Guiness is good
08/06/13 21:58 Filed in: Interview
A still from Christopher Guiness' short film Captain T&T
Q: Your films seem to spend a lot of time at ground level. Does this represent a directorial decision or an effort to offer an underrepresented perspective?
CG: In Pothound it was to take you into the world of the dog, to see things from her perspective. I fell in love with the aesthetic though, so it's very present in Captain T&T.
It's intimate yet somewhat voyeuristic, the ant on the floor to the fly on the wall.
Q: Your protagonists are unlikely, but heroic nonetheless. Do you have a particular perspective on the decision to be heroic and the impulses that govern it?
CG: It's the choice to transfer compassion into action. Not necessarily to be selfless but to be considerate and act upon it. Is it innate, is it learned, situational.? All, none? This question is going to make my small brain explode.
Q: Your scenarios offer a vision of a world that's increasingly nostalgic. Do you think that today's young people, raised on computers and iPads will relate to your stories of childhood or are they targeted at adults?
CG: Yeah the nostalgic elements are targeted at adults. I try to take my viewer back to a more innocent, less complicated time.
Short films on the whole are a hard sell for Generation Z though, maybe some will appreciate them, but MMOTPG's and first person shooters are way cooler by comparison for the younger generation to care about anything else.
Q: Dogs are full scale characters in your films. What should we understand about you in noticing this?
CG: Dogs are great friends and I want to represent them in an endearing manner. Plus when you are working with small budgets you have to use every resource that is available to you, and I just happen to have some really smart, talented pups who work for chow.
Q: What's up with the cartoon interludes?
CG: They're great to create scenes my non-Hollywood budget don't allow. Plus I like the stylistic approach.
Q: Are you concerned that there might be racial concerns about the villains in your new film?
CG: Oh you mean because they are black? Nah, I cast two kids who could act their butts off. They had to deliver in the little time they had on screen. Wayne and especially Rizario were great to work with.
Q: What do you hope that viewers take from your short films?
CG: Hopefully, they don't want their 10 minutes back first! Then a little smile in the corner of their mouth would suffice.
Q: There's a powerful hope for change in your films. What, in a perfect world, if your films could flip a switch in the viewer's mind, what would that be?
CG: Be nicer. Be kinder. Be a better person. Be the hero of your life. So in any situation think to yourself what will a hero do?
He wouldn't pelt that stray dog rummaging through garbage.
He wouldn't harass the girl passing on the street and ask her to have his first born.
And he'd help that old woman take her groceries home a la the David Wears photo.
Small everyday things like that.
Or if you want to go further, get that rescue puppy from the pound if you were thinking about getting a dog, spaying and neutering the ones you already have.
Or donate books and art supplies to the Summer Heroes Foundation if you able to do so.
[End plug]
Lastly, parents should give their kids a break, support their endeavours and stop worrying if they will fail.
Neil Degrasse Tyson when speaking about children said something along the lines of "We spend the first year of their life teaching them to walk and talk, then the rest of their lives telling them to sit down and shut up."
Let little De Shaun draw on the wall, let chubby Cindy take dance if she wants to. Kids are naturally curious and want to try everything. We should let them, providing it's not hazardous to their health. How can someone figure out who they really are if someone else is making all the decisions for them?
Q: Is that really PM 1? I think you got me with that shot.
CG: No, it's a Kalloo's rental. Anyone who wants to kick it like the PM for a day, give them a call.
There's even a bar in the car.
Q: What did it cost to produce the film?
CG: Thirty something thousand, all of which went to the actors, various props, travel, catering and acquiring music. Thankfully we got some tunes complimentary. Kernal Roberts, the Amars/Nastee X and Mr. Winston "Gypsy" Peters, thank you.
Related: My Click Here story for the Sunday Arts Magzine on Captain T&T
Comments
Lil' Superman
08/06/13 21:45 Filed in: Reviews
Originally published in the Sunday Guardian's Sunday Arts Magazine for June 09, 2013
A still from Captain T&T, Christopher Guiness' new short film.
Christopher Guinness is shaping up to become our cinematic Norman Rockwell. His short films, offered for free online via Vimeo, are suffused with a warm nostalgic glow and a yearning for the way things were that would be cloying if it didn’t all ring so true.
In Guinness’ Captain T&T, a recollection of the late 70’s and 80’s, mean, wicked folks were met by courage, conviction and no small measure of innocent enthusiasm.
By now everyone in the country has seen Pothound, his almost perfectly charming story of puppy love that was voted a 2012 Vimeo Awards Finalist and won a basketful of short film awards
His newest film also features a dog, but shifts the aspirational focus to a boy who I can’t help thinking is more autobiographical memoir than fond reminiscence.
Guiness also packs in the threat of animal cruelty, fantasy filtered through a child’s eyes and giant dollops of sweetly sentimental advice on living together.
The most obvious similarity between the two, though, is the large number of worm’s eye view shots in the 12 minute film.
“In Pothound it was to take you into the world of the dog,” Guiness explained. “To see things from her perspective. I fell in love with the aesthetic though, so it's very present in Captain T&T. It's intimate yet somewhat voyeuristic, the ant on the floor to the fly on the wall.”
The filmmaker hopes that his viewers will come away moved to “Be nicer. Be kinder. Be a better person. Be the hero of your life.”
If they do, it will be because Guiness decided to fight for justice with the superpowers he was born with.
Find the new film, already a Vimeo Staff Pick, here.
Related: An extended interview with director Christopher Guiness.
A still from Captain T&T, Christopher Guiness' new short film.
Christopher Guinness is shaping up to become our cinematic Norman Rockwell. His short films, offered for free online via Vimeo, are suffused with a warm nostalgic glow and a yearning for the way things were that would be cloying if it didn’t all ring so true.
In Guinness’ Captain T&T, a recollection of the late 70’s and 80’s, mean, wicked folks were met by courage, conviction and no small measure of innocent enthusiasm.
By now everyone in the country has seen Pothound, his almost perfectly charming story of puppy love that was voted a 2012 Vimeo Awards Finalist and won a basketful of short film awards
His newest film also features a dog, but shifts the aspirational focus to a boy who I can’t help thinking is more autobiographical memoir than fond reminiscence.
Guiness also packs in the threat of animal cruelty, fantasy filtered through a child’s eyes and giant dollops of sweetly sentimental advice on living together.
The most obvious similarity between the two, though, is the large number of worm’s eye view shots in the 12 minute film.
“In Pothound it was to take you into the world of the dog,” Guiness explained. “To see things from her perspective. I fell in love with the aesthetic though, so it's very present in Captain T&T. It's intimate yet somewhat voyeuristic, the ant on the floor to the fly on the wall.”
The filmmaker hopes that his viewers will come away moved to “Be nicer. Be kinder. Be a better person. Be the hero of your life.”
