The professional musician’s life has many attendant aspects, other than the activity itself, so that any successful Caribbean musician will tell you that one of the problems is dealing with hecklers who consider themselves comedians and will shout stuff at you from the crowd, very loud. I remember an incident from the early Tradewinds in Toronto days, with this Trini musician Dave DeCastro who was pretty good playing cuatro and singing popular calypsoes. Castro was a regular at our We Place club downtown fairly often, real Trini loud mouth, and he would come close to the stage with a couple padnas while we were on and try to run some tantalise at us. Most of the time I would just ignore him or laugh him off, but one night he came in and I was fed up with his foolishness (I should mention he was almost bald), so I stopped the band and with the whole place quiet I leaned into the mike and said, “Padna, why you don’t put your two fingers in your nose and go lawn bowling?” Well the whole club cracked up, including his padnas (you know how Trinis love a picong); they roasted him. I never heard a word from Castro after that.
In those early Toronto club days as well, while I was still single, there was a Canadian lass, Mickey, who had a crush on me, and she invited me to have breakfast with her, but I wasn’t taking her on, so she went to Joe Brown, our bass player, and Joe assured her he would get me to come around, but when he brought it up I wouldn’t budge. Joe was annoyed. He said, “Man, talk to the girl, na. I gave her my word.” So I told Joe: “Oh you gave her your word? Well then you have breakfast with her.” Joe was a smart guy; he let the whole thing drop.
In the late 1970’s there was a popular Trini kaiso man called Maestro who later died in a car accident. Reading a reference to it recently brings back many things. The day before he died, I had been chatting with him on Frederick Street, by a travel agency; he had his ticket and his passport, to be leaving the next day for New York. The following night, I had come from playing somewhere; it was like 3am, and the Trinidadian Ellis Chow Lin On (who used to book us in Trinidad) and I ended up in Diego Martin, as the word spread, with Lord Kitchener at somebody’s house. It was a moonlight night and we were all standing around outside. I remember now how quiet everybody was; the suddenness of it. I was also reminded that Maestro was also a fine human being; always happy, always looking to help other performers, a guy you couldn’t help liking, apart from admiring his music.
The memories come in different ways at different times. I remember a Tradewinds tour where we travelled via NY to go on to Toronto. It was a holiday weekend. We came into American to catch Air Canada; turns out the JFK Air Canada terminal was very close to American but you had to go all the way around the circle in the shuttle to get back to it. The airport was in gridlock. The shuttle guy told us “Just walk back, at the side of the road to Air Canada. It may take you a while, but if you take the shuttle, in this traffic jam, you’ll never get there in time.” It had to be almost a quarter-mile, but we were dying to get home. We had the suitcases, three guitars, and a small amp. Bass player Joe Brown and I made a platform with the flat bass–guitar case, laid the amp across that and a suitcase on top of that; he held one end, I held the other. Terry and Clive took the other guitar and the three suitcases between them. The thing Joe and I were carrying was heavy as hell. We were walking across a grassy field most the way; every 50 yards or so we had to stop and rest, but after about half an hour or so we go to the edge of Air Canada and hooked up with Red Caps to take us the rest of the way. I remember looking back at the way we had come, and it seemed the gridlock hadn’t moved an inch; hundreds of red lights stationary. We made our flight, though. That was JFK.
I’m always intrigued by comments relating to technical matters in music. There was a reference from fellow Guyanese musician George Jardim about my use of minor chords in my songs, that is, that they often seem to suggest some sort of deliberation, or chosen structure, in those things, whereas I have found them to be simply evolutions that have a life of their own.
I truly don’t see any particular pattern in the chord selection, for example, in the Tradewinds songs. Having written the songs, almost always with just an acoustic guitar (no rhythmic help), what you hear in the recordings are the chords I heard and indeed, most of the arrangements – the intro lines, the counterpoint things, the vocal construction, drums, etc. that I would work out with the band prior to going in the studio and from that the life of the song would be set. I wasn’t on any deliberate format, it’s just the way it emerged from my head.
From playing with other musicians, other than Tradewinds, over the years, one difference I do see is my use of minor chords, and I don’t know where that came from. It could be from the early “ray minor” calypso patterns that I became acquainted with when I migrated to Canada and began interacting with various Trinidadian musicians there. I had not heard much of music before (it’s not played much on radio here) and I was captivated by it (still am, to some extent) for the sheer joyousness of it, so maybe it came from there, but I will frequently find I’m choosing minor progressions to move melody along and this happens in whatever genre I’m writing – ballad, calypso, soca, reggae, bossa nova, traditional. It could also be an influence from traditional music which I’m drawn to (I recall a time in Canada when I would devour Israeli folk music as well as African folk) and where minor chords are common.
In this evaluation, what could be at play here is the common phenomenon of being surprised to hear people come up with a slant or interpretation in a song of mine that was not my intention. In other words, you may be hearing a thread or a style that happened, so to speak, in spite of me; which is the evolution thing I mentioned earlier. In other words, the pattern may be there but I’m not aware of it. Just a couple years ago I was on a radio interview in Barbados along with Gabby (his popular kaiso was Boots) and he went into this long dissertation about the purely musical side of my songs (somebody was highlighting the lyrics) and how much musicality there was in the intros (they’re often in sharp contrast to the verses) and in the response lines. I remember being surprised because while I had paid a lot of attention to those things in producing the finished songs, my sense was that most people were fixated on the song, not the accoutrements. The difference, of course, is that Gabby comes with a very musical ear as you would know if you are familiar with his song “Emmerton”.
