Local Lives 16
08/04/13 22:10 Filed in: Festivals
The men who cheer at goats
The text for a story about Sonny Murray, racing goat breeder, published in the T&T Guardian on April 09, 2013.
By Mark Lyndersay
View an expanded gallery of images from this photo essay here and download a PDF of the published Guardian story here.
Sonny Murray first got involved with goat racing in Tobago when he was just eight years old. The sport was already well established, beginning in 1925 when the people of Tobago decided that they wanted their own races, ones that didn’t require expensive horses to run.
Murray, 65, has been around long enough to see the sport mature from humble beginnings on Chance Street, move to Rosehill, where rails were built out of bamboo and swamp wood. The races are now run at several multipurpose facilities on the island.
He has served as a president of the island’s Goat Racing Committee and continues to raise four goats for racing, one of which he’s lost to pregnancy.
“Once they have a litter, you can’t race them anymore,” Murray said. “The blood loss, you see. They never run the same way again.”
Except for that, goats run according to performance, not by gender, with three classifications, A, B, C1 and C2, introduced in 1979, which govern the groupings for races. It’s an equality that isn’t accorded to jockeys, and the small number of female riders are relegated to their own women’s only races.
For all the years he’s been a breeder and organiser of goat racing, Murray has never been a jockey.
“I couldn’t run,” he explained, “them goat fast.”
It is, on first blush, a goofy looking sport. Goats don’t care about lanes, and the riders run alongside, and most often behind their wilful charges. The goats will sometimes dig in their heels on their way to the starting gate, refusing to obey the jockeys, glaring back at them with baleful intensity.
What probably began as a parody of the moneyed pretensions of horse racing now gets taken quite seriously. There are just a few rules, and the two that spectators need to be aware of are that jockeys run barefoot and must be attached to their animals at the finish line.
The barefoot riders, attached to the goats by a regulation length nine-foot rope, chase the goats during the 100 metre run. Their job is to keep the goats roughly on the track to finish the race while keeping pace with the animals.
Murray alternates his two riders who will, altogether, run 15 races at each event, each man running a 100 metre race flat out every time.
The athletes flex their muscles before each of their races, limbering up for the challenge of keeping up with their goat. Murray supplies his riders with a fine silk shirt for their run.
“It’s a festival,” he said, “we want people to look the part.”
The big event for the Easter goat and crab racing season is run at Buccoo on the Tuesday after the end of the long weekend, adding an unofficial half-day to the vacation for the serious goat racing connoisseur, but a well attended, though smaller race event takes place at Mt Pleasant on Easter Monday. This year a night race was added to the calendar on Easter Friday night
The text for a story about Sonny Murray, racing goat breeder, published in the T&T Guardian on April 09, 2013.
By Mark Lyndersay
View an expanded gallery of images from this photo essay here and download a PDF of the published Guardian story here.
Sonny Murray first got involved with goat racing in Tobago when he was just eight years old. The sport was already well established, beginning in 1925 when the people of Tobago decided that they wanted their own races, ones that didn’t require expensive horses to run.
Murray, 65, has been around long enough to see the sport mature from humble beginnings on Chance Street, move to Rosehill, where rails were built out of bamboo and swamp wood. The races are now run at several multipurpose facilities on the island.
He has served as a president of the island’s Goat Racing Committee and continues to raise four goats for racing, one of which he’s lost to pregnancy.
“Once they have a litter, you can’t race them anymore,” Murray said. “The blood loss, you see. They never run the same way again.”
Except for that, goats run according to performance, not by gender, with three classifications, A, B, C1 and C2, introduced in 1979, which govern the groupings for races. It’s an equality that isn’t accorded to jockeys, and the small number of female riders are relegated to their own women’s only races.
For all the years he’s been a breeder and organiser of goat racing, Murray has never been a jockey.
“I couldn’t run,” he explained, “them goat fast.”
It is, on first blush, a goofy looking sport. Goats don’t care about lanes, and the riders run alongside, and most often behind their wilful charges. The goats will sometimes dig in their heels on their way to the starting gate, refusing to obey the jockeys, glaring back at them with baleful intensity.
What probably began as a parody of the moneyed pretensions of horse racing now gets taken quite seriously. There are just a few rules, and the two that spectators need to be aware of are that jockeys run barefoot and must be attached to their animals at the finish line.
The barefoot riders, attached to the goats by a regulation length nine-foot rope, chase the goats during the 100 metre run. Their job is to keep the goats roughly on the track to finish the race while keeping pace with the animals.
