Retro Caribbean Jazz CD Reviews by Israel and Mark Lyndersay: University of Calypso – Andy Narell and Relator (updated with other Lyndersay links)

University of Calypso – Andy Narell and Relator

Review by Mark Lyndersay

June 30, 2009.

University of Calypso, a new album by pannist Andy Narell and Lord Relator (Willard Harris) gets off to a rollicking start with Harris’ ‘Gavaskar’, a witty anecdote about West Indian cricket that the singer clearly enjoys, adding an extra ‘rrrr’ as he rolls the Indian cricketers’ names off.

It’s a song that illustrates everything that’s great about this new album. Harris and Narell are committed to delivering an authentic kaiso experience, replicating with a band of top-tier musicians, a sound that essentially died in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1980’s.

Today’s calypsonians either pursue the dance music gold mine that’s offered by soca; a few pursue the narrow sideline of music tailored for the steelband; and only a few more remain committed to the narrative storytelling style of topical music that’s on display here.

In his Relator persona, Harris is better known now as a living archive of not just vintage calypso, but also a skilled mimic of the vocal styles of the calypsonians who performed them.  He’s used that skill to deliver hilarious sketches casting vintage calypsos in the singing styles of popular pop singers and to lovingly parody the unique tics of popular calypsonians.

None of that is on this album, and that’s just as well, since seeing Relator doing it is as much fun as hearing it.  The selections that Harris has chosen to work with here reflect his preference for funny calypsos, both his own and overwhelmingly, the work of Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), represented by six numbers out of the fifteen on the album.

Harris’s reading of Kitchener’s ‘Love in the cemetery’ a hilarious early work that demonstrates Roberts’ underrated capacity to weave together a funny story with clever metre and lyric, quite apart from his later reputation for crafting intricate music for the steel orchestra.

Narell and his band provide solid, but almost invisibly respectful backing to Harris on most of these tracks, sounding for all the world like a particularly tight calypso session band from the fifties or sixties.

The band doesn’t start to seriously rip until the first instrumental, ‘Pan in harmony,’ by Kitchener and only lets loose twice more on the album, on the other two pan focused numbers, Terror’s ‘Sugar for Pan’ and ‘Steelband Music,’ also by Kitch.

On these numbers, the rich harmonies of the music, all from that unique sub-genre of calypso music known as the “pan tune” by steelband connoisseurs, offer the band an opportunity to stretch out and fill the music, with Paquito D’Rivera in particular offering challenging counterpoint to Narell’s pan runs.

University of Calypso is a delight, if an ultimately unsatisfying one. This listener was left with a powerful sense of unfinished business as the album wrapped up with the delicate charm of Kitchener’s ‘My brother, your sister.’

The collaboration between Narell and Harris is, by turns, an engaging love letter to a style and approach to calypso music that’s now almost exclusively found on scratchy vinyl albums, a revival of some almost forgotten but still very entertaining classics, an aide memoire of the greatness of Kitch’s Calypso Revue and an exploration by a more than capable jazz band of the deep musical legacy of the genre.

Spread over fifteen songs, it tantalises at all these, but accomplishes none of them definitively. The hugely entertained listener is left to hope that University of Calypso is but the first semester of a course with great potential.

Band members

Paquito D’Rivera – clarinet, alto saxophone

Andy Narell – steel pan

Mark Walker – drums

Pedro Martinez – congas, bongos, timbales

Dario Eskenazi – piano

Gregory Jones – bass instrument, bass guitar

Inor Sotolongo – percussion

Marco Araya-Correa – cuatro

Relator – vocals, guitar

Track list

1. Gavaskar (Willard Harris)

2. Love in the cemetery (Aldwyn Roberts)

3. Food prices (Willard Harris)

4. Pan in harmony (Aldwyn Roberts)

5. Eating competition (Spider)

6. Steelband music (Aldwyn Roberts)

7. My pussin (Aldwyn Roberts)

8. Sugar for pan (Fitzgerald Henry)

9. Hold onto your man (Aldwyn Roberts)

10. Peddlars (Fitzroy Alexander)

11. Bottle and spoon (Willard Harris)

12. Take yuh meat out meh rice (Aldwyn Roberts)

13. Pan on Sesame Street (Willard Harris)

14. Ugly woman (Rafael De Leon)

15. My brother your sister (Aldwyn Roberts)

Dial up andynarell.net for complete lyrics of all songs, plus photos from the rehearsals and recording sessions

And review now posted on my website here, with appropriate shout outs…and on Trinidad Guardian here…

Mark Lyndersay is a professional photographer and journalist who has worked in Trinidad and Tobago over the last thirty years. He has worked in corporate communications, editorial management and been widely published as a writer and photographer. His column, BitDepth, is the longest running column reporting on technology in the country.

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University of Calypso

Review by Israel

Andy Narell and Lord Relator’s new Cd release, ‘University of Calypso‘ hit the music aisles, June 23  2009.  The anticipation at the Woodshed has been palpable ever since the three little birds whispered the news that the recording was in the can.

