Tripwolf Blog

New York City, USA

I left Kingston as soon as possible after narrowly surviving the biggest shake down attempt of my life at Anchor Studios.  In the five days since my arrival in the Jamaican capital, I had used the guesthouse as my home base; conversing, interviewing, playing my guitar and waiting for appointments that I hoped would provide information. It was here that I met Selaissie, a Rastafarian from Robin’s Bay who was down in the city escorting a lady friend to the airport for her flight home.  Our rooms were stifling and cell-like, so we spent the afternoon of his departure hanging out together—me resting after my trip in from Puerto Rico, and him waiting for the hotel staff to enforce their 12:00 checkout policy.  As we got to know each other, Selaissie began to tell me his story.

He grew up poor on the streets of Kingston, never knowing his father, but had managed to escape, and now lived a quiet life out in the countryside.  He told me about his place up in St. Mary Province, that he had built with his own hands, and it sounded perfect to my weary nerves: no electricity, no traffic, no tourists.  According to his descriptions, there was just ocean, peaceful green landscapes and the occasional thunderstorm.   He invited me up as soon as my business in town was finished, and I told him I would be there before the weekend.

I had been traveling for five weeks when I met Selaissie, and during that entire time, this documentary project dominated the course of my thinking, almost like a mantra.  “The project,” as I repeated to myself hundreds of times, was all that mattered.  Even when pondering the most mundane details or errands, I would habitually ask myself which option would yield the greater benefit for my endeavor (white shirt or brown shirt; still camera or camcorder; both?).  I can’t say why my negative experience with the Kingston musicians finally made me see the folly in this line of reasoning, but somewhere along the line, the project had become like a mirage. Every time somebody asked me what I was doing down in the Caribbean, I would give a different answer.  Usually it was something about “research for a documentary on the region’s culture and history,” but the words were now ringing hollow.

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Robin’s Bay, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica

I arrived at Kingston’s Edna Manley College the next day around 12:30 p.m., which gave me enough time to meet my contact, Derrick Johnston, before making my way to nearby Anchor Studios for a 2:00 appointment with Bongos Herman. Derrick is the cousin of a colleague of mine in New York, and I figured that his experience as the college’s Senior Library Assistant would provide me with the resources I needed to better understand the conditions from which Reggae emerged.  The literature he gave me included industry publications, government surveys and music genealogy texts, and they all pointed in one direction: Mento.
The topic of this little-known traditional Jamaican music came up several times during my conversation with artist/producer Robert Ffrench the previous evening. After he stressed that Rastafarians like himself viewed Reggae as the world’s most highly “evolved” form of music, I asked him what role previous genres like Mento had played in this evolution. The response I got was that each was a necessary, divinely ordained step towards the creation of a musical force that would spread around the world to deliver its message of revolutionary self-empowerment.

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Robin’s Bay, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica

After less than a week in Puerto Rico, I flew to Kingston on a Saturday morning, and due to the discordant state of travel in the Caribbean, found no option for the trip other than connecting through Ft. Lauderdale. I went to the airport straight from a night in the town in Old San Juan, and by the time I arrived in the Jamaican capital, it was already late afternoon. The immigration officer, unlike his counterparts in Trinidad, Antigua and Puerto Rico, would not let me into the country with just the name of a hotel chain listed as my local residence, so he held on to my passport as I visited the nearby tourist information desk. I had the name of a contact at Kingston’s Edna Manley University, and when I told this to the young woman behind the counter, she suggested a moderately priced guesthouse/hotel in the Barbican neighborhood, not far from the Bob Marley Museum. Despite almost leaving behind the bag containing all my previous video footage, this detour through immigration turned out to be major stroke of luck–in both positive and negative ways–for my quest to understand the state of music in Jamaica.

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Much to my surprise (and contrary to what living in New York had led me to expect), Puerto Rico was not an easy place to find authentic live music. One reason for this is that public transportation on the island is of little use, unless you’re commuting between major tourist areas. As a result, I elected to rent a car in order to maximize my time during the brief five days before my flight to Kingston, Jamaica. Arriving around ten, I left the airport and headed southwest, to the mountainous region of Adjuntas, and the heartland of Puerto Rico’s Jibaro Music. This genre, I was to learn, originated among Spanish-born settlers who migrated from Europe in the hopes of finding cheap land that wasn’t suitable for plantations. They represented the rugged ideal of the Puerto Rican frontiersman: independent, tough-minded and strong, not unlike their counterparts in the American west. Jibaro is unique among the island’s predominant musical forms in that it emerged independent of the West African rhythms and rituals that were brought by imported slaves. However, like most Spanish music of the time, its strum patterns and mournful, chant-like singing take their roots from Spain’s centuries of Moorish occupation and acculturation. Read More »

I left Tobago after seventeen days, having gained a solid foundational understanding of the island’s African heritage, and the impact which slavery had on the Caribbean region’s developing social consciousness. I came to Antigua, which sits roughly 520 miles to the north, intending to stay for only forty-eight hours before moving on to Puerto Rico.

