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There’s much more to Caribbean music than Bob Marley. The diversity of the region’s music is such that it has influenced millions around the globe and even spawned the only acoustic instrument to be invented in the 20th century. Garry Steckles keeps us in tune.
Mention the Caribbean to any reasonably savvy fan of popular music anywhere in the world, and chances are the first two words you’ll get in response are Bob Marley. The late King of Reggae’s worldwide adulation has been so overwhelming it has tended to overshadow – at least in global terms – the music of the rest of the Caribbean. Almost 30 years after his death, he continues to account for roughly half the reggae sold throughout the world, and this in the face of the Marleyesque version of the music – roots – being all but overwhelmed by dancehall in Jamaica and throughout much of the region. But there’s a lot more happening in the Caribbean than Bob Marley and reggae. From the big Spanish-speaking islands, where salsa, merengue and reggaeton are taken as seriously as football and baseball, to the mostly smaller English-speaking countries, where they dance to the beat of reggae, soca and calypso and follow the fortunes of the West Indies cricket team, to the French-speaking islands, with the zouk of Martinique and Guadeloupe and the compas of Haiti to the forefront, the music pouring out of the Caribbean is out of all proportion to the number of people living in the region. Caribbean music, in all its diverse forms, is being heard around the globe. Which is entirely appropriate, given that people from around the world have made the Caribbean their home and created this remarkable cultural smorgasbord. The music of the region may be diverse, but it has been shaped by only two major and closely linked historic occurrences: (a) the forced migration to the Caribbean of millions of African slaves; and (b) the cultural backgrounds of the colonial powers – mainly Great Britain, France and Spain – who seized control of most of the islands in the Caribbean in the years following Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World (and the ensuing genocide of the Amerindian populations who had lived in the region for thousands of years; but that’s another story). From calypso to compas, from soca to zouk, the sounds of the Caribbean have their roots in Africa, with the hugely different end results of this musical odyssey largely dependent on whether an island’s colonial masters had favoured the quadrille or something a little more Latin. Next to reggae, probably the most widely recognised Caribbean musical genres are calypso and its younger cousin, soca. Traditional calypso, it has to be said, is going through trials and tribulations very similar to roots reggae, with the young people of Trinidad and Jamaica predominantly fans of the often extreme “dancehall” variations of the respective genres. But many classic calypsonians such as the Mighty Sparrow, David Rudder, Black Stalin, Chalkdust, Calypso Rose, Gypsy, Sugar Aloes, Explainer, Superior and Baron, continue to perform and record successfully, while legends who have left us – among them Lord Kitchener, Lord Melody, Roaring Lion, Atilla the Hun, Blakie and, most recently, the Mighty Duke – are still spoken of with reverence, and their music is hugely popular with people everywhere who appreciate the subtleties and nuances of vintage calypso. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, and particularly in the English-speaking islands, calypso and soca are every bit as popular as they are in Trinidad, and world-class calypsonians – St Kitts’s four-time soca monarch King Konris is a classic example – are emerging from many of the smaller islands. Calypso’s international appeal and influence goes back a long, long way. It was hugely popular in the US in the decade or so leading up to the Second World War, with stars such as the Roaring Lion and Atilla appearing on top-rated national radio shows, and many Trinidadian bandleaders setting up shop, with considerable success, in New York City. The music’s popularity continued in the fifties, thanks in part to the success of a talented young calypsonian – and seriously gifted violinist – who performed as The Charmer, and is now much better known as Louis Farrakhan, whose mother was from St Kitts and Nevis and who was to go on to become one of America’s most talked about and frequently controversial public figures as leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan, according to all reports, was far from amused when a smooth, good-looking and talented young American calypso singer called Harry Belafonte appeared on the scene around 1953 and immediately scored mainstream chart hits singing watered-down versions of what traditional calypsonians know simply as “real calypso”. Without delving into the rights and wrongs of Belafonte’s calypso qualifications, there was no question his worldwide success brought the music of Trinidad unprecedented international exposure while, around the same time, the world was starting to hear another made-in-Trinidad form of music: the steel band. The steel pan, generally believed to be the only new acoustic musical instrument invented in the 20th century, was the result of a combination of circumstances: the banning of drums during carnival mas processions by the colonial authorities and the large-scale production of oil in Trinidad. Empty oil drums soon became a common sight in Trinidad and, before long, some ingenious musicians discovered they could make different percussion sounds by hitting the concave top of a drum with a stick. That quickly progressed into converting the tops of drums into complex musical instruments. Today, the sound of one of Trinidad’s top steel orchestras playing anything from a Mozart symphony to a Kitch classic – the late Grand Master was renowned for composing pan-friendly melodies – ranks among the world’s great musical experiences. A little further down the string of islands, the musical vibrations are equally strong but quite dramatically different. In the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the sound that rules is called zouk, and the band that has ruled zouk since its creation in the seventies is called Kassav. Exactly how the sound came about is a topic that is disputed among musicologists, although there’s a highly imprecise consensus of sorts that it evolved from a melange of popular Caribbean styles of music along with some outside influences. The supergroup Kassav not only rule the zouk scene – they’re widely credited with having created the genre, are hugely popular throughout the Caribbean and attract standing room only audiences globally, particularly when they play in cities with big Caribbean populations. Zouk is also, and not surprisingly, popular in Haiti, but the biggest of the French Caribbean nations is best-known for a complex, constantly changing style of music called compas. Like zouk, compas’s range of influences are too numerous to mention, but it betrays touches of Cuba, American swing, ballroom dancing and, of course, the African roots of the Haitians who invented the sound half a century back. Over the past 15 years or so, the Caribbean sounds that have probably had the most impact internationally, and have become wildly popular as global dance sensations, are the supercharged rhythms coming out of the region’s Spanish-speaking islands. The late-nineties film Buena Vista Social Club and its Grammy-winning soundtrack introduced millions of people around the world to the sounds of the Spanish Caribbean. And although it was strictly about Cuban musicians – carrying many of them from obscurity to international fame – it certainly didn’t do any harm to the music of Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, the region’s other two Latin giants. In Puerto Rico, despite the huge and comparatively recent popularity of reggaeton – a heady mix of dancehall reggae with rap and Latin rhythms – salsa continues to dominate the music scene. Salsa itself has benefited enormously from the migration of large numbers of Puerto Ricans to the US, mainly New York, where salsa musicians were exposed to everything from mainstream rock to Latin jazz and responded by constantly pushing the musical envelope themselves. Although it has never achieved the international success of salsa, merengue – the music of the Dominican Republic – parallels salsa’s history in many important ways. It has also been influenced by an exodus of Dominican people to the US, mainly New York and Miami, and its highly percussive and heavily rhythm driven sound has evolved into a music that lends itself to dancing in a way that can conservatively be described as exuberant. As for roots reggae, it may not rule Jamaica the way it once did, but it continues to be hugely popular internationally; many of the surviving roots groups spend most of their time touring in North America and Europe and are also big attractions in Africa and Japan. In the past couple of years alone, I’ve seen the Wailers Band performing to an enthusiastic audience in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Sly and Robbie sharing the bill with Michael Franti and Spearhead at a music festival in a remote part of Vancouver Island, Toots Hibbert delivering a supercharged set at Chicago’s House of Blues, and Jamaican veteran Pluto Shervington blowing Sean Paul off the stage at St Kitts’s annual music festival. And in Africa, where it all started, reggae continues to be hugely popular and influential, with African musicians such as Alpha Blondy, Victor Essiet, Majek Fashek and the late Lucky Dube lovingly reconstructing and embellishing on the Jamaican sounds they grew up with. |
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