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 powerful contributions he has made to his homeland.
Starting out as a book to chronicle the story of music in Guyana, the work, in Professor Cambridge’s hands, (he teaches Mass Communications at Ohio University) has morphed into a resource with many applications. As Vibert says in the prelude, “music is the end result of many human interactions in the political, economic, social and technological spheres” and his book is indeed all those things in the Guyana context. I have often argued that one can tell a revealing general history of the Caribbean by using the various topical calypsos, some popular and some not, which have been written across the region going back to the 1930s. Much of that is true about Vibert’s work; he skilfully includes the political and social information about the time as he delves into its accompanying music and musicians and music business professionals.
The result is a wide and detailed canvas, and one has to be impressed with the courage of the man in the sense of the scale of the undertaking. Having some idea of the research involved in such things from my own small foray into ‘Raise Up’, I am bowled over by what my friend put into this project. At the Moray launch it wasn’t opportune for me to ask him about the details of the research, but it must have been staggering. There are 40 pages of notes; 13 pages of bibliography; 15 pages of index. Vibert criss-crossed the Caribbean interviewing people (he found me in the Festival Office in tiny Grand Cayman) and visited archives in England and Germany; hearing his speech at the book launch one ended up with a sense of the work involved.
In his talk at Moray, it was clear, time and again, that Vibert had buried himself in this project. As he spoke, he was summarizing the 300-page book, delivering the material mostly from memory, and being able to call up names and incidents and places without a hitch. He had not only researched, he had absorbed. And striking too, in the delivery, was his natural wit – colloquial humour is part of the man I’ve always known – which allowed him to weave in incidents or episodes from outside the book, but done so naturally that the division was seamless. In one example, he referred to the ‘Bush Woman Come To Town’ song, highlighting women of easy virtue, with such picturesque names as ‘Land Perai’ and ‘Camudi Coil.’ (Imagine encountering those two.) The book is full of such diversions.
At the core, this is a book about Guyana’s music and in presenting that Vibert has created an impressive work. The detail previously referred to is on every page, as is knowledge of the various stages and progenitors in our musical history. For a country boy like me, unaware of the musical gyrations in Georgetown (particularly in the years when I lived abroad) Musical Life in Guyana is a primer for what went on in the art and for who were the movers and shakers – for example, the Mootoo Brothers with the powerful music of Berbice. All the important names in our musical history are here – the combos in town; the Police Band; the musical promoters; the individual band-leaders and musicians – and even the less known but very evocative contributors (David Campbell, for example) have been brought to our attention. At the public launch Vibert contended “I am not a musician.” I was forced to publicly contradict my friend. He may not play an instrument, but he has shown in this book so many qualities of the musician and the musicologist – he knows the value of tone and tempo and imagination; he understands composition and pacing, and he knows how important dedication to the craft is.
In overall impact, however, what he has produced is much more than a book about music. Our history is here; our politics; our sociology; even our morals; the pieces are there on every page. “Music is the result of many human interactions” – Vibert was right to place that at the very start of his impressive book. He has demonstrated that point in its pages.