If they do, it will be because Guiness decided to fight for justice with the superpowers he was born with.
Find the new film, already a Vimeo Staff Pick, here.
Related: An extended interview with director Christopher Guiness.
Remy on Five
19/05/13 13:27 Filed in: Interview
An e-mail interview with video artist and musician Remy Yearwood about his new song and video release, Five.
The story is here...
Q: You were an artist and then you were an animator and then you were a singer. Explain the migration from one to the other for me.
R: I am a multimedia artist, so it's all connected, but the chronology is actually artist and singer then videographer and animator.
I have been involved in art and music from a young age, writing and acting in school plays and musicals, choir, calypso/extempo competitions and the Kisskidee Karavan.
I started doing cartoons for newspapers in my teens (that sparked my interest in animation, I always wanted to bring my cartoons to life), then graphic design with ad agencies.
I went off to college got my degree got into video and audio production and eventually animation.
Q: Your music and your videos have always been quirky and speak to the little nuances of T&T. What inspires you to create your songs and the attendant videos?
R: The inspiration for my songs and videos come from life, my surroundings, the people and places I've seen and been and random ideas and musings that pop into my head.
The melodies, lyrics and visuals hang out together, so whichever one arrives first, the others are never far behind.
Q: How would you rate your success online versus your success in the world of performers and recordings? It seems like your work was designed to thrive on YouTube.
R: My work thrives on the internet and that's the biggest platform so I'm cool with that. As far as live performances go...slowly but surely i'm getting back into the swing of that side of things.
Q: What was the inspiration for Five?
R: I was "awake in a dream scene" when I wrote Five - the idea came, I saw the story, got the chorus, then the lyrics and I transported it into this dimension.
Q: What's next? Six? Ten? Fifty? Let us know what you're thinking.
R: Ha! Riiiight Mark. Well let's see, in We Are, I'm talking about Trinidad and Tobago's 50th anniversary. I have a song called Ten Million Woman, and then there's Five, so inadvertently I have a few songs with numbers in them. No song about SIX, a few about SEX but none about SIX. Blesssssss.
The story is here...
Q: You were an artist and then you were an animator and then you were a singer. Explain the migration from one to the other for me.
R: I am a multimedia artist, so it's all connected, but the chronology is actually artist and singer then videographer and animator.
I have been involved in art and music from a young age, writing and acting in school plays and musicals, choir, calypso/extempo competitions and the Kisskidee Karavan.
I started doing cartoons for newspapers in my teens (that sparked my interest in animation, I always wanted to bring my cartoons to life), then graphic design with ad agencies.
I went off to college got my degree got into video and audio production and eventually animation.
Q: Your music and your videos have always been quirky and speak to the little nuances of T&T. What inspires you to create your songs and the attendant videos?
R: The inspiration for my songs and videos come from life, my surroundings, the people and places I've seen and been and random ideas and musings that pop into my head.
The melodies, lyrics and visuals hang out together, so whichever one arrives first, the others are never far behind.
Q: How would you rate your success online versus your success in the world of performers and recordings? It seems like your work was designed to thrive on YouTube.
R: My work thrives on the internet and that's the biggest platform so I'm cool with that. As far as live performances go...slowly but surely i'm getting back into the swing of that side of things.
Q: What was the inspiration for Five?
R: I was "awake in a dream scene" when I wrote Five - the idea came, I saw the story, got the chorus, then the lyrics and I transported it into this dimension.
Q: What's next? Six? Ten? Fifty? Let us know what you're thinking.
R: Ha! Riiiight Mark. Well let's see, in We Are, I'm talking about Trinidad and Tobago's 50th anniversary. I have a song called Ten Million Woman, and then there's Five, so inadvertently I have a few songs with numbers in them. No song about SIX, a few about SEX but none about SIX. Blesssssss.
On the count of five
19/05/13 13:26 Filed in: Reviews
Five by Rembunction
Originally published in the Sunday Arts Magazine of the Sunday Guardian for May 19, 2013
For as long as he’s been creating, Remy Yearwood has been flying undeservedly below the radar. His work is engaging, creative and inventive and more than anything else, funny.
Anyone who followed his weekly strip, Reminabox could see the germination of a clever witty mind and it shouldn’t be surprising that one of his most best-known works is the seasonal bit of hilarity, Socks and Drawers, his take on the Christmas nightmare waiting under the tree for every Trini man too old for toys.
I can’t stop humming the chorus of his latest number, Five, which pulls together his animation, composing and compositing skills and wraps them around a warm funnybone.
“The inspiration for my songs and videos come from life, my surroundings, the people and places I've seen and been and random ideas and musings that pop into my head,” the artist now known as Rembunction said.
Yearwood posted Five to YouTube on May 05 and since then the five-minute song has begun to attract buzz and no shortage of chuckles. It’s a little bit rapso, a little bit kaiso, a little bit cartoon and truly cool fun.
He’s collaborated with Santa’s Daughter, Sparrow and Isaac Blackman but Remy Yearwood is really at his best when he looks at the craziness around him, puts two and two and one together and distills it into something that provokes a knowing smile.
Get more Rembunction here and read my interview with him here.
Originally published in the Sunday Arts Magazine of the Sunday Guardian for May 19, 2013
For as long as he’s been creating, Remy Yearwood has been flying undeservedly below the radar. His work is engaging, creative and inventive and more than anything else, funny.
Anyone who followed his weekly strip, Reminabox could see the germination of a clever witty mind and it shouldn’t be surprising that one of his most best-known works is the seasonal bit of hilarity, Socks and Drawers, his take on the Christmas nightmare waiting under the tree for every Trini man too old for toys.
I can’t stop humming the chorus of his latest number, Five, which pulls together his animation, composing and compositing skills and wraps them around a warm funnybone.
“The inspiration for my songs and videos come from life, my surroundings, the people and places I've seen and been and random ideas and musings that pop into my head,” the artist now known as Rembunction said.
Yearwood posted Five to YouTube on May 05 and since then the five-minute song has begun to attract buzz and no shortage of chuckles. It’s a little bit rapso, a little bit kaiso, a little bit cartoon and truly cool fun.
He’s collaborated with Santa’s Daughter, Sparrow and Isaac Blackman but Remy Yearwood is really at his best when he looks at the craziness around him, puts two and two and one together and distills it into something that provokes a knowing smile.
Get more Rembunction here and read my interview with him here.
Cooking with Gyazette
29/04/13 20:31 Filed in: Reviews
Cooking with Gyazette
Originally published in the Sunday Arts Magazine of the Sunday Guardian for April 28, 2013.
Straight up, Gyazette is one of the most musical local bands I’ve heard in a while and that confidence is the first thing that you really hear on their debut album, Bread.
The rhythm section, accomplished bassist Corey Wallace and lockstep tight drummer Jonathan Otway, keep the groove bubbling across the six songs on the new album while guitarists Nikolai Salcedo and John Hussain create a rich atmosphere across the album.
