Month: September 2011

Categories
Music

The Calypso Queen

The following article was written by Tony Hiller for World Music Central.org, and published on Sept. 2, 2001.


McArtha Linda Sandy-Lewis might never be immortalized in the global annals of female activism, but the feisty woman claiming that formal and somewhat long-winded moniker has certainly made an indelible mark on the history of Caribbean music. Back in 1978, Calypso Rose, as she is widely known, shattered the glass ceiling in Trinidad & Tobago when paradoxically becoming the first of her gender to win the coveted ‘Calypso King’ crown. Organizers of the annual championship were obliged to change the title to ‘Calypso Monarch’, and Rose went on to win the prestigious event for five consecutive years. In recent years, the Tobago-born singer has gone international with her trademark husky vocals, incisive wit and raunchy calypso and up-tempo soca songs.

Now 70 years of age, Calypso Rose revisited her trail-blazing days after being voted the No. 1 calypsonian of Trinidad & Tobago earlier this year. Speaking from New York City, where she has resided for the past three decades, this voluble, irrepressible woman, said: “The calypso scene has changed immensely over the years. It was mostly men back in the early days like Kitchener [Lord Kitchener], The Lion [Roaring Lion], The Sparrow [Mighty Sparrow], Atilla The Hun and Lord Irie. When I came into the arena in 1955, Lady Irie, the wife of Lord Irie, was the only female and she was a senior citizen at that time.”

Despite calypso being a male domain, Calypso Rose, a Baptist minister’s daughter, says she was received “very highly” by audiences in general, but not by church groups, who frowned upon her performing in that milieu. “They called me to meeting after meeting,” she recalls. “They wanted to know how come a young girl like me could be in the calypso tents, singing calypso between all the men. In 1963 I said: ‘Look, I will not be like the five foolish virgins that buried their talent in the soil’. I said: ‘The Lord has given me the ability to write calypso lyrics and create the melody and make the people happy and I will continue doing that until the day I die’, and I got up and I walked out of the room.” Whether by divine intervention or not, it’s a fact that Hurricane Flora devastated the islands of Tobago and Grenada soon after. “I wrote a calypso about the hurricane to sing in the tent in 1964. After every verse I sang ‘Abide With Me’.” After rendering a verse of said hymn down the line from Queens, Rose suggests that may have given her some purchase with the church elders.

As an idiom, calypso currently lives in the shadows but that wasn’t always the case. In 1969 Calypso Rose was on an equal footing with Bob Marley. The Caribbean artists performed together at a New Year’s Eve concert held in the ballroom of the Grand Concourse in New York’s Bronx. “The people went crazy,” Rose recalls. During its heyday in the late ‘50s, Harry Belafonte took calypso to the top of the pop charts with ‘The Banana Boat Song’ (aka ‘Day O’). Calypso Rose, who has written over 800 songs, herself had a major hit in the Caribbean with her signature number ‘Fire in Meh Wire’, which was subsequently recorded in nine different languages, and Bonnie Raitt did a cover version of her ‘Wah She Go Do’. “I was in San Francisco one year performing and she came on stage and sung it with me,” she says. Rose has rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest names in show business. In 1978 she did a gig with the late Michael Jackson. In Europe she says she has performed to audiences of up to 10,000. Back home, where she’s regarded as a living legend, Rose is a fixture during the annual carnival season in Trinidad & Tobago, playing for many thousands of revellers.

Rooted in social and political commentary, calypso is a music form that puts more emphasis on lyrics than almost any other idiom, and is invariably peppered with patois. Rose has written her share of risqué numbers over the years, but only one overtly political song, ‘The Boat Is Rocking’, which she penned leading up to a crucial local election. One of the songs she’s most proud of, ‘No, Madame’, she wrote when Trinidad & Tobago domestics were working for a paltry $25 a month. “Soon after that song was released, the government voted that no domestic should work for less than $1200 a month.” Rose says that you could sing just about anything in the calypso tents, but the more controversial songs wouldn’t be played on the radio.