Murray alternates his two riders who will, altogether, run 15 races at each event, each man running a 100 metre race flat out every time.
The athletes flex their muscles before each of their races, limbering up for the challenge of keeping up with their goat. Murray supplies his riders with a fine silk shirt for their run.
“It’s a festival,” he said, “we want people to look the part.”
The big event for the Easter goat and crab racing season is run at Buccoo on the Tuesday after the end of the long weekend, adding an unofficial half-day to the vacation for the serious goat racing connoisseur, but a well attended, though smaller race event takes place at Mt Pleasant on Easter Monday. This year a night race was added to the calendar on Easter Friday night
Local Lives 15
09/02/13 15:07 Filed in: Carnival
Hanging out in the Yard of Music
An expanded version of the text for the Phase II story published in the Sunday Guardian on February 10, 2013.
By Mark Lyndersay
View an expanded gallery of images from this photo essay here and download a PDF of the published Guardian story here.
The sun is dimming on the horizon and there are disjointed tinkles of tenors and rumblings of bass drums in the Woodbrook panyard of Phase II.
It’s hours after practice was supposed to formally begin on my first day photographing the band, and I’m still to make the time zone adjustment between intent and reality that’s part of the way that Phase II gets their work done.
Dr Pat Bishop famously took ownership of calypsonian Shadow’s brilliant line, “I belong to the House of Music,” first for an exhibit of her art, and finally as a commitment to her work.
This then is the yard of that house, a relaxed, familial space that’s as much a community as it is an extended family where music is also at the centre of its every existence.
The music is created in sections before it’s assembled and rehearsed by its arranger and composer Len “Boogsie” Sharpe and his drill lieutenants.
First, the music is played at half speed, the senior musicians listening for misplaced or laggardly notes. This isn’t what casual pan fans come to the yard to hear, but if you’re patient can imagine the piece even in these component parts.
This odd little hollow at the dead-end of Hamilton Street is where Phase II has been putting together the chords that have become the defining music of an age since 1972, when six young men decided, with all the arrogance of their years, that they knew better than their elders in Starlift and struck out on their own.
The men, boys really, were Barry Howard, Rawle Mitchell, Andy Phillip, Selwyn Tarradath, Noel Seon and Sharpe, all of whom had been pursuing their own parallel dream in Starlift, often doubling back after band practice to do their own thing on the pans after everyone else had packed up to go home.
They found a home in a little clearing in overgrown bamboo and bush on the street, across the road from the home of one of their number, Selwyn Tarradath.
The original plan was to pursue fusion music, working with traditional musicians and creating their own songs created for the pan.
Part of that plan worked out, and not in the way that they imagined.
Starlift would spawn two other bands, 3rd World and Huggins Pandemonium, an all-girl band sponsored by the distributor that would often be supplemented by Starlift players.
Eventually, more of those players along with other Starlift players would drift into the compelling sphere of Phase II drawn by the musical explorations that the band encouraged and pushed away by the cussedness of the old school pannists of Starlift.
“There was a lot of ill will with the band leaving Starlift,” band manager Errol Skerritt explained, “but there was a lot of goodwill in the community."
"As more pannists dropped by, it seemed possible to field a side that could go to Panorama in 1973, where they played Sparrow's Mas in May, the first and last time that they would play a traditional calypso in competition.
In 1984, they played I Music, the first in a four-decade-long run of original compositions by Sharpe (in 1994 and 1995 the band played Ray Holman compositions), daring arrangements and sometimes controversial appearances at Panorama that have made Phase II one of the most discussed bands in the history of pan.
The band now works on a seasonal basis with 160 pannists, with 35 of them forming the professional core of the band.
At one time, many of those pannists came from within the Woodbrook community, but that’s no longer the case.
“Woodbrook is no longer a community,” lamented Skerrit.
Over the years, the band’s striking arrangements and Sharpe’s personal commitment to powerful and individualistic playing attracted musicians like Nappy Mayers and Richard Bailey to the panyard to listen and to participate.
Until this year, the band hosted an annual jazz fusion event on the Wednesday two weeks before Carnival that attracted musicians to take part in jams with the most skilful players in the band. That didn’t happen this year, but it’s something that the band hopes to return to the musical calendar soon.
In 1984, when Skerritt joined the band, there was no electricity, no running water, no bathroom facilities and Tarradath’s mother was the emergency resource for all these services.
“I remember coming into her living room and watching her look at television. The band was playing thunderously, things were shaking on the shelves and she was sitting there, stoically looking at her show,” Skerritt recalled.