I’m guessing that Salcedo is responsible for the Melvin Ragin (Wah Wah Watson to Motown connoisseurs) influenced rhythm guitar that underpins the album while Hussain threads the music with shimmering riffs and solos that recall nothing less than the wildly varied, though understated work of Andy Summers with The Police.
The result is an album that’s so powerfully played that it takes a special effort to listen to the lyrics, which are more notable for the punchy lines that Salcedo delivers with strangled angst than their narrative clarity.
The band steers clear of obvious expressions of their musical influences, delivering a funk-based, rock polished album with hip, knowing arrangements that are uniquely their own.
Songs like Bread, which opens the album with a throbbing bass line seem grander when you yell their chorus lines along with Salcedo.
If you think shouting “I really want to buy some bread” is fun, then be warned that hollering “Who is the captain of this ship?” from Captain, the album’s closer and a howling, defiant update of Gypsy’s Sinking ship, is likely to get you sidelong glances from the wrong company.
That’s why it’s so puzzling that Mango, the most focused and quietly lascivious piece of writing on the album, has such a convoluted chorus line. You’d think that a song that advocated walking away from stress and troubles to, um, pick a mango, would have merited a cleaner call to response.
There isn’t a dud on the six cut album, though the funky lavway beat on Dance We do and the menacing life-as-a-horror-story snarl of Jumbie are particular standouts.
Ultimately, the real disappointment is that on an album that barely clocks 32 minutes, Gyazette didn’t feel confident enough in their musicianship to stretch out this recording of their jams a bit more.
Their only real effort at showing their skill as players comes on the seven and a half minute ballad Not Good Enough, and even then, it feels a bit tentative.
Gyazette wants to say a lot with this first album and Salcedo has no hesitation about saying it loud, but the band is glossing over its most muscular endowments for no good reason.
It’s a mystery why they have relegated their powerful playing to a supporting role when to even the most casual listener, it’s the music that’s rising so temptingly on Bread.
Gyazette is...
Nickolai Salcedo - Lead Vocalist/Guitarist/Composer
John Hussain - Guitarist
Corey Wallace - Bassist
Jonathon Otway - Drummer
Tinika Davis - Percussionist
Shirleena Zola Grandsoult - Vocalist
Mandisa Granderson - Vocalist
Tracklist for Bread
Bread
Dance we do
Jumbie
Mango
Not good enough
Captain
Originally published in the Sunday Arts Magazine of the Sunday Guardian for April 28, 2013.
Straight up, Gyazette is one of the most musical local bands I’ve heard in a while and that confidence is the first thing that you really hear on their debut album, Bread.
The rhythm section, accomplished bassist Corey Wallace and lockstep tight drummer Jonathan Otway, keep the groove bubbling across the six songs on the new album while guitarists Nikolai Salcedo and John Hussain create a rich atmosphere across the album.
I’m guessing that Salcedo is responsible for the Melvin Ragin (Wah Wah Watson to Motown connoisseurs) influenced rhythm guitar that underpins the album while Hussain threads the music with shimmering riffs and solos that recall nothing less than the wildly varied, though understated work of Andy Summers with The Police.
The result is an album that’s so powerfully played that it takes a special effort to listen to the lyrics, which are more notable for the punchy lines that Salcedo delivers with strangled angst than their narrative clarity.
The band steers clear of obvious expressions of their musical influences, delivering a funk-based, rock polished album with hip, knowing arrangements that are uniquely their own.
Songs like Bread, which opens the album with a throbbing bass line seem grander when you yell their chorus lines along with Salcedo.
If you think shouting “I really want to buy some bread” is fun, then be warned that hollering “Who is the captain of this ship?” from Captain, the album’s closer and a howling, defiant update of Gypsy’s Sinking ship, is likely to get you sidelong glances from the wrong company.
That’s why it’s so puzzling that Mango, the most focused and quietly lascivious piece of writing on the album, has such a convoluted chorus line. You’d think that a song that advocated walking away from stress and troubles to, um, pick a mango, would have merited a cleaner call to response.
There isn’t a dud on the six cut album, though the funky lavway beat on Dance We do and the menacing life-as-a-horror-story snarl of Jumbie are particular standouts.
Ultimately, the real disappointment is that on an album that barely clocks 32 minutes, Gyazette didn’t feel confident enough in their musicianship to stretch out this recording of their jams a bit more.
Their only real effort at showing their skill as players comes on the seven and a half minute ballad Not Good Enough, and even then, it feels a bit tentative.
Gyazette wants to say a lot with this first album and Salcedo has no hesitation about saying it loud, but the band is glossing over its most muscular endowments for no good reason.
It’s a mystery why they have relegated their powerful playing to a supporting role when to even the most casual listener, it’s the music that’s rising so temptingly on Bread.
Gyazette is...
Nickolai Salcedo - Lead Vocalist/Guitarist/Composer
John Hussain - Guitarist
Corey Wallace - Bassist
Jonathon Otway - Drummer
Tinika Davis - Percussionist
Shirleena Zola Grandsoult - Vocalist
Mandisa Granderson - Vocalist
Tracklist for Bread
Bread
Dance we do
Jumbie
Mango
Not good enough
Captain
Jazz Artists on the Greens 2013
25/03/13 19:36 Filed in: Reviews
Jamming at Farm Road
A review of Jazz Artists on the Greens 2013, originally published in the Trinidad Guardian on March 22, 2013.
Lord Relator, singing his popular calypso Gavaskar, was a guest performer with Andy Narell's quintet at Jazz Artists on the Greens at the WASA compound, Farm Road, St Joseph. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
Jazz Artists on the Greens (JAOTG) is, after more than ten years, something of a fixture on the performance calendar. That consistency of production quality made it more than a little surprising that the team at Production One managed to underestimate their audience by more than 30 percent, turning the five-hour show into a standing room only event for quite a large section of their audience.
The shows that I’ve attended have always struggled with the ongoing dilemma of the local jazz show, balancing crowd pleasing choices with jazz credibility, and nothing exemplified that challenge better than the set by the Xavier Strings.
I’ll be blunt here. I don’t get the Xavier Strings. But then I don’t get Bond or the Alternative Quartet either.
The sisters that lead the band, Janelle and Janine Xavier, are smart enough to realise that as beautiful as the violin is, using it as the lead instrument to reinterpret popular songs is a one-trick pony, albeit a quite symphonic one.
After vamping agreeably on the Mission Impossible theme and doing teasingly interesting work on songs by Michael Jackson and Adele they hit their stride with a delightfully fragmented version of Night in Tunisia, which made intelligent use of the band backing them.
The arrangement and spare, focused treatment of the song was so striking that it made the band’s lapse back into much less exploratory work quite irritating.
