female vocalist Shaunelle McKenzie does justice to a composition by krosfyah’s Tony Bailey called Hot and Crazy, with its striations of French Caribbean rhythms and pop. Of the 11 numbers, perhaps the two strongest are The Swing and Living, both written by Bailey and showcasing the band’s powerful vocal skills over a sonorous soca rhythm. Living asks a more serious question — “where is peace and love?” — while The Swing is about pure enjoyment. Overall, this CD is rhythmic, melodic, well-arranged, strong in voice and instrumentation. Blaksand shows tremendous promise.
Roxan Kinas
10 Sisters
(fishink)
Trinidad’s alternative music scene could hardly get more alternative than this collection of “slamming poetry and rhythms”. A recording that grew out of, and was financed by, the live show of the same name that toured the country last year, 10 Sisters is eclectic and somewhat uneven. Two or three of the album’s 19 tracks just should not have been included; but even the weaker cuts underscore how good the rest of the songs and poems are. On the singing side, Karissa Lewes, Avion Blackman and Gillian Moor stand out (even if Blackman’s grammatical slipups detract from an otherwise excellent song). The poets include the project’s founding partners, Paula Obé Thomas and Anessa Baksh. They’re mostly very good, apart from a couple who resort to the shallowest of images and try to make it up with cliché. Fleshly delights are one of the major themes; you should definitely listen to “Starch Mango”, Carol Hosein’s ode to oral sex, in private.
B.C. Pires
Trinidad’s steady rockers
Exile, Baby
jointpop (Kisskidee KRJP0052002)
Of Birds and Bees
Orange Sky (Road Block Records TOS39500)
The big debate about jointpop and Orange Sky, Trinidad’s leading rock bands, is which of them should be cast as the Beatles to the other’s Rolling Stones. Some declare jointpop the superior songwriters and, hence, the Trini Beatles; others call Sky the better band as a whole, which would make them the Trini Stones (much to the chagrin of jointpop lead singer Gary Hector, who combined the names of the Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger and their musical driving force, guitarist Keith Richards, for his own songwriting pseudonym, Mick Richardson).
Certainly the two bands are as important to Trinidad’s nascent original rock music scene as their English forerunners were to England’s. Sky and jointpop constitute the cream of a strange crop: a small rock scene, but one so hardcore that, at rock music festivals, even in the scorching heat of the midday Trinidadian sun, you will see a line of longhaired headbangers dressed in all black, including floor-length leather overcoats.
The lead singers of both Sky and jointpop have voices as distinctive and as instantly recognisable as Neil Young’s trembling falsetto or Bob Dylan’s drawl. Indeed, Sky’s lead singer and principal songwriter Nigel Rojas may have the most unique voice in pop music today. And, in the opinion of this first-generation, Satisfaction 45-buying, diehard Stones aficionado, jointpop’s new album, Exile, Baby, is better than Tattoo You.
The comparisons to the Beatles and the Stones, though flattering to all four bands, are unfair to Trinidad. It took two large cities, Liverpool and London, to give birth to the two most influential British bands of all time; it is nothing short of miraculous that Trinidad, with a population of just over a million, could have produced two bands as good as Sky and jointpop in the same lifetime. The last time a similar feat was managed in the Caribbean was in the 1950s, in a different discipline altogether, when the square mile around the Kensington Oval in Barbados produced Sir Frank Worrell, Sir Everton Weekes and Sir Clyde Walcott, the inimitable Three Ws of West Indies cricket. There are American cities that produce many good bands — Austin, Seattle, San Francisco — but they are all centres of musical migration, whereas Port of Spain should be expected to attract only soca singers.
Which is not to say there isn’t a great deal of soca and calypso in both Orange Sky and jointpop. Like jointpop’s Hector, Sky’s Nigel Rojas was exposed to Black Stalin as much as to Black Sabbath. No matter how their songs blossom, all are rooted in indigenous music. In Orange Sky’s case, reggae has also had a strong influence — on their last album, they included a courtroom skit arguing the case for ganja legalisation.
Of Birds and Bees is Orange Sky’s third album. Exile, Baby (produced by LA’s Jake Smith) is jointpop’s second. It is no exaggeration to say, in terms of musical achievement, that these are the West Indian equivalents of Rubber Soul and Beggar’s Banquet. And they promise, in the future, the sure arrival of the Caribbean counterparts of Sgt Pepper and Exile on Main Street.
