After the recent Birthday rah rah that engulfed me and led to my column last week, I am taking that opening to spend some time this week with some looking back down memory lane at the musical journey for me that started all those years ago beginning with my very early years living at Vreed-en-Hoop, which I’ve written about before. Learning to play guitar in a group with Joe and Jack Henry, Billy Stephenson, all from Vreed-en-Hoop and Gerry Martins (no relation to me) from Pouderoyen.
The next stage came when I migrated to Toronto in 1955 (my sister Cecelia and uncle Joe Barcellos had gone before), lived with my uncle for a while, and then started a group call The Latins, with a drummer from Nassau, Eric Minns, and Calvin Saranchuk, accordionist, from Toronto. After a few years of that, I saw the need for a more North American focus for the group, something more in demand in the Toronto bars, and changed both the repertoire and the name of the band, to The Debonairs, playing a mixture of Caribbean and American pop music.
A few years after that, however, we had started to see the emergence of vocal/instrumental groups in the Caribbean, playing almost totally Caribbean material (previously, it was mostly big bands with brass) and I saw this change as something I could exploit as I had come to the conclusion, in my time with Debonairs, that what was calling me was essentially Caribbean music. And so I broke up Debonairs and formed the Tradewinds with musicians I had come to know in Toronto: Glen Sorzano, guitar, Kelvin Ceballo, drums, and Joe Brown, bass, all from Trinidad. My interaction with the large number of Trinidad musicians, migrants to Canada, was a big factor in this. Listening to their array of recordings of Trinidadian music, largely on the Cook label, had been a revelation for me, partly in the intricacy of the music developed by the Trinis, going back to the kaiso formation of Atilla the Hun and coming forward to Sparrow and Kitch, but mostly for me, as a budding song-writer for the underlying message in that music from the Trinidadian calypsonians that one could go past the general love-song themes of American music, and sing literally about any subject under the sun. That awareness, which dawned on me gradually – it was not something remarked on by others – was the principal factor, in the shift to Tradewinds, as differing from Debonairs, and remains my focus as a song-writer today, some 54 years later.
I never discussed this shift with anyone, not in my family, not among my friends, and not in the very varied musical community in Toronto at that time. It was a gradually developing view, it did not land on me overnight, and while some may see it as a subtle change, for me it was a dramatic one after dabbling somewhat with American pop. Calypso, for me, was an epiphany that remains with me to this day. As someone with a keen interest in song-writing, it was like a door opening into a warehouse where I was totally free to wander around, creatively, and choose whatever subject caught my fancy. I had heard recordings of calypsonians singing the double entendre material with the sexy songs, but I had also noted the more voluminous amount of songs that were not salacious in that way which had achieved popularity in the region. Our song-writers, largely in Trinidad, had songs about labour unrest, about the world’s first satellite by the Russians, about a ship sinking, about cricket, about a man invading the bedroom of England’s Queen, and on and on. Whoever heard about popular music dealing with such topics? It was like a window opening with light coming in and showing me a path I could jump right into and go in whatever direction I chose. Now mind you, I did not let my euphoria in this regard get in the way of reality. I knew enough about the Caribbean market, both in the region and outside, that the salacious material was a proven winner – it was there all over the region, including my own Guyana, and so when I formed Tradewinds in 1966, with the Caribbean market in mind, I made sure that among the first recordings that group made, and took to Trinidad Carnival in 1967, came from that genre of bedroom material, in a song called “Honeymooning Couple”, or as folks would refer to it, “both a we on top”.
I pause the chronology at this point to note that the history of popular music, generally, is littered with the examples of bands who come along with an idea, or a form of music, or a style of playing it, which they present with great enthusiasm, and sometimes considerable expense, only to find difficulty and rejection from the market, so I won’t deny that I was nervous about this adventure with Tradewinds. I had seen too many music ventures fail, in both North America and the Caribbean, so I knew the odds were against me. But I took a fatalistic approach along these lines: 1. Tradewinds were an established group in the Caribbean community in Toronto and partly in North America. 2. We were operating the only nightclub in downtown Toronto, featuring Caribbean music six nights a week. 3. I had put money aside to pay our way to Trinidad Carnival to present the songs there, but if that venture flopped we had regular employment, six nights a week, year round in Toronto, so there was no financial peril involved. 4. Plus, in the Trinidad jaunt, three of us had family there, so accommodation was taken care of, all we needed was the airfare. Yes, popular music is a long shot, the jaunt could be a failure, but we would be able to absorb it, so we went to Trinidad, all of us aware that we were taking a gamble, but not one that would cripple us financially if it didn’t work out. It was a win-win. Nonetheless, we were not four crazy guys. There was trepidation, particularly on my part, the only non-Trini in the mix.
As it turned out, however, we went to Trinidad, hooked up with Sam Ghany of Radio Trinidad, after all the band was mostly Trini, and he generously ensured we got massive airplay in the island and across the region in a weekly radio show of his, called Sunday Serenade, heard throughout the region. We played free shows in Port-of-Spain, largely through Choy Aming, who had a popular band, did the radio bit, were overwhelmed by Carnival, but nobody broke down the doors for Tradewinds – we were totally unknown. But two months later, I get a call in Toronto from a Trinidad record label, Telco, who wanted to release our material. We had given four songs to the radio stations, and three of them had made very little impact, but one of them, the salacious Honeymooning Couple, had become a hit across the region, and overnight, the four guys from Toronto, were now a household name, and promoters from the US Virgin Islands down to Grenada in the south were calling us to come play for their people. The magic of radio….I had heard of it, and had been dubious, but now I was seeing it happen. I’m relating this saga now a week after I wrote about the explosion of birthday greetings that came my way after my wife Annette mentioned it in a post, to say that the Trinidad trip was the genesis of the music career that followed for me, as I continued to write songs in that totally Caribbean genre, and I was fortunate to have many of them become hits that would take me to places I had never heard of – like Bequia in the southern Caribbean, and Cayman Brac in the north – and to all over North America, from Halifax in the east to Los Angeles in the West – and to a dozen Trinidad Carnivals and home to Guyana’s Cultural Centre and Mashramani.
So one week after I wrote in this space expressing my thanks for my birthday greetings, I’m back with an even more voluminous “thank you’ to all of you, over the years, in the region and living outside, for your acceptance of my music and my various ramblings, for your devotion to Tradewinds and, particularly, for the many times, in too many places to count, where you have stopped me on the road, or sent me an internet note, saying “thanks for the music”. I have heard you loud and clear, you have made me feel blessed, and so I hope you hear me equally loud and clear now, Caribbean. On behalf of the Tradewinds guys, thank you for your devotion; you have made us feel blessed. Long live music.
