NIGEL CAMPBELL
Etienne Charles’s engagement with the Carnival and its music is ongoing, as heard in his albums Kaiso (2011) and Carnival: The Sound of a People, Vol 1 (2017) and the subsequent live performances here. It's also visible in the evolution of Carnival music on the road with his music/masquerade band Riddim, Brass & Mas; his recording of kaiso and soca collaborations with Kes, Terri Lyons and David Rudder.
On February 1, at Queen’s Hall, St Ann's, he delved deeper into the magic of this music that moves a society and defines celebration.
The Road March in Concert was a review of those songs that are the most popular songs on the road, at Carnival competition spaces, and in fetes.
The concert began as a historical showcase of the chants, lavways and leggos of emancipated folk, and almost sequentially moved towards a veneration of popular calypsoes and soca tunes, highlighting the personalities who made these Carnival music hits.
It was a timeline; what began as a contemplation of music history ended in celebration and the cheeky marketing of Charles’s 2024 Carnival band, Magnificent.
And that was a good thing, as it targeted the two aspects of an audience in search of Carnival entertainment outside the sweaty jam of modern fetes. That juxtaposition of contemplation and celebration is at the heart of Carnival, and was the ultimate ethos of the event.
[caption id="attachment_1063509" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Singing his Bahia Girl, David Rudder was the big surprise of the night at Etienne Charles's The Road March In Concert at Queen's Hall, St Ann's. - courtesy Maria Nunes[/caption]
Starting the concert with a drum-accompanied chant of “Pas de six ans. Point de six ans!” (“Not six years. No more six years!”) – the refrain of the crowd gathered to hear the conditional emancipation proclamation by the governor in Port of Spain on August 1, 1834 – Charles invited the audience to interpret this as the first road march, the protest song of the people, possibly sung by prison turnkey Congo Barra.
From this noble genesis, the audience was then led through a few patois songs that represented the zeitgeist of an era before organised competitions with rules and government subvention: the 1899 chantwell lavway Prisonié Lévéz itself being a version of an 1830s kaiso; Jamette Matador’s (Sophie Mataloney’s) reworking of a Guadeloupean folk song as Pauline from 1906; Lionel Belasco appropriation of a Martiniquan melody L’Année Passée in 1907 later to become Lord Melody’s Rum & Coca Cola tune; and Wilmoth Houdini’s Sly Mongoose from 1923.
The use of the genius of jazz to reconsider history and legacy as art is a trope of Charles in his recording and performing career from the beginning. From local folklore characters to historical incidents in the Black Atlantic like the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, and to the Carnival as a whole and its development in the society, the blending of local rhythms and jazz harmonies to add context and contrast to ideas continues.
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