“The things that people have done for this band...”
In 1986 Errol Skerritt was appointed the band’s manager, taking over from founding manager Peter Aleong. One of his first missions was replacing the band’s instruments, which they played for the first time on the Savannah stage in 1987, performing This Feeling Nice, for which they won their first Panorama title.
This year they arrived at the Queen’s Park Savannah stage to play More Love, one of dozens of Sharpe compositions the band has played over the years and emerged in first place with 273 points, a single point ahead of longtime rival Exodus.
The band must manage its instruments carefully now, a sharp contrast to the carefree days of 1986, when a tenor pan, tuned, cost an average of $900. In 2013 that cost has jumped to $5,000 and the premium pans, once left out to the elements are now stored in air-conditioned shipping containers. Skerrit cannot afford to replace all the band’s instruments anymore and pans are chromed not for style, but for longevity.
Even with a sponsor, Petrotrin, with whom the band has had an irregular relationship since 1999, there are significant cost challenges to maintaining the band’s distinctly low-key presence, a huddling of used shipping containers, a shed and some ageing bleachers the only stake that the band has put down in Hamilton Street in 41 years.
It’s a space now in the shadow of the towering presence of One Woodbrook Place, whose air-conditioning cooling towers continuously sprinkle the panyard with a fine mist of water spray when the wind shifts.
Wayne Rajnauth, who provides transport for the band’s movements to the Savannah and back, describes the cost of maintaining a large steelband succinctly.
“When I make the trip with the rostrum alone that’s a million by itself.”
Soon after he tells me this, the truck in front makes a sharp turn up to the Savannah and a pan rolls off the racks and hits the road with a sharp, ringing crash. Rajnauth brakes and we watch the pan roll across the road with a drunken wobble toward a young woman who watches it in shock.
As it arcs toward the drain, she steps forward and stops it, looking up with questioning eyes at the cabin of the truck we’re in. Rajnauth barks orders to his loading men and the pan is quickly scooped up.
Since Ray Holman’s Pan on the Move in 1972, much has changed for pan music. Far fewer traditional calyxsonians are creating songs for the steelband and the notion of bands coming to Panorama with their own compositions has become commonplace, but Sharpe’s adventurous arrangements and Phase II’s independent spirit keep it just one step apart from its competitors.
Postscript
Early on Carnival Sunday Morning, three hours after midnight and eight hours after the competition began, Petrotrin Phase II rolled its pans onto the Queen’s Park Savannah stage to perform its final arrangement of Len “Boogsie” Sharpe’s collaboration with Black Stalin, More Love.
The band emerged winner of the competition, scoring 283 points, five ahead of Neal and Massy Trinidad All Stars.
In addition to adding unpublished material to the story that appeared in the Sunday Guardian, this story also corrects an error in fact about the composer of Mas in May and the year I Music was first performed.
Phase II wins
1987 - This feeling Nice
1988 - Woman is boss
2005 - Trini gone wild
2006 - This one’s for you Bradley
2008 - Musical vengeance
2013 - More love
The band has placed second in the competition 11 times.
An expanded version of the text for the Phase II story published in the Sunday Guardian on February 10, 2013.
By Mark Lyndersay
View an expanded gallery of images from this photo essay here and download a PDF of the published Guardian story here.
The sun is dimming on the horizon and there are disjointed tinkles of tenors and rumblings of bass drums in the Woodbrook panyard of Phase II.
It’s hours after practice was supposed to formally begin on my first day photographing the band, and I’m still to make the time zone adjustment between intent and reality that’s part of the way that Phase II gets their work done.
Dr Pat Bishop famously took ownership of calypsonian Shadow’s brilliant line, “I belong to the House of Music,” first for an exhibit of her art, and finally as a commitment to her work.
This then is the yard of that house, a relaxed, familial space that’s as much a community as it is an extended family where music is also at the centre of its every existence.
The music is created in sections before it’s assembled and rehearsed by its arranger and composer Len “Boogsie” Sharpe and his drill lieutenants.
First, the music is played at half speed, the senior musicians listening for misplaced or laggardly notes. This isn’t what casual pan fans come to the yard to hear, but if you’re patient can imagine the piece even in these component parts.
This odd little hollow at the dead-end of Hamilton Street is where Phase II has been putting together the chords that have become the defining music of an age since 1972, when six young men decided, with all the arrogance of their years, that they knew better than their elders in Starlift and struck out on their own.
