DAVID BOOTHMAN
Dedicated to the calypso jazz fraternity: Raf Robertson, Tony Voisin, David Marcelin, Michael Meggie Clarke, Russ
Henderson, Scofield Pilgrim, Rupert Clemendor, Andre Tanker, John Buddy Williams, Newman Alexander, Wilfred Woodley and Fitzroy Coleman.
I first met the charismatic Zanda in 1967. I was 14, and positioned as student vice-president of the second-phase QRC Jazz Club. Zanda had returned to Trinidad from his studies in England.
The QRC Jazz Club was founded by Scofield Pilgrim in 1960. He was the Latin teacher there.
QRC was the high school that had produced world-renowned thinkers as Eric Williams, Lloyd Best, VS Naipaul, Geoffrey Holder, Peter Minshall and Rudy “The Pharaoh” Piggott, to name a few. Scofield was a bohemian, intellectual, educator, musician and jazz aficionado.
He was known as the father of calypso jazz. At the beginning of the jazz club, he initiated the term “calypso jazz” after the progenitors of Russ Henderson, Rupert Clemendor, Rudy “Two Left” Smith and others who laid the groundwork and foundation for the expression in the region and in Europe. There was always calypso jazz, expressed from the 1920s by road bands and Carnival procession jam bands. Processional expression was always fused with multi-cross rhythms of the Afrocentric/South American variations from the Caribbean. In the history of North American jazz, it was noted that calypso had a pivotal influence, adding the rhythmic sway and cut-time syncopation to the Dixieland jazz march style and representation.
[caption id="attachment_935895" align="alignnone" width="1024"] David Boothman and Clive Zanda at Boothman's art exhibition Out of This World, Gallery 1234, Hotel Normandie, 1992. -[/caption]
Scofield and the scholars knew of this, and reconstituted the concept, promoting their revised history for the new independent Caribbean. Most of the historic and anthropologic studies of the day were Eurocentric –and still are. Though the works of Lomax and the like were important and foundational to the ethnomusicology and anthropological sciences, on the ground certain histories were resorted to.
The musicians, big bands and combos played their part in their organisations and styles in the 50s and 60s against the new organised expression of the steel drum, the pan. The calypso phrasing and posturing mixed with the compelling clave, offbeat syncopation (the iron rhythm), progressions and montunos, the calypsonians' gestures and caricatures, created a language inherent in the music of calypso jazz.
There was a sect of musicians which I would call transcendentalists/calypso scientists. They were those whose musical language was ingrained in the calypso jazz expression. These were gifted musicians in various organised bands and collaborations of music arrangers, soloists, instrumentalists, vocalists and calypsonians. There was a sophistication. There was a music before the pan music which the pan musicians and arrangers e
