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Lords of the West Indies: The Cultural Intersections of Jazz and the English-Speaking Caribbean

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By Carter Van Pelt

On March 7 and 8, Jamaican-born pianist Monty Alexander brings a uniquely themed concert to Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrating both his roots as a Jamaican and the cultural intersections of jazz and the West Indies. Alexander is a celebrated musician whose recording and performance history with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown alone places him squarely in the pedigree of jazz, but he has long embraced his roots in Jamaica and the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean*.

“Throughout my career, the music of Jamaica and Trinidad has remained very dear to me because of my fond memories of hearing Lord Kitchener, Harry Belafonte, the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Flea, Lord Melody, Alerth Bedasse, and scores of others as I grew up in Kingston," explains Alexander. “These two styles of music, calypso and mento, express a joy and love of life that I hope to recapture during the performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center."

Alexander says that the concerts will be presented in two halves with different ensembles for each style of music augmented by Alexander's jazz trio with Herlin Riley and drums and Hassan Shakur on bass. For the calypso ensemble, David “Happy" Williams (known for his work with Cedar Walton) will be on vocals and bass, along the young trumpeter Etienne Charles, trombonist Clifton Anderson (of Sonny Rollins' band), tenor saxophonist Charles Dougherty, and singer Keith Prescott, a.k.a. Designer. For the mento group, alto saxophonist Dean Fraser and tenor saxophonist Cedric IM Brooks will complement a rhythm section of Carlton James on banjo, Joseph Bennett on shakers, and Albert Morgan on the rhumba box. Drummer Desi Jones will also be part of the group, and Pluto Shervington, a Jamaican singer and guitarist versed in both styles, will join each ensemble.

Alexander continues, “We chose the title 'Lords of the West Indies' because many of the music's stars used that particular honorific, and all of them can be seen as West Indian cultural royalty, having first introduced the English-speaking islands to people around the world."

Both Trinidad and Jamaica, two of the major islands of the West Indies, have distinct musical heritages and cultural influence seemingly out of proportion with their small populations. Trinidadian calypso and soca, as well as Jamaican mento, ska, and reggae, each had significant phases of international exposure and each continues to have its own resonance around the globe.

“In Trinidad, calypso can be traced to the Carnival celebrations dating back to the 19th century," says Alexander. “Although American record companies often used term calypso to sell all Caribbean folk music, including mento, calypso is a Trinidadian music in the strict sense. Mento on the other hand is a deep country Jamaican thing. 'Deep inna de bush' as we say. It uses a banjo and a beautiful bass instrument called a rhumba box, which is like a bass kalimba, straight out of Africa."

As Alexander explains, Jamaican mento evolved from the French Quadrille dance music that was fashionable among the English colonists in the 19th century. Even though Trinidad and Jamaica were both English (and Protestant) colonies before independence in the 1960s, Trinidad was in Spanish (Catholic) hands more than 100 years longer than Jamaica and also had a French presence, which likely accounts for the greater significance of a pre-Lenten celebration like Carnival. Both calypso and mento emerged from the same sets of circumstances and a similar cultural process that produced jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century.

Even before jazz's introduction to Trinidad, improvisation was part of a calypso tradition called Sans Humanit where singers devised lyrics of social comment or competitive insult on the melody. In Trinidad and Jamaica, jazz played a role in the development of each country's popular music and early recording industries, as soldiers at American military bases and radio broadcasts from Miami and New Orleans spread the sounds of swing. The jazz influence is evident in the pre-war recordings of Trinidadians Lionel Belasco and Sam Manning, but many straight-ahead calypsonians in the 1950s were enamored of jazz. For example, among Lord Kitchener's considerable repertoire was “Kitch's Be Bop Calypso." Jamaica's Lord Flea performed and popularized the same song as “Calypso Be Bop" in the 1957 film Bop Girl Goes Calypso.



“In Jamaica, a lot of the musicians who were involved with the birth of the recording industry in the late 1950s saw themselves as jazz men. They really wanted to swing, and they did, but the development of ska was just natural because they couldn't help but put their Jamaican identity into it," says Alexander. These gifted musicians included the guitarist Ernest Ranglin, trombonists Don Drummond and Rico Rodriguez, and saxophonists Cedric Brooks, Val Bennett, Roland Alphonso, and Tommy McCook. Several of these horn players were members of local big bands for years before forming the internationally acclaimed Skatalites, the first band to back Bob Marley and the first band to give Jamaican music a truly national identity after its 1962 independence. Cedric Brooks, a performer on the Lords of the West Indies concerts, was also a co-founder of The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari along with the drummer Count Ossie.