Beyond an effort to expand the range of the band with some throaty vocals from sister Janelle, a pleasant, though hardly authoritative outing, the band settled for melodic and soothing though hardly intriguing string treatments of local songs.
The Alexis Baro Latin Jazz Sextet came charging right out of the gate with Wake up Call, a brisk number that gave everyone in the band a solo flourish and established the band as the night’s firebrands.
On Coltrane’s Naima, already a haunting composition, Baro slowed the music down to the point of faltering, the sax and trumpet solos fluttering and soaring across a beat that was slowed past a funeral pace.
Dear Friend, a piece Baro dedicated to a Trini friend too ill to attend the show, began with a mournful, extended passage featuring Jeff King on the tenor sax before breaking into a wildly enthusiastic and distinctly Caribbean breakaway jam, filtered compellingly through the bandleader’s very Latino sensibilities.
Having engaged the audience with his homage to regional beats, he announced Jazz it up with a call to party, yelling “This is dancing music!”
And some did, though the funky composition proved to be more suitable for a gentle bounce than an outright boogie or wine back, at least until the band left them beatless with an extended and articulate conversation between Baro’s trumpet and King’s sax.
Closing the night was Andy Narell, backed by a strong supporting band pulled from the local jazz elite. In Raf Robertson and Theron Shaw, positioned as frontmen alongside the pannist, he had comperes capable of running the distance with him.
Narell gets a lot of stick, not for what he’s done with the national instrument, but for his cocky presumption that he knows what’s best for it.
That’s worth mentioning, because it was a very serious looking and circumspect Andy Narell who took the stage at JAOTG, fidgeting through his first two numbers and constantly throwing anxious looks at the audio mix team.
His concerns were justified. The first number, his sparkling version of Sugar for Pan from the University of Calypso album collaboration with Relator, turned out muddy, the high notes drowned by an indistinct blur of bass and drum.
The mix cleaned up, and Andy Narell settled down, though never seemed fully at ease during the performance.
He needn’t have fretted though. The work he does with the pan is confident, assured and inventive, while remaining suitably reverent to its source and inspiration. Nobody who has heard University of Calypso can doubt the pannist’s great love for T&T calypso and his first full smile of the night came as the band backed Relator on Gavaskar.
Another notable number was Raf Robertson’s earthy arrangement of Andre Tanker’s Forward Home, which, slowed down to emphasise a surprisingly angry bass line, seemed to channel all the indignation that accompanied the reclamation of Afro-Caribbean pride that the song provided the soundtrack for.
This year’s edition of JAOTG was a briskly produced five-hour production that was only marred by a shortage of seats. It’s a worthy entry in the jazz series.
A review of Jazz Artists on the Greens 2013, originally published in the Trinidad Guardian on March 22, 2013.
Lord Relator, singing his popular calypso Gavaskar, was a guest performer with Andy Narell's quintet at Jazz Artists on the Greens at the WASA compound, Farm Road, St Joseph. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
Jazz Artists on the Greens (JAOTG) is, after more than ten years, something of a fixture on the performance calendar. That consistency of production quality made it more than a little surprising that the team at Production One managed to underestimate their audience by more than 30 percent, turning the five-hour show into a standing room only event for quite a large section of their audience.
I’ll be blunt here. I don’t get the Xavier Strings. But then I don’t get Bond or the Alternative Quartet either.
The sisters that lead the band, Janelle and Janine Xavier, are smart enough to realise that as beautiful as the violin is, using it as the lead instrument to reinterpret popular songs is a one-trick pony, albeit a quite symphonic one.
After vamping agreeably on the Mission Impossible theme and doing teasingly interesting work on songs by Michael Jackson and Adele they hit their stride with a delightfully fragmented version of Night in Tunisia, which made intelligent use of the band backing them.
The arrangement and spare, focused treatment of the song was so striking that it made the band’s lapse back into much less exploratory work quite irritating.
Beyond an effort to expand the range of the band with some throaty vocals from sister Janelle, a pleasant, though hardly authoritative outing, the band settled for melodic and soothing though hardly intriguing string treatments of local songs.
On Coltrane’s Naima, already a haunting composition, Baro slowed the music down to the point of faltering, the sax and trumpet solos fluttering and soaring across a beat that was slowed past a funeral pace.
Dear Friend, a piece Baro dedicated to a Trini friend too ill to attend the show, began with a mournful, extended passage featuring Jeff King on the tenor sax before breaking into a wildly enthusiastic and distinctly Caribbean breakaway jam, filtered compellingly through the bandleader’s very Latino sensibilities.
Having engaged the audience with his homage to regional beats, he announced Jazz it up with a call to party, yelling “This is dancing music!”
And some did, though the funky composition proved to be more suitable for a gentle bounce than an outright boogie or wine back, at least until the band left them beatless with an extended and articulate conversation between Baro’s trumpet and King’s sax.
Narell gets a lot of stick, not for what he’s done with the national instrument, but for his cocky presumption that he knows what’s best for it.
That’s worth mentioning, because it was a very serious looking and circumspect Andy Narell who took the stage at JAOTG, fidgeting through his first two numbers and constantly throwing anxious looks at the audio mix team.
His concerns were justified. The first number, his sparkling version of Sugar for Pan from the University of Calypso album collaboration with Relator, turned out muddy, the high notes drowned by an indistinct blur of bass and drum.
The mix cleaned up, and Andy Narell settled down, though never seemed fully at ease during the performance.
Another notable number was Raf Robertson’s earthy arrangement of Andre Tanker’s Forward Home, which, slowed down to emphasise a surprisingly angry bass line, seemed to channel all the indignation that accompanied the reclamation of Afro-Caribbean pride that the song provided the soundtrack for.
This year’s edition of JAOTG was a briskly produced five-hour production that was only marred by a shortage of seats. It’s a worthy entry in the jazz series.
Hope Review
31/12/12 20:43 Filed in: Reviews
Craft, sweetness and hope
A review of Hope by Sheldon Blackman & The Soul Rebels, originally published in the Sunday Guardian for December 30, 2012.
On Malo Jones' The Last Days of Jonestown, I found local musicians exploring the swampy dissolution of blues rock with surprising honesty and no small success.
Sheldon Blackman’s Hope, produced with his band The Soul Rebels, finds the son of Ras Shorty I channelling his father’s vibe across a wide range of disciplines backed by a Nordic musicians. Roots soca recorded in Oslo.
It’s surreal to hear 80’s era soca being anchored with such authority by drummer Thomas Dulsrud and bassist William Pedersen Stavik.
After an odd introduction, an aural soundscape meant to be a rallying of crowds to a train ride, the band explodes into Steelband Oi, a lavway that might credibly have been played to coax a weary mas band home by a combo on its second wind late on a Carnival Tuesday afternoon.
The next number is a fusion jazz number, Reach for the sky (Mama Africa) suggests a signal from Blackman that anything can and will be permissible on this album.
