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Tuesday, January 10, 2006
1. KITCH'S BEBOP CALYPSO
Lord Kitchener
London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956
Honest Jon's Records : 2002
[Buy It]
2. MIX UP MATRIMONY
Lord Beginner
London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956
Honest Jon's Records : 2002
[Buy It]
3. HEADING NORTH
The Mighty Terror & His Calypsonians
PYE/Mixa : 1958
Available on: Trojan Calypso Box Set
[Buy It]
4. IF YOU'RE NOT WHITE YOU'RE BLACK
Lord Kitchener
London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956
Honest Jon's Records : 2002
[Buy It]
5. TURN BACK, MELODY
Lord Melody
Melody's Top Ten
Cook : 1959
Available on: Calypso Awakening: From the Emory Cook Collection
[Buy It]
6. CALYPSO WAR
Lord Invader, Macbeth The Great, and Duke of Iron
Calypso After Midnight: Midnight Special Concert, New York City, 1946
Rounder : 1999
[Buy It]
7. SEVEN SKELETONS FOUND IN THE YARD
Lord Executor
Calypso Breakway 1927-1941
Rounder : 1990
[Buy It]
8. FOUR MILLS BROTHERS
The Lion
Roosevelt in Trinidad: Calypsos of Events, Places, and Personalities 1933-1939
Rounder : 1999
[Buy It]
9. BARBADOS CARNIVAL
Dizzy Gilliespie
Jambo, Caribe!
Verve : 1964
[Buy It]
As promised, a follow-up to MW's New Year's calypso-fest, in which we established that calypso might just be the most interesting, and most neglected, music out there - it, too, deserves a fair hearing. So, getting right down to it:
1. Every book about the British Invasion sets London's trad jazz scene up as a foil for the rough-edged rhythm and blues the Rolling Stones, Beatles, et al would soon be playing. The Brits didn't get bebop, the story goes, and so, they began trotting out one Dixieland retread after another. And yet, the West Indians who arrived in Britain after WWII found that the local jazz scene had quite a bit going for it - to see what we mean, you can (and should) download this track, which goes a long way towards dispelling the stock pre-rock narratives once and for all; eg: Post-war jazz splits into rival camps: A bop camp for all the serious, goateed hipsters who wouldn't be caught on a dance floor, and a rhythm and blues camp the swing kids could appreciate. But was bop really so undanceable? BTW, that's Lord Kitchener in the photo you'll see when you click "link," below. And if you're interested in reading more about calypso's history this is one of the better resources I've found, online or off.
2. RE: How direct and uninflected the politics of calypso's could be - how calypsonians could, and did, say things African Americans were forced to speak about in code. Compare: American fear of miscegenation against Lord Beginner's 1952 plea for outright race-mixing.
3. While we're on the subject, here's The Mighty Terror's 1958 indictment of the American South - with a footnote addressing South Africa - followed by:
4. Lord Kitchener's 1953 take on tensions between light-and-dark-skinned West Indians in Britain:
Your father is an African
Your mother may be Norwegian
You pass me without saying goodnight
Feeling you are really white....
Your negro hair is obvious
You make it more conspicuous
You use all sorts of Vaseline
To make out you are European
You speak with exaggeration
To make the greatest impression
That you were taught, apparently,
At Cambridge University....
You hate the name of Africa
The land of your great-grandfather
The country where you cannot be wrong
The home where you really belong
You'd rather be amongst the whites
Than stick up for your father's rights...
No, you cannot get away from the fact,
If you're not white, you're considered black.
5. A reminder that, like hip-hop, calypso originated as a battle medium....
6. And an example of a live calypso battle, recorded at Alan Lomax's Town Hall calypso concert, in 1946. Nifty (or not), that so many lines from the song pop up again in The Mighty Terror's "Calypso War," which was recorded twelve years later, in London, and which you can hear by scrolling down to the New Year's posts.
7. Like hip-hop, calypsos have never shied away from politics. Here are a few lines from what's supposed to be the first political calypso, which dates back to 1920
Class legislation is the order of this land
We are ruled with an iron hand
British boasts of equality
Brotherly love and fraternity
But british colored subjects must be in perpetual misery
In this colony.
And, like hip-hop, calypsos were often ripped straight from the headlines. Take Lord Executor's remarkable "Seven Skeletons," above.
8. Another early, excellent example of the bleed-through between African-American and West Indian idioms.
9. And - to bookend "Kitch's Bebop Calypso" - Dizzy Gillespie's own, emphatically danceable take on Carnival.Labels: alex, holidays
posted by Alex
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