B.C. Pires
How to cook like a Trini
The Multi-Cultural Cuisine of Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean
(Naparima Girls’ High School Cookbook, Updated & Revised Edition, ISBN 976-8173-64-5)
You’d think a high school would take pains not to title their cookbook so that it sounded like, well, a high school project. No matter. The second edition of this enormously popular publication will no doubt continue to be called “the Naps Girls’ cookbook”. (I have more than once heard it referred to as “the Bible”, but I doubt that will work its way into the official name any time soon.)
The title isn’t the only place they decided to throw everything into. This marvellous collection takes nothing for granted. Within its new hard, full-colour covers, behold:
• Notes on Temperature (32º F = 0º C — Freezing point),just in case you weren’t sure what happened there, and
• Table of Abbreviations (approx. = approximately), because it would be so easy to confuse it with some other word beginning with “approx”.
But who am I to deny the need for clarity — have I myself not suffered the consequences of failing to appreciate that a “dash” is in fact a precise measurement equal to less than one eighth of a teaspoon?
I have known young men, on setting out to seek their fortunes in alien lands, to feel themselves stoutly armed if in possession of this book. Adolescent girls have been forgiven a host of adolescent sins for their preparation of the faultless two-egg cake here described. This is the ultimate idiot-proof guide to Caribbean cooking.
Want to cook like your ——— (please insert as appropriate: mother, tantie, uncle, Trini-born friend, relative or ancestor of choice) but are reluctant to endure hours of tutelage under that person, who will certainly use the opportunity to point out that you are not fit to make toast? This is the recipe book for you.
The first edition, published in 1987 to commemorate the school’s diamond jubilee, was a humble, homemade type of book. With no pictures and an amateurish layout, it went on to sell in the thousands. Infinitely useable and practical in a way that few recipe books manage, what it lacked in gloss was more than compensated for by its excellent instruction. What makes the Naps cookbook so Trinidadian is its utter embrace of everything, all the peoples and traditions that found themselves here: the brioche and the fried bake, curried goat and quiche, all happily co-exist. This new edition, a sleeker model all round, will undoubtedly keep yet another generation of aspiring Caribbean cooks sated and delighted.
Anu Lakhan
The proof is in the pudding — or the polenta, as the case may be. If you doubt the infallibility of the Naps cookbook, these sample recipes should serve up a healthy helping of faith.
Polenta (a close cousin of that Caribbean favourite, coo-coo)
4 cups cooked pumpkin (steamed)
2 cups cornmeal
2 cups low fat or skimmed milk
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1/4 cup finely chopped pimento or sweet pepper
1 tablespoon margarine, softened
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
Crush pumpkin and add cornmeal, milk, sugar, salt, onion, pimento pepper and margarine. Combine mixture well and spread in a greased casserole dish.
Bake in a preheated oven at 350º F for about 25 to30 minutes, until mixture is cooked and firm. Garnish with parsley.
Serves 12
Shrimp Creole
2 lbs. shrimp
2 tablespoons green seasoning
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped sweet pepper
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 lb. (or 1 14-oz. can) chopped tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon hot pepper
Season shrimp with green seasoning.
Sauté garlic, onion, celery and sweet pepper in margarine until tender, but not brown. Blend in flour and sugar; add tomatoes, salt and pepper; simmer for 15 minutes. Add shrimp and cook on high heat for 5 to 10 minutes, or until shrimp is cooked.
Adjust seasoning and serve with rice.
Serves 8
On the Web
Had to be a Bajan
“One day a Trinidadian, a Jamaican, and a Bajan walked into a rum shop together. They each ordered a Banks beer. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverages, a fly landed in each of their glasses.
“The Trini pushed his beer away from him in disgust. The Jamaican fished the offending fly out of his beer and continued drinking it as if nothing had happened.
“But the Bajan . . .”
If you want to hear the punch line, you’ll have to check out the (often bawdy) Caribbean Jokes website, repository for some of the best known products of the Caribbean sense of humour — as well as, frankly, some of the worst. Think you can do better? Submit your own favourites to the site, and keep the laughter going.
http://www.caribbeannews.com/jokes/jokes.html
On the Shelf
Lost and found
Much of the English-speaking Caribbean’s early literature — especially dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries — has long been forgotten, languishing on the shelves of libraries and archives, unknown even to scholars. In many cases this obscurity is well-deserved; many early works are mediocre, naïvely imitative stuff, unworthy to stand in the canon with Seymour, Walcott, Selvon, Naipaul or Lamming. But some of those little-known early stories, poems and essays do show genuine merit, foreshadowing the great creative explosion that came in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. They are what Kenneth Ramchand calls the Caribbean’s “lost literature”.