While the music is wide ranging, with bluesy ballads and skanking rockers, the themes are almost painfully constrained. After so many years working abroad, much of Sheldon Blackman’s songwriting seems to be straitjacketed into the lesser themes of his father’s legacy.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because Garfield Blackman’s work was not just diverse and genre defining, it was adventurous and exploratory before it became mired in dogmatic preachiness.
The man who mastered calypso, evolved it into soca and then anchored it in conscious music with Jamoo left impossibly large shoes to fill and it might be argued that the whole Blackman family, raised to compose, sing and play, have been enthusiastically stepping out in all directions.
But this is an album about loving and losing love, irritatingly vague social concerns, maternal love and feel good aspiration.
When the album really works, it absolutely soars.
The hypnotic beauty of Ocean, with its snaky bass and seductive harmonies is a siren call of bubbling rhythms.
The title song, Hope, seems to speak to where Sheldon Blackman finds himself as an artist.
As Peder Øiseth’s wailing trumpet provides sympathetic counterpoint, Blackman sings...
“Deep within my soul I seek for direction
Hoping that in thy message I find a solution
Cause in my heart and in my soul there’s such confusion
The question and answers I can’t find them nowhere and from no one
I say oh my soul why are thou so heavy
Oh my spirit why are thou so heavy”
This is where the snide reviewer might note that Blackman has good reason to be worried, particularly after wading through the desultory old-school reggae beats of Fret not, Good Things and Miss you today, but there’s so much craft in the best work on the album that it would be absurd to dismiss it on its weakest moments.
There’s so much sweetness to the music when it meets the words in that deft lockstep of sound, meaning and mood that Blackman can channel when his head is fully in the game, but he needs to step away from the easy Marleyisms that plague this work and pull it down into the maudlin and ordinary.
When he stands boldly on the shoulders of his family’s legacy of work as he does confidently on Ocean and Hope, speaks his mind and sings his soul as he does on the achingly spare Lonely, well, then there’s more than hope, there’s little that’s more fulfilling than that.
A review of Hope by Sheldon Blackman & The Soul Rebels, originally published in the Sunday Guardian for December 30, 2012.
On Malo Jones' The Last Days of Jonestown, I found local musicians exploring the swampy dissolution of blues rock with surprising honesty and no small success.
Sheldon Blackman’s Hope, produced with his band The Soul Rebels, finds the son of Ras Shorty I channelling his father’s vibe across a wide range of disciplines backed by a Nordic musicians. Roots soca recorded in Oslo.
It’s surreal to hear 80’s era soca being anchored with such authority by drummer Thomas Dulsrud and bassist William Pedersen Stavik.
After an odd introduction, an aural soundscape meant to be a rallying of crowds to a train ride, the band explodes into Steelband Oi, a lavway that might credibly have been played to coax a weary mas band home by a combo on its second wind late on a Carnival Tuesday afternoon.
The next number is a fusion jazz number, Reach for the sky (Mama Africa) suggests a signal from Blackman that anything can and will be permissible on this album.
While the music is wide ranging, with bluesy ballads and skanking rockers, the themes are almost painfully constrained. After so many years working abroad, much of Sheldon Blackman’s songwriting seems to be straitjacketed into the lesser themes of his father’s legacy.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because Garfield Blackman’s work was not just diverse and genre defining, it was adventurous and exploratory before it became mired in dogmatic preachiness.
The man who mastered calypso, evolved it into soca and then anchored it in conscious music with Jamoo left impossibly large shoes to fill and it might be argued that the whole Blackman family, raised to compose, sing and play, have been enthusiastically stepping out in all directions.
But this is an album about loving and losing love, irritatingly vague social concerns, maternal love and feel good aspiration.
When the album really works, it absolutely soars.
The hypnotic beauty of Ocean, with its snaky bass and seductive harmonies is a siren call of bubbling rhythms.
The title song, Hope, seems to speak to where Sheldon Blackman finds himself as an artist.
As Peder Øiseth’s wailing trumpet provides sympathetic counterpoint, Blackman sings...
“Deep within my soul I seek for direction
Hoping that in thy message I find a solution
Cause in my heart and in my soul there’s such confusion
The question and answers I can’t find them nowhere and from no one
I say oh my soul why are thou so heavy
Oh my spirit why are thou so heavy”
This is where the snide reviewer might note that Blackman has good reason to be worried, particularly after wading through the desultory old-school reggae beats of Fret not, Good Things and Miss you today, but there’s so much craft in the best work on the album that it would be absurd to dismiss it on its weakest moments.
There’s so much sweetness to the music when it meets the words in that deft lockstep of sound, meaning and mood that Blackman can channel when his head is fully in the game, but he needs to step away from the easy Marleyisms that plague this work and pull it down into the maudlin and ordinary.
When he stands boldly on the shoulders of his family’s legacy of work as he does confidently on Ocean and Hope, speaks his mind and sings his soul as he does on the achingly spare Lonely, well, then there’s more than hope, there’s little that’s more fulfilling than that.
The Jonestown Review
03/12/12 22:24 Filed in: Reviews
Big bad brown cowboy in town
A review of The Last Days of Jonestown by Malo Jones, originally published in the Sunday Guardian of December 02, 2012.
Malo Jones’The Last Days of Jonestown is a quirky beast of an album. Produced in Trinidad and Tobago, composed and performed by local musicians, it’s a compellingly authentic blues album, drenched in the lean back country grooves you’d expect to find on a dusty Southern American street.
The music reaches way back for its influences, past the pop blues of bands like the Guess Who and Cream, whose interpretations appear as brief touchstones in the music, to the snarling simplicity and methodical anguish of Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters.
The drums stomp sullenly along, the bass crawls lazily alongside it and the guitar howls bloody murder at an uncaring world while Malo Jones preaches a sermon of regret, guilt and apparently unceasing personal anguish.
On first spin, the album sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly vengeful western film, but it’s even more spare than that, a stripped down, fingernail scrape of angst across a dust encrusted and weatherbeaten wooden bar.
The architects of this unlikely and accomplished channelling of American roots blues are three Trinis, Malo Jones (born Marlon Jones), songwriter, bassist and lead singer, Peter Shim, who plays virtually everything else that makes a sound and Roger Israel who guided the recording and production to completion. Marcus Rojas dropped in to do bass on some of the songs.
Jones is generous in his praise of his partners in the creation of Jonestown.
“Peter was the architect and provided all of the sonic landscapes.” Jones explained.
“When I asked for a 'desperado' intro to William Brown, Peter would produce it in a few takes. When I required a Southern rock feel for Sadie's Gone, Peter supplied chicken picking guitar and a country shuffle drum pattern. His knowledge is simply astounding.”
“Roger was largely responsible for the album's sparse sound,” the singer said of the producer.