Jazz, of course, has long flourished at New York City's enormous cultural crossroads, benefiting from the unending influx of new sounds and ideas that are the hallmark of an international environment. Among its profound ingredients, jazz's embrace of the music of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean accounts for what Jelly Roll Morton once called the “Spanish tinge." Dizzy Gillespie's forays into Cuban music are well documented, but influence of New York City's West Indian immigrants is less often considered.

Throughout the 20th century, West Indian immigrants faced unique challenges in their process of assimilation in African American communities of New York City, often compelled to de-emphasize their heritage to avoid prevalent stereotypes. In the jazz community, the phenomenon was similar, as Alexander recalls: “I was happy to fit in for the most part, but something inside made me made me realize that I can tap into something really important in my own culture, from the deep in the country to the cities and everywhere in between."

Through the years, Alexander and myriad jazz artists with West Indian roots made key contributions to jazz, bringing both subtle and explicit West Indian musical expressions. Among West Indian musicians whose careers included jazz was Trinidadian alto saxophonist Rupert Cole, who worked with Sam Manning before joining Don Redman in the 1930s and Louis Armstrong in the 1940s. Other Jazz musicians who were from the West Indies or whose families were from the West Indies include Blue Mitchell (Bahamas), Fats Navarro (Bahamas), Wynton Kelly (Jamaica), Kenny Drew (Jamaica), Oscar Peterson (St. Croix and St. Kitts), Carmen McRae (Jamaica), Art Taylor (Jamaica), Connie Kay (Montserrat), Randy Weston (Jamaica), Roy Haynes (Barbados), Dizzy Reece (Jamaica), and Sonny Rollins (Virgin Islands).

Sonny Rollins provides the most salient example of how a West Indian family heritage informed the life of an American jazz musician. As he once recalled, “My grandmother . . . was involved with Marcus Garvey . . . she was a black nationalist . . . I became a devotee of Paul Robeson, because my grandmother used to take me to a lot of his rallies." Rollins' embrace of his Anglo-Caribbean roots is most famously expressed in his recording of “St. Thomas," his signature adaptation of “Fire Down There," a folk song with West Indian origins that his mother used to sing to him. Rollins also recorded and performed the West Indian folk song “Brown Skin Girl" and the Trinidadian folk song “Hold Em Joe."

Duke Ellington noted the influence and originality of West Indian musicians in his autobiography Mistress Is My Music as he spoke of trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam" Nanton, who played with the Duke Ellington Orchestra from 1926 to 1946. Nanton is recognized as a pioneer in the plunger/muting techniques associated with the orchestra's 'jungle' sound. “What he was actually doing was playing a very highly personalized form of his West Indian heritage," recalled Ellington. “When a guy comes from the West Indies and is asked to play some jazz, he plays what he thinks it is, or what comes from his applying himself to the idiom. Tricky and his people were deep in the West Indian legacy and the Marcus Garvey movement. A whole strain of West Indian musicians came up who made contributions to the so-called jazz scene, and they were all virtually descended from the true African scene . . . Bop, I once said, is the Marcus Garvey extension (into contemporary music)."

From the age of four in 1921, Thelonious Monk grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a largely Barbadian neighborhood known as San Juan Hill. The Bajan influence on Monk is reflected in compositions such as “Monk's Dream" and “Bye-Ya." (And notably, “Bemsha Swing," co-written by drummer Denzil Best, is in reference to “Bimsha," a term used by Bajans to refer to their island). Similarly, Charlie Parker connected with the sounds of the West Indies, expressed in his composition “My Little Suede Shoes" and his performances of the Jamaican mento “Slide Mongoose" and the aforementioned “Brown Skin Girl."

All told, the cross-pollination between West Indian music and American jazz has affected each in profoundly positive, if not obvious ways, contributing to the variegated beauty of several of the 20th century's most significant popular music forms. To this day, Monty Alexander is an ambassador of that essential blend, and his concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center will bring the various traditions into focus for the first time on one of the world's most important stages.



* The West Indies, more formally defined, includes as many as 28 Caribbean territories but is also a common term of self-definition used by residents of former British colonies including Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, The Bahamas, etc.

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