Trinidadian Music in New York City

Please see Chapter 1 in this volume for biographical information on Ray Allen.

Images of fancy costumes, sensual dancing to the latest calypso and soca hits, and fierce steel band competition come to mind when most New Yorkers think of Brooklyn's West Indian Carnival. While recent television coverage has brought a degree of notoriety to the annual Labor Day event, few people realize that calypso and steel band music are native to one island, Trinidad, and that these venerable expressions were well established in New York long before Carnival came to Brooklyn in the early 1970s.

EARLY CALYPSO IN TRINIDAD AND NEW YORK

West Indian calypso and steel band music have their roots in the nineteenth-century Carnival celebrations of Trinidad. The call-and-response singing and percussion traditions of costumed carnival revelers eventually evolved into lyrical, textually rich "calypso" songs characterized by clever satire and social commentary. Calypso singing and instrumental dance music were brought north with Trinidadian emigrants who arrived in New York City in the early decades of this century.

During the 1910s bandleaders George "Lovey" Baily and Lionel Belasco came to New York to record West Indian songs and instrumental pieces. In the late 1920s Wilmoth Houdini, touted as the "Calypso King of New York," recorded with Belasco's orchestra and emerged as the dominant West Indian vocalist. In the mid-1930s Trinidadian guitar player and bandleader Gerald Clark arrived in New York and began broadcasting on radio WHN. By the late 1930s Clark's band was playing Harlem theaters, midtown dance halls, and downtown clubs, including the Village Vanguard and Cafe Society. Known as the Caribbean Serenaders, the band backed some of Trinidad's leading calypso singers, among them Caresser, Lord Invader, Duke of Iron, MacBeth the Great, and Sir Lancelot. The exhilaration of their new home was captured in a 1939 calypso sung by Cecil Anderson, the Duke of Iron:

I am happy just to be,
in this sweet land of liberty.
Standards of living here,
is much higher than anywhere.
With Mr. Roosevelt at the head,
American people bound to eat bread.
For who pays the rent when you ain't got a cent?
And who gets you meat when you have none to eat?
Now where can you roam when you ain't got a home?
Oh where can you flee to a land that is free?
USA!

The audience for authentic calypso quickly expanded beyond the confines of New York's West Indian community to include African American and white listeners. Calypsonians responded by writing more songs about their American experiences, such as those found on Houdini's 1940 Decca release, Harlem Seen Through Calypso Eyes. The collection of 78 RPM recordings focused on America's most famous black neighborhood, with songs such as "Harlem Alley Cat," "Married Life in Harlem," "Good Old Harlem Town," "Harlem Popcorn Man," and "Harlem Night Life." Later recordings by the Andrew Sisters, the Kingston Trio, and New York-born Jamaican singer Harry Belafonte popularized calypso with a broader American audience but clouded the music's Trinidadian roots.

STEEL PAN MUSIC

Trinidadian Carnival also provided the setting for the emergence of steel pan music. Sometime in the mid-1930s, Carnival percussion bands began experimenting with

paint and trash cans, biscuit drums, automobile brake drums, and other metal objects. By 1940 metallic percussion instruments had become commonplace. It was during this period that players discovered that different notes could be produced by pounding the bottoms of metal containers into different shapes and striking them with sticks. By the end of World War II, these new "steel" bands were providing a polyrhythmic accompaniment for bands of Carnival singers and beating out simple three- and four-note melodies to popular calypso tunes. In the early postwar years steel pan tuners (builders) began to forge instruments from oil drums cut into different sizes to produce different tonal ranges. More sophisticated techniques were developed for grooving the notes, leading to pans capable of producing fully chromatic scales and conventional Western harmonies. Thanks to these innovations, steel pan orchestras could, by the 1950s, play more complex arrangements of calypsos as well as Latin dance music, American popular songs, and European classical pieces.

The early diaspora of steel pan music to New York was accomplished through the efforts of a handful of influential Trinidadians who immigrated in the postwar years. Ambitious pan players, tuners, and arrangers, including Rudy King, Reynolds "Caldera" Caraballo, Conrad Mauge, Lawrence "Pops" MacCarthy, Kim Loy Wong, and Ellie Mannette established small steel bands in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s. Initially they played for West Indian fetes (parties), but eventually found work at Greenwich Village clubs as well as at private suburban parties and country clubs where they performed for mostly white audiences. Bands developed two repertories: standard Belafonte-style calypsos and popular American songs for white clientele and the latest Carnival hits from Trinidad for West Indian audiences.

CALYPSO AND STEEL PAN MUSIC IN NEW YORK CARNIVAL

Sometime in the mid-1930s two homesick Trinidadians, Rufus Gorin and Jesse Wattle, began organizing outdoor carnival parties in Harlem. In 1947, Wattle managed to get an official permit to close Lenox Avenue for a Trinidad-style Carnival parade featuring fancy costumed mas (masquerade) bands. In deference to the New York climate, the celebration was held in early September, on the Monday of Labor Day weekend, rather than during the traditional midwinter, pre-Lenten Carnival season. Costumed dancers paraded down Harlem's mainstreet, moving to the music of Trinidadian brass (calypso) bands perched on floats and small trucks. Calypso singers like MacBeth the Great fronted the brass bands. By the late 1950s Rudy King's Trinidad Steel Band, Lawrence "Pops" McCarthy's Harlem All Stars, and Caldera and the Modemeres joined the Lenox Avenue festivities. As in Trinidad Carnival, the steel orchestras played lively calypso melodies while throngs of carnival revelers danced down Lenox Avenue.