“He helped forge the identity of the music by restraining the inclination of both Peter and I to add additional instrumentation.”
For all that, though, the album is absolutely Majo Jones’conceptual baby. The words and voice of the album are clearly his. Well, his and Clint Eastwood’s. The singer-songwriter is upfront about acknowledging as inspiration the fog of regret; the hot glow of corruption and the Old Testament justice found in films like Pale Rider and Unforgiven.
He’s also quite frank about the profound influence his two years in Tucson, between 2006 and 2008, had on him and his awakening to American roots music.
Jones is currently in Arizona, studying for his PhD.
Any doubts about what Malo Jones is up to on this album, are answered by the first video from the album of the song, The Ballad of William Brown, that’s on YouTube here.
That dark snarl of that song and the delicate acoustic flutter of Lions describe the range of Malo Jones’s work on the album, his voice an angry guttural growl on William Brown and soaring gently and hopefully on Lions.
Whether in Trinidad and Tobago or in the larger world, Jones’choice to stick so close to the roots of blues, albeit sprinkled liberally with rock and country influences and flourishes here and there, will limit his potential audience to those with an interest in those increasingly esoteric traditions.
If you’re in the least bit interested in local rock though, this is a definite must for your collection and it’s definitely worth a listen.
The Last Days of Jonestown is available on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon and on his return to Trinidad and Tobago for Christmas, Jones promises to bring some CDs for sale.
A review of The Last Days of Jonestown by Malo Jones, originally published in the Sunday Guardian of December 02, 2012.
Malo Jones’The Last Days of Jonestown is a quirky beast of an album. Produced in Trinidad and Tobago, composed and performed by local musicians, it’s a compellingly authentic blues album, drenched in the lean back country grooves you’d expect to find on a dusty Southern American street.
The music reaches way back for its influences, past the pop blues of bands like the Guess Who and Cream, whose interpretations appear as brief touchstones in the music, to the snarling simplicity and methodical anguish of Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters.
The drums stomp sullenly along, the bass crawls lazily alongside it and the guitar howls bloody murder at an uncaring world while Malo Jones preaches a sermon of regret, guilt and apparently unceasing personal anguish.
On first spin, the album sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly vengeful western film, but it’s even more spare than that, a stripped down, fingernail scrape of angst across a dust encrusted and weatherbeaten wooden bar.
The architects of this unlikely and accomplished channelling of American roots blues are three Trinis, Malo Jones (born Marlon Jones), songwriter, bassist and lead singer, Peter Shim, who plays virtually everything else that makes a sound and Roger Israel who guided the recording and production to completion. Marcus Rojas dropped in to do bass on some of the songs.
Jones is generous in his praise of his partners in the creation of Jonestown.
“Peter was the architect and provided all of the sonic landscapes.” Jones explained.
“When I asked for a 'desperado' intro to William Brown, Peter would produce it in a few takes. When I required a Southern rock feel for Sadie's Gone, Peter supplied chicken picking guitar and a country shuffle drum pattern. His knowledge is simply astounding.”
“Roger was largely responsible for the album's sparse sound,” the singer said of the producer.
“He helped forge the identity of the music by restraining the inclination of both Peter and I to add additional instrumentation.”
For all that, though, the album is absolutely Majo Jones’conceptual baby. The words and voice of the album are clearly his. Well, his and Clint Eastwood’s. The singer-songwriter is upfront about acknowledging as inspiration the fog of regret; the hot glow of corruption and the Old Testament justice found in films like Pale Rider and Unforgiven.
He’s also quite frank about the profound influence his two years in Tucson, between 2006 and 2008, had on him and his awakening to American roots music.
Jones is currently in Arizona, studying for his PhD.
Any doubts about what Malo Jones is up to on this album, are answered by the first video from the album of the song, The Ballad of William Brown, that’s on YouTube here.
That dark snarl of that song and the delicate acoustic flutter of Lions describe the range of Malo Jones’s work on the album, his voice an angry guttural growl on William Brown and soaring gently and hopefully on Lions.
Whether in Trinidad and Tobago or in the larger world, Jones’choice to stick so close to the roots of blues, albeit sprinkled liberally with rock and country influences and flourishes here and there, will limit his potential audience to those with an interest in those increasingly esoteric traditions.
If you’re in the least bit interested in local rock though, this is a definite must for your collection and it’s definitely worth a listen.
The Last Days of Jonestown is available on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon and on his return to Trinidad and Tobago for Christmas, Jones promises to bring some CDs for sale.
Skyfall Review
10/11/12 20:42 Filed in: Reviews
Third time’s the charm
Originally published in the Trinidad Guardian, November 09, 2012
In a stylishly photographed scene from Skyfall, James Bond (Daniel Craig) stalks a killer.
Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film in the long running franchise, sports a strong pedigree and not just in front of the lens. Directing is Sam Mendes, the grandson of Trinidadian Albert Mendes and guiding the screenplay, along with Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, is playwright and screenwriter John Logan, notable for the films Rango and Hugo.
Together they weave a tough-minded and gritty story about a blond secret agent, abandoned by his ruthless handler M, who is forced to come to terms with the consequences of that decision.
He’s a dapper dude, smart and deadly, with an eye for the long term plan, a highly charged sexual presence and an absolute dedication to his mission.
It says something about this film that I’m actually talking about the villain, Silva, played with mercurial wit by Javier Bardem. The Spanish actor has a grand time toying with the crazed foibles of the traditional Bond bad guy, relishing his disfigurement, his revenge and his nemesis, 007.
Sam Mendes strips a franchise, already making do with few of the traditional gimmicks that kept it running through years of lackluster scripts and by the numbers directing, to its skeletal structure to figure out just what makes it tick.
When Bond (Daniel Craig) meets his new quartermaster, the intensely nerdy and quietly stylish Q (Ben Whishaw) and gets a tracker radio and a pistol from him, he muses wryly, “Not exactly Christmas, is it?”
“What were you expecting, an exploding pen?” Q retorts with a vaguely disparaging smile. “We don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”
No, they don’t. Daniel Craig’s James Bond keeps running out of bullets, losing his gun and being forced to survive by his increasingly sharp wits, reaching for weapons as diverse as an excavator strapped to a train and shotgun shells embedded in floorboards.
Bond, in Skyfall, continues a somewhat sadistic spiral into the heart of what makes a successful double-oh agent, and after learning the penalty of love in Casino Royale and the emptiness of vengeance in Quantum of Solace, he must come to terms with his physical limits and the difficulty of being dedicated to service to the Crown.
As you can imagine, there are no surprises in the outcome of this dilemma, but there is considerable suspense wrung from an unlikely final set piece, which explains Skyfall, tells us more about Bond than we’ve ever known and puts the agent, in the final arc of his becoming Her Majesty’s deadliest bastard, in the grip of tragedy in the ruins of his past.