She points out that calypso has changed considerably in style over the years and that these days soca, a faster, more dance-orientated variant which places less emphasis on the lyrics, holds sway. “It’s gone from the minor calypso to the four-verse calypso, from the four-line calypso to the eight-line calypso. With the four-verse calypso you’re getting more rhythm. The structure of the bass has been changed and the drumming has been changed too. It’s vastly different now, and I think that is the reason why the Mighty Sparrow and myself are still on the road working because we do soca, although we also do the old-style calypso.”

It was calypso that enabled a 13-year-old McArtha Lewis to overcome a debilitating stammer. “I’ve come a very long way,” she reflects. “I couldn’t speak without stuttering badly back then.” Calypso Rose will forever be proud of the fact that she opened the doors to let other females enter the long-time male preserve of calypso. As she observes: “There are a lot of female calypsonians around these days, not only in Trinidad & Tobago but the whole of the Caribbean and even beyond.”

• The above interview first appeared in Rhythms, Australia’s only dedicated roots music magazine, for which the author is World/Folk correspondent.

For original report: The Calypso Queen | World Music Central.org.

Categories
Festivals

West Indian-American Parade Not Synonymous With Violence

The following article was written by Zack Stieber for the Epoch Times.

A crowd gathers at Brooklyn Borough Hall to listen to speakers condemn the link made by media between increased gun violence and the West Indian-American Day Carnival. (Amal Chen/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—Indignant elected officials and organizers of the West Indian-American Day Carnival held an emergency press conference to address an association made between gun violence and the annual parade by media reports.

“How dare anyone insult this rich community and this rich culture with attempting to associate the misguided behavior of the numerical minority that participated in criminal behavior with the millions of people who are on the parkway attempting to enjoy and celebrate the rich heritage of this culture,” declared state Sen. Eric Adams at Brooklyn Borough Hall on Wednesday. “That’s wrong!”

A relatively high number of crimes over the Labor Day weekend ended with 67 victims of “senseless shootings and killings,” according to state Sen. John Sampson.

Multiple officials condemned the New York Post for a story that linked the largest parade and festival in New York with gun violence, pointing out that criminal acts occurred throughout the city, with a typical amount in the vicinity of the parade.

State Sen. Eric Adams condemns the perceived link between gun violence and the West Indian-American Day Carnival. He spoke at Brooklyn Borough Hall with other elected officials and parade organizers on Wednesday. (Amal Chen/The Epoch Times)

 “Our tabloids, our papers have a major influence on how people respond to things. … They identified … the parade as the cause for the shooting, but people don’t know about what this parade is,” said Adams. “Some people have called my office and said because of the parade we’ve had 24 shootings in 24 hours; they thought that the shootings that happened across the city were because of the parade. They connected violence in the city this weekend with the parade, which is not true.”

A crowd of about 100 attended the press conference.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz spoke first, saying that “this parade is a great gift to New York and to America.”

For the full original article: West Indian-American Parade Not Synonymous With Violence | United States | Epoch Times.

Categories
Festivals

Mas’ in yuh Mas: Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival

tribal-migration-2

Mas’ in New York

Every Labor Day, since the mid-sixties, Brooklyn New York has played host to the masquerade, pulsating rhythmic sounds, and free-spirited abandon that exudes from the West Indian Carnival. From a solitary procession, the event has grown to festivities that occupy the entire weekend that leads into the first monday in September. In addition to the Parade of Bands on the Eastern Parkway, the early morning Jouvay has long become a staple of the Labor Day bacchanal. Additionally, on the preceding Saturday, the young aspiring masqueraders hold court when the bands in the Children’s Carnival wind their way to the Brooklyn Museum, where – later in the evening – the clash of steel in the annual Panorama Competition can be heard ringing through the Brooklyn landscape. For the hundreds of thousands of Caribbean migrants, who have made New York their home over the last century, this annual celebration bears significance of immense proportions.

