In my early years in music in North America, I often noticed that with non-Caribbean crowds, the band would start, but people on the dance floor would park there, not moving, until the melody of the song began; they dance to the song. For a West Indian crowd, once the rhythm starts, the dancers let out the clutch and they’re off; they dance to the rhythm.
You may not have identified it, but every band that you’ve ever loved, in any kind of popular music, has that tight disciplined rhythm section working there like a heart beat, and sometimes, in the middle of a live show or a recording, that rhythm section will jump out and suck you into its combined beat, its singular pulse.
It happened in the recent Mashramani Calypso Competition final at Thirst Park. In the course of a song by The Professor, the Mingles combination on stage, with Mike Fung handling audio, came together in that seamless blending of keyboard, bass, guitar and drums into one surge that is the essence of our music.
It is that sound, that sensual weaving of African and Latin rhythms, that first drew me to Caribbean music. I couldn’t have been more than 8 years old. I was hanging around my aunts’ shop at Hague Front, and the shopkeeper put on a calypso recording called “Grenada Excursion”. It hit me like a calabash of cold water in the morning. To this day, it is that rhythm, created originally by black musicians in Trinidad, that I consider the sweetest thing in music. Think about it: ours is the music that started the whole “hands in the air” thing. Other performers are now encouraging audiences to do it, but we were there first, and it came as a perfectly natural response to the joy of that sweet, pulsing, sexy, rhythmic roll of Caribbean music.
And I’ll go further than that: the underlying calypso beat or pulse, with the cymbals sliding in and out, almost teasing you, is in fact the base of most of our popular Eastern Caribbean music right up to the present. Don’t let the music industry people or the announcers on the radio stations bamboozle you. Calypso and soca and chutney are the same creature in different clothing; each of them is basically drawing on that original calypso rhythmic heart. Soca is that basic calypso pulse played at a higher tempo (these days as high as 140 beats per minute), with more sparse melodies, and (here’s the key) a difference in content, i.e., instead of dealing with social issues or situations, the lyrics are specifically focused on the “party time” message. This is not reflection time, folks; this is “move to the left”, and “roll your bumper”. Chutney, too, is speeded up kaiso, flavoured with tabla drums, and often sung with Indian inflections.
Don’t pay too much attention to labels. What we now call soca was actually around in the days when calypso was our pop music of the day. If you believe in labels, then Lord Nelson’s “Garrett Bounce” was soca; so was Calypso Rose’s “Fire Fire”; so was my song “Put Your Hand In The Air”. Kitchener…”Sugar Bum Bum”…that’s soca. Using the labels we have today, the calypsonian Shadow was singing soca before there was soca. And by the way, the position that it has to be slow to be calypso is nonsense; all of those songs above were played at breakneck speed.
The harsh reality is that calypso featuring social commentary has been replaced in popularity by today’s music which is essentially party music. In this speeded up world, we get our social commentary from other agencies (television; radio; internet; magazines); so we want our music speeded up, with simple hook messages, and strong on beat, but the emphasis on the rhythm section remains the essential ingredient in any popular music that prevails.
Take some time and listen to it, and you will see. There are many instances of music, recorded or live, where the material is good, and the renditions are good, and the audio is good, and there are many of those. But there are occasions when the performance or the recording goes to another level, where the music simply soars, and you find yourself almost transported into some higher dimension of joy – those times when you find yourself putting your hand in the air, or simply exulting. In those instances, if you go back and listen, you will see that, good vocal or not, fine solo or not, great brass section or not, it is the rhythm section underneath holding the thing in its embrace and giving it that platform to reach the heights.
It is what I heard in that shop at Hague many years ago.
It is what I heard in my first Trinidad carnival in the Sparrow tent on Wrightson Road, with that backing band featuring sax man Vaso DeFreitas, and that killer rhythm section making even the horn players sway.
It was there again in our calypso competition night with Oliver Basdeo on keyboards, Colin Perreira on drums, Robert Burns on bass, and Xenophon Goliah on guitar, pulsing behind the singers; the Mingles brass players were sitting as they played, but you could see them swaying to it, as well.
Many times in life you make this circle where you come right back to some revelation, some epiphany, that you first discovered early in your life and then there you are again, years later, re-experiencing the revelation like an old friend coming in the door.
On that Thirst Park night, in that crowd, a little bit wet from the rain, I could feel again that mysterious surge of sweetness that comes when a musical combination finds its groove and comes to grab you wherever you are. I turned to the Trini calypsonian Crazy, who was sitting next to me, and said, “Rhythm section.” Crazy, despite his name, is one of the most astute guys in the business. He looked at me and smiled. “That’s the heart, padna.”
Indeed it is. So it will always go.
Finally, I can’t leave without mentioning the superb brass players backing the calypsonians with arrangements by Robert Burns, Earl Parl, and Boss Stephens. I haven’t heard better anywhere. It was so sweet, it almost edge your teeth.
But oh that rhythm section – I’m still hearing them in my head.
(P.S. In that line above – “it almost edge your teeth” – the computer spell check told me it should be “edges your teeth”. You see what happens when computer don’t know dialect?)