Mendes and Logan amuse themselves with the clichés of Bond conventions, using them as touchstones in their entertaining reimagining of the Bond mythos.
Given the way that Bond films are made (try to do a good one, try to do another good one), it’s doubtful that this arc was intended, so the structure of this film, which gathers the threads strewn though the Craig’s first two and weaves quite a quilt out of it, must represent some careful forethought on the part of the creative team.
Skyfall is Daniel Craig’s third film in the series and the third outing for any actor portraying the secret agent tends to set the tone for his time in the tux.
Goldfinger (1964), with its colourful villain and gadget laden Aston Martin DB5 defined Sean Connery’s suave and cruel assaying of the role, while The Spy who loved me (1977), featuring Jaws, cemented the nod and a wink silliness that would be the lasting legacy of Roger Moore’s contribution to the series.
Mendes leaves us at the end of Skyfall with a series reset to zero.
There’s a theme song by Adele that stands, save for its nonsensical lyrics, robustly alongside Shirley Bassey’s defining Goldfinger, an M in a manly wood panelled office, a Moneypenny and a coat rack just waiting for an artfully flung hat.
Oh, and we also have a Bond who’s been through hell in every imaginable way who’s still standing and ready to serve. Who knows where he goes next?
Originally published in the Trinidad Guardian, November 09, 2012
In a stylishly photographed scene from Skyfall, James Bond (Daniel Craig) stalks a killer.
Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film in the long running franchise, sports a strong pedigree and not just in front of the lens. Directing is Sam Mendes, the grandson of Trinidadian Albert Mendes and guiding the screenplay, along with Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, is playwright and screenwriter John Logan, notable for the films Rango and Hugo.
Together they weave a tough-minded and gritty story about a blond secret agent, abandoned by his ruthless handler M, who is forced to come to terms with the consequences of that decision.
He’s a dapper dude, smart and deadly, with an eye for the long term plan, a highly charged sexual presence and an absolute dedication to his mission.
It says something about this film that I’m actually talking about the villain, Silva, played with mercurial wit by Javier Bardem. The Spanish actor has a grand time toying with the crazed foibles of the traditional Bond bad guy, relishing his disfigurement, his revenge and his nemesis, 007.
Sam Mendes strips a franchise, already making do with few of the traditional gimmicks that kept it running through years of lackluster scripts and by the numbers directing, to its skeletal structure to figure out just what makes it tick.
When Bond (Daniel Craig) meets his new quartermaster, the intensely nerdy and quietly stylish Q (Ben Whishaw) and gets a tracker radio and a pistol from him, he muses wryly, “Not exactly Christmas, is it?”
“What were you expecting, an exploding pen?” Q retorts with a vaguely disparaging smile. “We don’t do that sort of thing anymore.”
No, they don’t. Daniel Craig’s James Bond keeps running out of bullets, losing his gun and being forced to survive by his increasingly sharp wits, reaching for weapons as diverse as an excavator strapped to a train and shotgun shells embedded in floorboards.
Bond, in Skyfall, continues a somewhat sadistic spiral into the heart of what makes a successful double-oh agent, and after learning the penalty of love in Casino Royale and the emptiness of vengeance in Quantum of Solace, he must come to terms with his physical limits and the difficulty of being dedicated to service to the Crown.
As you can imagine, there are no surprises in the outcome of this dilemma, but there is considerable suspense wrung from an unlikely final set piece, which explains Skyfall, tells us more about Bond than we’ve ever known and puts the agent, in the final arc of his becoming Her Majesty’s deadliest bastard, in the grip of tragedy in the ruins of his past.
Mendes and Logan amuse themselves with the clichés of Bond conventions, using them as touchstones in their entertaining reimagining of the Bond mythos.
Given the way that Bond films are made (try to do a good one, try to do another good one), it’s doubtful that this arc was intended, so the structure of this film, which gathers the threads strewn though the Craig’s first two and weaves quite a quilt out of it, must represent some careful forethought on the part of the creative team.
Skyfall is Daniel Craig’s third film in the series and the third outing for any actor portraying the secret agent tends to set the tone for his time in the tux.
Goldfinger (1964), with its colourful villain and gadget laden Aston Martin DB5 defined Sean Connery’s suave and cruel assaying of the role, while The Spy who loved me (1977), featuring Jaws, cemented the nod and a wink silliness that would be the lasting legacy of Roger Moore’s contribution to the series.
Mendes leaves us at the end of Skyfall with a series reset to zero.
There’s a theme song by Adele that stands, save for its nonsensical lyrics, robustly alongside Shirley Bassey’s defining Goldfinger, an M in a manly wood panelled office, a Moneypenny and a coat rack just waiting for an artfully flung hat.
Oh, and we also have a Bond who’s been through hell in every imaginable way who’s still standing and ready to serve. Who knows where he goes next?
Eat ah Food review
15/10/12 21:55 Filed in: Reviews
Eat up, people are starving
Originally published in the Sunday Guardian for October 14, 2012.
Cecelia Salazar and Debra Boucaud Mason discuss men in the play Eat ah Food.
Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
Eat ah food
Written by Ricardo Samuel
Directed by Richard Ragoobarsingh
After a sleek projected credits sequence, Eat ah food, a new local play at the Central Bank, quickly settled down to delivering what it promised in its advertising.
That was, as you might expect, scurrilous inferences, bacchanalian pronouncements and the kind of devious scheming that most folks imagine happens behind the heavy oaken doors of political activity and the equally hefty doors of the wealthy and privileged.
In the world of Ricardo Samuel’s play, the two are inextricably intertwined, mostly through crooked financial schemes and that old standby of the successful comedy, sex. Here it’s dirty and clandestine, just waiting to be discovered.
Eat ah food is a curious theatrical animal. For the whole of its first act, it indulges in everything it can muster that might be crowd pleasing.
Glen Davis, soon to be theatrically deceased and thereby become the key plot point for the production, walks through every door on the lushly decorated set nervously planning a naughty assignation with the agency.
His cameo comes to a sudden end with two offstage gunshots and he gets to go home, missing all the chaos that’s to come.
For the first half of the play, there’s all the broad posturing, screeching, wailing that you might expect, capped with the appearance of Security Minister Jackson Roberts (Nigel Auguste), sexpot supreme, armed with a very familiar speech impediment that immediately sent the audience into peals of laughter.
At the centre of all this madness, ably stirred by deaf, colour-blind and a mostly drunk household maid (Debra Boucaud Mason) and earnest Inspector Wilcox (Fabrice Barker), is Marlene Gopaul, widow, hornerwoman and the only person who seems to have a grasp on how anything works in this world.
Played by Cecelia Salazar, in what looked very much like a real cast and some very real grimace inducing pain, the character was a sedentary rock of sanity as hysteria swirled around.
Even if Ms Salazar seemed prone to reach for the low hanging titters with arch stares at the ceiling and moans of faux pleasure, her performance was the only one that didn’t seem to depend on a sliding scale of misplaced sanity to seduce the audience’s attention.