Brief History

The Carnival celebrations held in Brooklyn today are not the first of this type in New York. The Caribbean-style masquerade was initiated by the migrants from the Caribbean isles, who came to the New York metropolis in the first half of the the last century. Jesse Waddell, a Caribbean woman from Trinidad, is recognized as the individual responsible for the introduction of this type of celebrations. A musician, who came to the New York in the early 1920s, she hosted masquerade balls during the 1930s and early ’40s in venues such as the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem. Following World War II, Waddell, in conjunction with the West Indian Day Committee, gained permission from the City to host an outdoor Carnival parade in Harlem. This festival was successfully produced annually until 1964, when the permit was revoked.

This period witnessed the rise in popularity of calypso, the music of the West Indian Carnival, in New York and the American popular music industry. Guitarist Gerard Clarke and his Caribbean Serenders played on many calypso recordings and in venues such as the Vanguard. Pianist and bandleader Lionel Belasco worked with artistes like Sam Manning, actor and singer, and the calypsonian Houdini. Pianist Daphne Weekes, who arrived in New York in 1939, became known as the first woman to leader a calypso band, the Versatile Caribbean Orchestra, and actively participated in the Carnival up to her death in 2004. Also, there existed a steady flow of calypsonians, such as Phillips Garcia – Executor, Raymond Quevedo – Atilla the Hun, and Raphael de Leon – Roaring Lion, all of whom recorded and performed in New York; as well as the Lord Invader, Rupert Grant. His calypso composition, Rum and Coca Cola, gained international prominence from the popularity of the Andrew Sisters’ version, which later become the subject of legal action. The work of these and other artistes, together with the success of the calypso recordings and performances of Harry Belafonte in the1950s and 60s, contributed greatly to the respect these Caribbean artistic forms garnered during that period.

Carnival 2011

This years Carnival festivities will showcase 33 adult masquerade bands that will parade the Eastern Parkway route on the afternoon of Labor Day. The Children’s Carnival, hosted annually on the Saturday preceding, will be graced by the presence of 39 junior bands. The 2011 Steelband Panorama competition is themed “Pan in its Glory”, and will see the participation of 11 steel pan orchestras. This competition will highlight the work of a young crop of musical arrangers as the bands compete to dethrone defending champions Pan Sonatas, led by arranger Yohan Popwell.

Jouvay Steel from Ken Archer on Vimeo.

These events constitute the highlights of the New York Carnival celebrations. Together with all the parties, mas camps, steelband launches, calypso tents, and other activities, they are cherished in the Caribbean-American community as important spaces in which the artistic, cultural heritage of the Caribbean immigrants has been maintained and shared with their North American neighbors.

Categories
Dance

Gene Toney

dancer/choreographer/singer

Gene is one of Trinidad and Tobago’s foremost dancers, a choreographer, and troupe leader. He got involved in dancing around the time of the twin island state’s achievement of political independence from Great Britain in 1962. With the advent of the Prime Minister’s Best Village Competition in the ’60s, the Harding Place Cocorite Youth Movement was formed, and Gene embedded himself in its artistic life, particularly dance, under the leadership of the now-deceased Carlton Francis.

Through this activity, he became acquainted with some of Trinidad’s leading dancers such as: Jean Coggins, Julia Edwards, and Neville Shepherd with whom Gene performed and toured before forming his own troupe, the Ujamaa Folk Performers in 1972. Under the guidance of Gene, Ujamaa toured the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, Venezuela, and other places, performing numerous Caribbean dances including the Bele, Pique, Joropo, and the Limbo. Ujamaa has won the national limbo competition on multiple occasions.

Limbo Dance from Ken Archer on Vimeo.

In recent years Gene, together with his wife, Rosanna Toney, has taken his talents to Brooklyn New York, and assisted in the transmission of the knowledge and performance of these Caribbean dance forms among the youth, particularly those of Caribbean parentage. He has worked in the youth programs of the Sesame Flyers organization, helping to develop their dance troupe and artistic programs in general. He continues to share his cultural gifts by participation in the steelband movement, mas’ making and performance, and calypso singing.

African Dance from Ken Archer on Vimeo.