Luckily, an unabated interest in Caribbean culture and history, fuelled by universities around the world, is beginning to rescue some of these texts from long neglect. Macmillan Caribbean, for instance, has introduced a new Caribbean Classics series to reissue “rare books” under the general editorship of Barbadian scholar John Gilmore. Written in the 1890s, With Silent Tread, a novel by Frieda Cassin of Antigua (ISBN 0-333-77607-0), is a tale of high-society courtship with a wonderfully Gothic touch. Morea Latrobe is a classically Creole beauty, exotic, frivolous and irresistibly attractive to her staid English suitor. But Morea’s beauty is fatally tainted; as the couple’s marriage approaches, it is revealed that she’s infected with leprosy —this contagion standing in for unease over mixed-race relations in the Victorian era. Next on Macmillan’s list will be Lutchmee and Dilloo (Edward Jenkins, ISBN 0-333-92073-2), a novel of indentured life in British Guiana, and The Cross and the Sword (Manuel de Jesús Galván, ISBN 0-333-92072-4), a historical novel which helped shape the Dominican Republic’s sense of national identity.
The University of the West Indies Press is naturally playing a part in this wave of literary revivals, with a new Caribbean Heritage series, launched with Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, by the Trinidadian historian E.L. Joseph (ed. Lise Winer, ISBN 976-640-109-8). First published in 1838, Warner Arundell is a sprawling, picaresque fictional memoir; its acidly accurate depiction of West Indian society of the period (and the fact that many of its characters were thinly disguised portraits of real individuals) made it a small succès de scandale in its day.
Though C.L.R. James is hardly an obscure author, a surprising amount of the great Trinidadian thinker’s work remains either unpublished or uncollected, a consequence of his lifelong restlessness and rootlessness. But the Jamesian corpus too is slowly being revealed in its proper dimensions. Letters from London (Prospect Press, ISBN 976-95057-4-9), a collection of essays which originally appeared in the Port of Spain Gazette 70 years ago, is the latest addition. Written in the first weeks after James arrived in London in 1932, these essays form a unique record of a crucial period of his life, and offer a glimpse of the imperial capital in the tumultuous decade before the Second World War.
Telling his own kind of truth
Few serious conversations about art in Curaçao today exclude a reference to the work of Tirzo Martha. Like many contemporary Caribbean artists who have come into their own over the last 20 years, Martha takes a conceptual, investigative approach. For many viewers, his work simultaneously confirms, perhaps embodies, but also confronts their ideas of the Caribbean. His most recent mixed-media constructions and installations navigate the post-structural-adjustment arena, where a wide choice of cable channels is as readily available as automatic weapons. His work transports us beyond and behind the smile of the tourist poster or the hotel lobby.
“I’ve been confronted very often with the traditional view that Caribbean art must be colorful, exotic, naïve and primitive,” he says. “People told me that my work wasn’t typical Caribbean art . . . Because of what my work implies, I consider it more typical than the traditional images that people are used to. My work is about the spirit, the soul that lives in the people. It’s about their dreams, hopes, their daily struggle, surviving, anger, disappointments and perseverance.”
In the striking assemblage Silent Witness, an old-fashioned enamel chamber-pot is filled to the brim with empty bullet shells, becoming a highly charged associative image. “The bullets are, most of the time, the only evidence that is left behind at the crime scene,” says Martha. “They’re the only witnesses, but they’re mute! A lot of people will be just like the bullets, in a big silence.”
This work recalls Trinidadian John Stollmeyer’s Caribbean Basin, shown in 1982 in Port of Spain — also an enamel basin resting on the floor, pierced by three holes in the shapes of Grenada, Cuba and Nicaragua, countries that did not fit neatly into the vision of Reaganomics. Stollmeyer was saying, “it can’t hold water.” Martha’s Silent Witness, like his other constructions, is a new installment in this discussion of the symbolic resonance of objects taken from our everyday lives, idiomatic signs in the construction of our visual narratives.