The distractions in this first salvo of the production are quite familiar. Comment with overblown satire on current affairs, the fresher the better, use first names that crop up in the news often and offer scandalous rationales for puzzling acts of public policy.
Section 34 becomes an addendum to the Kamasutra, the media are a constant irritation and people begin dropping dead everywhere. When there’s this much cocoa being danced in the sun, what else must be happening in the dark corners of the shed?
Amid this turbulence, Salazar’s Marlene Gopaul is the bacchanal voice of our worst speculations, offering the real reasons we all suspect for what’s happening in Trinidad and Tobago after swilling that fifth ill-advised glass of wine.
Armed with such perspectives and a quiver full of pithy political barbs, the plot lurches along. It’s a sex comedy. It’s a political satire. It’s a farce of mistaken identity.
And just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, the second act of the play rolls around and while the theatrical vehicle that rolls onstage looks the same, with the same trim and passengers, but it soon becomes clear that the engine’s been ripped out and completely replaced.
After that long 20 minute intermission, Eat ah food has suddenly and surprisingly become a whodunit, complete with a living room showdown that gathers all the suspects and the inputs of two formerly dead characters into the type of denouement that has never happened in any actual criminal investigation, not even when Sherlock Holmes first introduced the form.
In one sudden rocket swift shift, we’ve left behind Yes, Minister to visit Clue and Marlene Gopaul and her affairs take a firm but brisk backseat to who did what to whom, where.
It’s now Fabrice Barker’s show as everyone sits down to petulantly deny his boldly declarative proof that they’re guilty, guilty, guilty.
He’s also got the best line of the play, declaring to the cowed suspects: “Someone is going down for this murder. Someone, some two or some three.”
In the end, it’s just one, but everyone onstage is guilty of something. Is this the production’s final message? Or is it that pointing fingers is really rude?
It’s hard to say, because Eat ah food never settles down to deal with anything other than issues torn from the headlines, a perspective on crime that’s comforting to the middle-class and sex, drugs and murder.
There’s probably a good play lurking around in here on just those subjects, particularly the sex drugs and murder bits, and while it occasionally peeks out from behind the hefty furniture from Fens of Marabella, but this isn’t it.
This is a farcical confection meant to make you smile and kill some time one evening, and hopefully the performers, who all hobbled through it in one way or another, will get their turn at the table.
Originally published in the Sunday Guardian for October 14, 2012.
Cecelia Salazar and Debra Boucaud Mason discuss men in the play Eat ah Food.
Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.
Eat ah food
Written by Ricardo Samuel
Directed by Richard Ragoobarsingh
After a sleek projected credits sequence, Eat ah food, a new local play at the Central Bank, quickly settled down to delivering what it promised in its advertising.
That was, as you might expect, scurrilous inferences, bacchanalian pronouncements and the kind of devious scheming that most folks imagine happens behind the heavy oaken doors of political activity and the equally hefty doors of the wealthy and privileged.
In the world of Ricardo Samuel’s play, the two are inextricably intertwined, mostly through crooked financial schemes and that old standby of the successful comedy, sex. Here it’s dirty and clandestine, just waiting to be discovered.
Eat ah food is a curious theatrical animal. For the whole of its first act, it indulges in everything it can muster that might be crowd pleasing.
Glen Davis, soon to be theatrically deceased and thereby become the key plot point for the production, walks through every door on the lushly decorated set nervously planning a naughty assignation with the agency.
His cameo comes to a sudden end with two offstage gunshots and he gets to go home, missing all the chaos that’s to come.
For the first half of the play, there’s all the broad posturing, screeching, wailing that you might expect, capped with the appearance of Security Minister Jackson Roberts (Nigel Auguste), sexpot supreme, armed with a very familiar speech impediment that immediately sent the audience into peals of laughter.
At the centre of all this madness, ably stirred by deaf, colour-blind and a mostly drunk household maid (Debra Boucaud Mason) and earnest Inspector Wilcox (Fabrice Barker), is Marlene Gopaul, widow, hornerwoman and the only person who seems to have a grasp on how anything works in this world.
Played by Cecelia Salazar, in what looked very much like a real cast and some very real grimace inducing pain, the character was a sedentary rock of sanity as hysteria swirled around.
Even if Ms Salazar seemed prone to reach for the low hanging titters with arch stares at the ceiling and moans of faux pleasure, her performance was the only one that didn’t seem to depend on a sliding scale of misplaced sanity to seduce the audience’s attention.
The distractions in this first salvo of the production are quite familiar. Comment with overblown satire on current affairs, the fresher the better, use first names that crop up in the news often and offer scandalous rationales for puzzling acts of public policy.
Section 34 becomes an addendum to the Kamasutra, the media are a constant irritation and people begin dropping dead everywhere. When there’s this much cocoa being danced in the sun, what else must be happening in the dark corners of the shed?
Amid this turbulence, Salazar’s Marlene Gopaul is the bacchanal voice of our worst speculations, offering the real reasons we all suspect for what’s happening in Trinidad and Tobago after swilling that fifth ill-advised glass of wine.
Armed with such perspectives and a quiver full of pithy political barbs, the plot lurches along. It’s a sex comedy. It’s a political satire. It’s a farce of mistaken identity.
And just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, the second act of the play rolls around and while the theatrical vehicle that rolls onstage looks the same, with the same trim and passengers, but it soon becomes clear that the engine’s been ripped out and completely replaced.
After that long 20 minute intermission, Eat ah food has suddenly and surprisingly become a whodunit, complete with a living room showdown that gathers all the suspects and the inputs of two formerly dead characters into the type of denouement that has never happened in any actual criminal investigation, not even when Sherlock Holmes first introduced the form.
In one sudden rocket swift shift, we’ve left behind Yes, Minister to visit Clue and Marlene Gopaul and her affairs take a firm but brisk backseat to who did what to whom, where.
It’s now Fabrice Barker’s show as everyone sits down to petulantly deny his boldly declarative proof that they’re guilty, guilty, guilty.
He’s also got the best line of the play, declaring to the cowed suspects: “Someone is going down for this murder. Someone, some two or some three.”
In the end, it’s just one, but everyone onstage is guilty of something. Is this the production’s final message? Or is it that pointing fingers is really rude?
It’s hard to say, because Eat ah food never settles down to deal with anything other than issues torn from the headlines, a perspective on crime that’s comforting to the middle-class and sex, drugs and murder.
There’s probably a good play lurking around in here on just those subjects, particularly the sex drugs and murder bits, and while it occasionally peeks out from behind the hefty furniture from Fens of Marabella, but this isn’t it.
This is a farcical confection meant to make you smile and kill some time one evening, and hopefully the performers, who all hobbled through it in one way or another, will get their turn at the table.