The Scribe, John Stevenson, is one of the first to unwrap one of the newly minted platters.  And as expected, he has something to say about the phenomenal project that is University, one respectfully undertaken by Narell and Relator to recapture and re-interpret some Classic Calypsos.

Stevenson: Andy Narell and Relator: University of Calypso (Heads Up)
New Yorker Narell has had a life-long romance with the Trinidadian steel pan and, naturally, with calypso music.  This CD best combines the two loves.  It also deservedly introduces elder calypso statesman Lord Relator (Willard Harris), and his sweet lyricism, to a wider audience.  Gently infused with jazz improvisation, Relator meanders down nostalgic pathways to remind us of calypso’s golden age on hits such as “Gavaskar” (and “Take Yuh Meat Out Meh Rice” and) Lord Kitchener’s “Pan in Harmony”.  Paquito D’Rivera’s classy clarinet and alto sax solos are a nice bonus too.

Relator, a student of the art form and an expert interpreter of same, indulges principally in the canon of Lord Kitchener.  However, he also finds a place for himself and for Dominica’s foremost melodic mogul, the now departed but revered Spider, in the fifteen track document.  The result is an outstanding testament to the historical synergy that vintage Calypso and Jazz both share.

Narell and Relator may have set out to pay homage to the singer-songwriters of the ‘Golden Age’ of Calypso that was the 1950s and 1960s.  But with Relator as an equal partner, the more humorous tunes of the time – steeped in the vein of the double entendre, social commentary and storytelling, the backbones of this griot music – became a sub-theme all their own.

Probably, the most striking feature of University of Calypso was the poignant relevance of the lyrics of a number of the cuts, fifty plus years after they were initially penned.

The current West Indies cricket team can in no way be compared to that which Sir Garfield Sobers led back then. However, the name Gavaskar could well be replaced with any other to epitomise the drubbing that the modern squads all too often succumb to from practically every international cricketing foe.

The supermarkets of decades past were certainly not as well adorned as the markets of today that litter every Caribbean town and the remotest of villages.  But as much as shelf space has multiplied, so too have the “Food Prices. “Relatively speaking, nothing has changed.  Ask Relator.

In bygone days, the ‘ole tiefs‘ were well-known nuisances.  They were known to all.  Unfortunately, the ‘ole tiefs‘ are no longer Peddlars playing hide and seek with the beat patrol; they are invariably sophisticated con-artists who blend into the fabric of society.  Some of them look just like you or me Pinpoint them like Fitzroy Alexander’s creation “down from South” Trinidad.

Under all this great storytelling by Relator is a seamless rhythm section comprising of Dario Eskenazi (piano), Gregory Jones (bass), Mark Walker (drums) and Pedro Martinez (congas, timbales, bongos) in support of the leaders and guest soloist Paquito D’Rivera (alto sax, clarinet).  Bet you will think that the band was plucked right out of Port of Spain or San Fernando.

Narell, restrained as he is, superbly weaves and wraps his steel pans overtly around Relator’s melodies (“Hold Onto Your Man”) and on an instrumental piece  such as Pan in Harmony which he uses to emphasize the beauty of ‘the song’ made in pan heaven.  The trading between Narell and D’Rivera’s clarinet are sublime here.

Time and again, the band breaks away into a bacchanal strut, like on “My Brother Your Sister,” with D’Rivera adding silky clarinet flourishes to boot.  By the way, this is the one song on which Relator’s box guitar really comes through to good effect.

Now to some of my favourites, the songs that cracked me up to no end, “Love in the Cemetery,” “Eating Competition,” “Take Yuh Meat Out Meh Rice.”  Talk about exaggeration: ghosts who would not let the cemetery lovers be; Champion Eaters who could eat enough to feed an entire nation for a day; and the stereotypical prowess of Bajan tricksters.

Then there are the songs of advice that calypsonians tend to revel in: “Hold Onto Your Man“ on Carnival day; and never make the mistake of marrying anyone but an “Ugly Woman” if you want to be happy, blissful and gay.

And of course, the Pan!  It is no cliché than Pan and Calypso are synonymous, which is why Calypso songwriters have made it a point of duty to write with the instrument in mind.  Two exemplars came from the hand of the Grand Master himself, namely Pan in Harmony, Steel Band Music. There are others, Sugar for Pan by The Mighty Terror (Fitzgerald Henry) and Relator’s Bottle and Spoon.

University of Calypso is arguably one of the most diverse concept recordings of recent times.  Front and center is the Calypso as it was meant to be, strong on lyrics and melody but suitable for listening…and dancing.  Still for all, University is an exposé of how the Calypso works in the context of relating current events as well as being a conduit for humour, exaggerated or raunchy.  Add a cadre of musicians who have an appreciation for the nuances and sensibilities of the genre and are led by two men who breathe the vocabulary, and it is magic to the ears.

P.S.  Picture yourself then with your own copy of University of Calypso.  Go out and grab one for real, listen and concur that loads of musical mirth was had.