Music: Sounds from the Caribbean

Trinidad has no concert hall and no symphony orchestra, and few visiting artists ever get to Port-of-Spain, its capital, just off the coast of Venezuela. But Trinidadians may well be the world’s most musical people. Out of prosaic newspaper headlines they created calypso songs, and out of such unmusical items as oil drums and automobile brake drums they created the world’s newest musical combo, the steelband (pronounced steelbon in Trinidad). Both were invented with sure instinct for novelty and self-expression by Trinidad’s Negro population.

Giant Mandolin. At 4 a.m. one day last week, the streets of Port-of-Spain were quiet, but an occasional lighted window showed dark figures stirring. At 5, donkey carts laden with coconuts were moving towards the market, passing sidewalks packed with quiet crowds. Finally, a clock chimed 6, and, as if unleashed, the crowds ran and danced out into the streets. Trinidad’s Carnival was under way.

Before the note of the chime had faded, the sound of a steelband grew in the distance. It was a sweet thrumming that, as it grew closer, began to resemble a giant mandolin playing a pretty tune. It was accompanied by an insistent clanging, like a syncopated firebell. Within a few minutes no fewer than 139 steelbands burst onto Port-of-Spain’s streets, gathering prancing followers as they went. The marchers strode, sensuously, with bent knees and swinging hips, sometimes six or eight clasped together in a veering line, sometimes a single marcher so excited by the music that he leaped out into an eccentric solo dance. For two days and nights the marchers and musicians strutted the streets, each band beating out its favorite road march in calypso tempo—Princess Charming, with its sweet, giddy, last phrase, Yankees Gone, with its sudden, catchy pause. Shaver Man, with its obsessive repeated phrase.

Steel Coming In. During Carnival there is scarcely a person—save a few fusty English colonials in temporary retirement on quieter islands near by—who does not “jump up” to the stimulating rhythms. In fact. Trinidad’s people want music so badly that they have gone on making it over the years despite organized restrictions.

Skin drums were long banned by the British in order to suppress African tribal traditions, but Trinidad musicians discovered they could make a kind of music with tubes of bamboo. “Bamboo-tamboo” bands competed with each other, thunking large-bore tubes on the ground and whacking smaller sticks together in the air to create a rich polyrhythmic effect; onlookers, unable to resist the compelling beat, would pound anything that would make noise. But by the early ’30s bamboo was on its way out—the police had found that the sticks were too likely to be used as weapons. Then Port-of-Spain musicians turned to garbage-can tops and biscuit tins. Someone—maybe”Spree” Simon or Aulrick Springer or “Totee” Lewis—decided to outline the parts of the tin top which had different pitches. He dented a line across, dividing the pan into segments, and found he had two different notes. The establishment of a U.S. base brought the latest refinement: oil drums. And so the steelband was born.

King Calypso. The best band of the mid-40s was The Invaders, who are credited with introducing bouncing massed “riffs” in harmony, and thus paralleling the transition of U.S. jazz from Dixieland counterpoint to the massed effects of swing. Today the steelband has swept the Caribbean islands—there is a severe short age of oil drums and automobile brake drums. The music is also penetrating the U.S. through recordings and tours by stray bands. Last week Record-Maker Emory Cook carried his microphones and tape recorders right into the parade to capture steelbands in the raw.

The bands played one kind of marching tune: calypso.* Often calypso was considered vulgar, usually with good reason. But since 1920, when someone improvised a song called Class Legislation, calypso has been a kind of musical journalism, with such topical titles as The Destruction of Hurricane Janet, What’s Federation?, The Princess Says No.

In past years calypsonians staged nightlong “wars,” attempting to outrhyme and outwit each other verse for verse, never repeating themselves as they improvised. Last week Port-of-Spain chose a Calypso King in a more sedate and less spontaneous contest. His professional name was The Mighty Sparrow. His song: Yankees Gone, hymning the imminent closing of the U.S. naval base. Excerpt:

Well the girls in town Reeling bad

No more Yankees in Trinidad

They going to close down the base for good

Them girls have to make out how they could

Is now they park up in town

In for a penny, in for a pound, Yes

Is competition for so

Trouble in town when the price drop low.

For two days and two nights the steel-bands played on without pause. In the late hours of mardi gras, bone-weary celebrants sat on curbstones, heads in arms, waiting for transportation home. But still, here and there, a clanking, humming steel-band could be heard, and its dancing members still wore expressions that seemed to say: this is our day, and this is the music that truly belongs to us. When midnight struck, the music stopped, and Trinidad’s steelbands vanished from the streets for another year.

* Nobody is sure how calypso started, or even where the word came from. It has nothing to do with the nymph who held Odysseus prisoner for seven years.