Creole Rock creator Gavin Mendonca has recently embarked on a Creole Rock Folk It Up Tour and has been popping up in various parts of the country performing many of Guyana’s folk songs.
Gavin has themed up with Marlon Adams of Buxton Fusion who plays African drums.
“I’m currently on a mission to find spaces and just pop up and play folk music so that we get it back into society. I do believe that folk music is at a risk of being lost in time because of all the foreign influences. So far this year, we have performed at KFC Link Show, MovieTowne, the Courtyard and Theatre Guild. It’s really just a project to have more folk music heard by our young people. Folk music is not being done as it used to be done in schools before, so we want to include schools. There are not a lot of artistes embracing folk music as well. They tend to gravitate towards the pop culture and mainstream music like reggae and soca and chutney, which is fine. I think it’s my cultural responsibility as a musician to do folk music,” he said.
Gavin is currently working on a folk music album so as to recapture the songs in their almost original format while at the same time also creating a creole rock version. He hopes to finish by midyear in time for the annual Guyana Folk Festival in New York where he is scheduled to perform.
The artiste will be heading to Trinidad next week for a couple of festivals. One is ‘The New Fire Festival, a three-day camping festival which revolves around protecting the environment. The festival said to be world music oriented encourages traditional music from countries. Gavin will be part of a four-member. The others are Andrew Campbell, the founder of Ebesowana Natural Foods; Nigel Butler, a local artist and Christine DeCambra of Everything Makes Craft. He will also be doing an acoustic show in San Fernando, Trinidad and at the end of the month he will also be performing at the annual Skyy Rock Festival there. The Skyy Rock Festival has been going on for five years and Gavin has performed with his band Feed the Flames in the last three years. This year, however, he will be participating with a newly formed band. The other members are two friends from Suriname and a friend from Trinidad. This first-ever, inter-Caribbean rock band is called Sugarcaned. The name is a reference to a shared colonial history of the three representative countries. The group will be releasing one of their originals titled “Beat Me” on Facebook, in reference to the history of the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and slavery.
Meanwhile, Gavin and Marlon have for some time now been performing folk songs at the Courtyard under the slogan ‘Folk Up Your Lunch’ every other Friday. However, after returning in May they plan on doing this every Friday from 12 pm to 2 pm.
The guitarist noted that tourists come hoping to experience Guyanese culture and folk music plays a great role in this. “Sometimes I might just pop up on a corner of Main and Quamina streets and just play folk music, while other times it’ll be a more planned event,” he said.
Asked how profitable he expects this venture will be, Gavin said, “There is no functioning art industry per se in Guyana. Most artists, and I’m not just talking musicians but visual artists, stage artists… A lot of us do this not because it is profitable but because we love to do it. My main mission has nothing to do with money, but has to do with impacting society positively, leaving an impression, creating opportunities for folk music to be heard so that folk music could be appreciated and to bring people together because that’s what folk music does; it’s community oriented. So, the main mission of the Folk It Up Tour is to contribute to the preservation of our folk music and culture and to reach out to the community so that they have the opportunity to hear and appreciate folk music and just to contribute positive vibes to a society that is angry and depressed, which we see in the news every day. Society has degraded to a bad level and folk music will help to revive [our nation].”
Audiences, Gavin said, since he began the tour have been welcoming. Many of the older folks, he noted, would be humming and singing and he can tell it is nostalgic for them. A few persons have related how refreshing the idea of folk songs being played live is for them, while the little ones seemed more amazed by the drums and guitar.
“Over the next year I’ll be playing folk music so much in the different places that people will subliminally begin to appreciate it. They’ll be walking down the road and they’ll be humming ‘Bamboo Fire’ because they heard it yesterday. If I can get children to appreciate folk music, it means they will grow up with that appreciation and they will carry on and help to preserve it as well as they get older.”
Gavin said he would love to see that he would have inspired other local artistes to play folk music and more traditional music and even join with him in doing so if they so wish. He added that since he began doing this, he has had musicians contact him to find out the chords for “Bamboo Fire” and other songs.
The Ministry of Public Telecommunications has assisted financially in the sponsorship of this venture. The Department of Culture also contributed toward this specifically during the Mashramani period.
Gavin had released a short film last year in which he incorporated Indigenous culture in his work for the first time. He had Michael McGarrell from the Amerindian People’s Association do a voiceover in Patamona for his music video “How To Build A Tree House” which became a short film that has been screened so far in Australia, the UK, New York, Florida, Brazil, Canada, Trinidad and in Guyana. He incorporated the legend of Kai in the film.
The singer said Indigenous folk music is richer historically than coastland folk music and since learning of this he has begun learning to play and sing those songs in the original languages. “When I go abroad to these world music festivals that I would attend… last year I was at WOMAD [World of Music, Arts and Dance] in the UK, if I’m representing Guyanese culture it shouldn’t just be the Indo and Afro side of things. There is a whole movement with Indigenous languages from around the world and I’m trying to get into that,” he said.
To date the artiste has performed in Trinidad, Suriname, Colombia, Brazil, England, the US and the Dominican Republic.
He acknowledged his sponsors: Umami Inc, Ming’s Products and Services Ltd, Zoon Inc, Chetson’s Ltd, KFC, The Courtyard, MovieTowne Guyana and the Ministry of Public Telecommunications.
