I have known Vibert Cambridge for more than 40 years, going back to 1970 in the We Place nightclub home of the Tradewinds in Toronto. That downtown basement hangout, open 6 nights a week, was an oasis for Caribbean immigrants many of whom would come over from the US on weekends. Vibert was one of those. I’m not sure how we met – my memory is that he came with a group and someone introduced us; he was a town man; I from country – but we connected right away. He wasn’t Dr Cambridge then, but one could see that’s where he was headed. On my trips back to play in Guyana, with him now graduated, our friendship continued. Indeed, on one of those trips Vibert, now a 
member of the Guyana Commemoration Commission celebrating the 150th anniversary of Full Emancipation, approached me with the idea of doing a song for the occasion. One minute into his pitch, I stopped him. “Vibert, that’s not a song; that’s a musical.” To condense the story, Vibert dutifully took my wider suggestion back to the Commission, and I ended up spending over a year of my life researching (with help from Vibert and Joel Benjamin) and writing the musical ‘Raise Up’, directed by Ron Robinson, which premiered at the Cultural Centre (was “Musical of the Year”) and went on tour to three US cities and Grand Cayman.
Our connection is long and varied, so when Dr Cambridge came to interview me some 10 years ago, for a book he was doing on Guyanese music, I was simply chatting with an old and comfortable friend. Today, as I write this, I am just back from a Moray House evening where that book Musical Life in Guyana was launched, and I’m reporting that Vibert has added another arrow to the quiver of