My flight out of Barbados was delayed, so by the time I touched down at Antigua’s V.C. Bird International Airport, all the local Internet cafes were closed, along with any store where I could purchase credit for my mobile phone. With no communication opportunities and a hobbled right foot, my options were limited, so I cut my losses, jumped into the only shuttle bus still waiting outside the terminal, and booked a night at the Airport Inn. That evening, in a noisy, lonely hotel room, I picked up a tourist information booklet and discovered, much to my embarrassment, that I had unknowingly arrived during Antigua’s Carnival season. Given the nature of my historical-cultural-musical project, I decided it would be foolish for me to not at least give the festival a look. Read More »

It’s been a busy week, and one in which I experienced more than my fair share of luck. The first instance of this came on a steaming tropical afternoon in Scarborough, the largest city of Tobago, when a young woman passed me wearing a t-shirt that commemorated the 200th anniversary (2007) of the island’s abolition of slavery. Despite being caked in sweat and the remnants of my vegetable roti lunch, I called out and asked about her shirt. As it turns out, she works for Tobago’s Administration of Community Development and Culture. When I explained to her what I was doing in the Caribbean, she overlooked my disheveled appearance and agreed to put me in contact with her superiors at the Cultural Division. My second major stroke of luck came about through the fact that my visit happens to coincide with a new administrative campaign to improve Tobagonians’ understanding of their cultural heritage. Ms. Victoria Pat Mitchell, an official in the department, called my local cell number the next morning, and gave me news that was better than anything I could have expected.

She and her colleagues in the Cultural Division’s hierarchy—including Mr. Claude Joseph and Mr. Kerry Cyrus, to whom I am also indebted for their help—had recently decided that it was time to start pushing back against America’s cultural hegemony over the region and inspire a resurgence of national pride and awareness among Tobago’s youth. As a result, she arranged not only for some local musicians to perform for me, but also for the Cultural Division’s own production crew to film the sessions, and provide me with edited copies once we finished. The following Monday, I received a thorough introduction to Tambrin Music, which Ms. Mitchell assured me was the authentic Tobagonian folk genre. I learned that the name is derived from the word “Tambourine,” the European instrument from which its circular drums get their design. Tambrin Music was invented by necessity; Read More »

After passing through immigration in Port of Spain, Trinidad, I proceeded in a sleep-deprived haze to the tourist information office and asked the woman there what my options were for finding tranquility; nice beaches and an authentic local music scene. She frowned and told me that most of Trinidad’s tourist facilities are geared towards business travelers, and the music scene is largely confined to the capital city’s frenetic nightlife. After hearing this, I gathered that Trinidad might not be the best place to start this musical adventure, so I bought a $25 one-way ticket to its sister island of Tobago. A pair of Americans I met on the flight introduced me to Marlon, a local friend of theirs who invited me to dinner and found me lodging at an inexpensive local guest house near his home in the town of Plymouth. After checking in and going for a sunset swim, I rejoined my new friends for an outdoor supper of grilled dolphin fish steaks, chopped vegetables and garlic bread.

As we relaxed in the balmy evening air, our host put on a CD shuffle mix that included some of Bob Marley and Michael Jackson’s greatest hits.  Sitting there sipping beers and listening to two of the world’s most renowned cultural icons, our conversation inevitably turned to music. We talked about how both men had achieved their fame by taking existing musical forms—Michael Jackson’s early work fused elements of Disco, R & B and Hip-Hop, while some of Bob Marley’s most beloved songs contain unmistakable characteristics of the lesser-known Jamaican Mento music—then adding their own personal vision to create something the world had never seen before. This led Shaka (not the name his mother gave him), a youthful, fifty-three year-old friend of Marlon’s, and an enthusiastic source of information about his homeland, to remark that Calypso, the national genre and most visible world-wide symbol of “T&T” culture, is still being influenced by Soca music, from which it emerged.

He told me I would soon have two opportunities to examine this phenomenon myself: the annual Tobago Heritage Festival runs July 17th-August 1st, and it provides a showcase for the island’s villages to honor their patron saints through songs, chanting and dances. Read More »

The emotions that I feel on the eve of my departure are a mixture of excitement, nervousness, curiosity and a rising sense of amused bewilderment.  This project contains many challenges, but perhaps none will be greater than conducting an effective overview of the Caribbean’s musical evolution, while avoiding generalized statements that gloss over each island’s unique experience.  The intricacies of the region’s ethnomusicology do not lend themselves well to oversimplification, but my preliminary research has taught me a few broad truisms which are relevant to the study at hand: first, due to the brutality and greed of their European conquerors, most of the islands’ original inhabitants were eradicated within eighty years of Columbus’s arrival in the new world.  As a result, the local Taino, Arawak and Carib Indian populations left almost no cultural legacy behind to impact future generations.  Second, because these Native Americans died so quickly, the new world’s colonial masters began importing African slaves en masse to work their plantations and mines.  The frequency and urgency with which this human cargo arrived reflected how much revenue the overseers hoped to squeeze from their territories, but it also had a direct impact on each island’s relative level of “Africanization.”

Consequently, Trinidad, which became a British settlement in 1797, imported far fewer slaves than Spanish plantation colonies like Cuba and Puerto Rico, and its national music style reflects this more moderate experience.  Read More »

In less than three weeks from today, I am leaving my life as a New York City writer, guitarist and high school teacher behind to embark upon an adventure of musical understanding through the Caribbean Islands. The essays that appear in this space will chronicle my experiences on the road, as I combine three of my life’s passions—travel, music and history—to journey in search of the ethnographic factors which are responsible for the region’s astonishing musical diversity. The central questions to be asked in the course of this voyage include: (1) In what ways did the combination of Native American, African and European cultures contribute to the emergence of Caribbean music; (2) How did each island’s colonial heritage (i.e. English, French, Spanish or Dutch) and economic orientation (slave plantation or settlement colony) impact the development of its own unique form of music; and (3) To what extent do these distinct traditions continue to influence each other?

My first destination is Trinidad, home to the musical styles of Calypso, Soca, Rapso and Chutney, among others. From there I will head northeast…

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