In 1964, following several minor disturbances, the Lenox Avenue parade permit was revoked. In the late 1960s the action moved to Brooklyn, where huge Carnival block parties sprang up in the Crown Heights and Flat-bush neighborhoods that were rapidly becoming the center of New York's expanding West Indian community. In 1971 Carlos Lezama, head of the newly formed West Indian American Day Carnival Association

(WIADCA), succeeded in obtaining a parade permit for Brooklyn's grand boulevard, Eastern Parkway. Six steel orchestras turned out for the first official Brooklyn Carnival, which, based on the Trinidadian model, quickly evolved into a wild spectacle of fancy masquerade bands and steel orchestras jammed together with hundreds of thousands of dancing spectators.

In the mid-1970s the WIADCA established a Panorama competition behind the Brooklyn Museum on the weekend prior to the Labor Day Carnival parade. The event offered cash prizes to the top steel bands and quickly became the center of heated competition. Additional evening concerts featuring calypso and masquerade costume competitions strengthened the Trinidadian foundations of the Carnival celebration. Later, Jamaican reggae and Haitian konpas evenings were established.

Brooklyn steel bands reached new heights of popularity in the mid-1970s, dominating the Labor Day Carnival activities and providing dance music at fetes, basement parties, and boat rides for the borough's growing West Indian population. By the late 1970s, however, deejays playing the new amplified soca (soul/calypso) sound began displacing steel bands from the Eastern Parkway parade and local parties. In the 1980s steel pan was relegated primarily to Carnival Panorama, while deejays and soca bands commanded the Eastern Parkway parade, parties, and dance hall engagements during Carnival season.

The 1990s launched a period of reinvigoration for steel pan in New York due in part to the emergence of a J'Ouvert (early morning) component to Brooklyn Carnival. Beginning around three o'clock Labor Day morning, the J'Ouvert celebration features steel pan orchestras and old mas costuming, purposely excluding the deejays and sound trucks that dominate the Eastern Parkway parade. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Museum Panorama has grown in size, currently attracting more than a dozen local bands to the annual competition. Despers USA, the CASYM Steel Orchestra, Moods Pan Groove, the BWIA Sonatas, and Silhouettes are among the recent top contenders.

In addition the multicultural movement of the last decade has helped pan players reach broad new audiences through presentations at public schools, colleges, museums, and outdoor arts festivals. Bands have become larger, more diverse (in addition to Trinidadian members, many bands include growing numbers of non-Trinidadian Caribbean and African American players), and more gender balanced (traditionally

dominated by men, the membership of contemporary bands is often half female).

In Brooklyn, as in Trinidad, the pan yard remains the center of steel pan culture. During the summer months bands rehearse nightly in outdoor yards and lots scattered throughout the borough. A special band arranger is hired to orchestrate and rehearse the Panorama tune. Teaching a sixty-piece, multisection steel orchestra a complex calypso arrangement (always with multiple melodic themes and often with key modulations) without a written score requires a great deal time and discipline. The arranger teaches parts by rote to the heads of the various sections (tenors, double tenors, double seconds, cellos, guitars, and bass pans), whose members in turn pass the parts on to individual players. The section parts are eventually joined through a tedious process of group repetition. On warm summer evenings family members and friends gather in the yards to socialize. As bands polish their tunes in the weeks prior to Carnival, the crowds grow in size and the yards often take on the atmosphere of large outdoor fetes.

TRINIDAD IN THE NEW WORLD

Just as calypso and steel pan music are promoted as national arts in Trinidad, they are hailed as cultural symbols of shared identity and pride by many leaders of New York's Trinidadian community. But the music itself never developed in a strictly insular, "ethnic" context. New York's early Trinidadian singers and pan players were ready, indeed eager, to use their music to cross cultural boundaries in significant ways, looking to white and black American interest in their music as a means of economic support and artistic validation.

Pan players were particularly proud that they had invented the steel pan by transforming discarded metal containers into sophisticated melodic instruments and welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate, before American audiences of all backgrounds, their ability to play not only calypso but also American jazz, popular music, and European classics. Moreover, many of New York's calypsonians and pan players have maintained close ties with Trinidad, and New York remained the hub of the Trinidadian recording industry throughout most of the twentieth century.

Today many singers, pan players, and costume makers travel an international Carnival circuit that includes annual celebrations in Toronto, Ontario, Miami, Florida, and London, England, as well as those in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Brooklyn. Viewed from this transnational perspective, New York's steel pan movement is a vibrant extension, rather than an antiquated survival, of an ongoing Trinidad tradition.

TRINIDADIAN MUSIC IN NEW YORK CITY

EARLY CALYPSO IN TRINIDAD AND NEW YORK

STEEL PAN MUSIC

CALYPSO AND STEEL PAN MUSIC IN NEW YORK CARNIVAL

TRINIDAD IN THE NEW WORLD

BIBLIOGRAPHY