The men, boys really, were Barry Howard, Rawle Mitchell, Andy Phillip, Selwyn Tarradath, Noel Seon and Sharpe, all of whom had been pursuing their own parallel dream in Starlift, often doubling back after band practice to do their own thing on the pans after everyone else had packed up to go home.
They found a home in a little clearing in overgrown bamboo and bush on the street, across the road from the home of one of their number, Selwyn Tarradath.
The original plan was to pursue fusion music, working with traditional musicians and creating their own songs created for the pan.
Part of that plan worked out, and not in the way that they imagined.
Starlift would spawn two other bands, 3rd World and Huggins Pandemonium, an all-girl band sponsored by the distributor that would often be supplemented by Starlift players.
Eventually, more of those players along with other Starlift players would drift into the compelling sphere of Phase II drawn by the musical explorations that the band encouraged and pushed away by the cussedness of the old school pannists of Starlift.
“There was a lot of ill will with the band leaving Starlift,” band manager Errol Skerritt explained, “but there was a lot of goodwill in the community."
"As more pannists dropped by, it seemed possible to field a side that could go to Panorama in 1973, where they played Sparrow's Mas in May, the first and last time that they would play a traditional calypso in competition.
In 1984, they played I Music, the first in a four-decade-long run of original compositions by Sharpe (in 1994 and 1995 the band played Ray Holman compositions), daring arrangements and sometimes controversial appearances at Panorama that have made Phase II one of the most discussed bands in the history of pan.
The band now works on a seasonal basis with 160 pannists, with 35 of them forming the professional core of the band.
At one time, many of those pannists came from within the Woodbrook community, but that’s no longer the case.
“Woodbrook is no longer a community,” lamented Skerrit.
Over the years, the band’s striking arrangements and Sharpe’s personal commitment to powerful and individualistic playing attracted musicians like Nappy Mayers and Richard Bailey to the panyard to listen and to participate.
Until this year, the band hosted an annual jazz fusion event on the Wednesday two weeks before Carnival that attracted musicians to take part in jams with the most skilful players in the band. That didn’t happen this year, but it’s something that the band hopes to return to the musical calendar soon.
In 1984, when Skerritt joined the band, there was no electricity, no running water, no bathroom facilities and Tarradath’s mother was the emergency resource for all these services.
“I remember coming into her living room and watching her look at television. The band was playing thunderously, things were shaking on the shelves and she was sitting there, stoically looking at her show,” Skerritt recalled.
“The things that people have done for this band...”
In 1986 Errol Skerritt was appointed the band’s manager, taking over from founding manager Peter Aleong. One of his first missions was replacing the band’s instruments, which they played for the first time on the Savannah stage in 1987, performing This Feeling Nice, for which they won their first Panorama title.
This year they arrived at the Queen’s Park Savannah stage to play More Love, one of dozens of Sharpe compositions the band has played over the years and emerged in first place with 273 points, a single point ahead of longtime rival Exodus.
The band must manage its instruments carefully now, a sharp contrast to the carefree days of 1986, when a tenor pan, tuned, cost an average of $900. In 2013 that cost has jumped to $5,000 and the premium pans, once left out to the elements are now stored in air-conditioned shipping containers. Skerrit cannot afford to replace all the band’s instruments anymore and pans are chromed not for style, but for longevity.
Even with a sponsor, Petrotrin, with whom the band has had an irregular relationship since 1999, there are significant cost challenges to maintaining the band’s distinctly low-key presence, a huddling of used shipping containers, a shed and some ageing bleachers the only stake that the band has put down in Hamilton Street in 41 years.
It’s a space now in the shadow of the towering presence of One Woodbrook Place, whose air-conditioning cooling towers continuously sprinkle the panyard with a fine mist of water spray when the wind shifts.
Wayne Rajnauth, who provides transport for the band’s movements to the Savannah and back, describes the cost of maintaining a large steelband succinctly.
“When I make the trip with the rostrum alone that’s a million by itself.”
Soon after he tells me this, the truck in front makes a sharp turn up to the Savannah and a pan rolls off the racks and hits the road with a sharp, ringing crash. Rajnauth brakes and we watch the pan roll across the road with a drunken wobble toward a young woman who watches it in shock.
As it arcs toward the drain, she steps forward and stops it, looking up with questioning eyes at the cabin of the truck we’re in. Rajnauth barks orders to his loading men and the pan is quickly scooped up.
Since Ray Holman’s Pan on the Move in 1972, much has changed for pan music. Far fewer traditional calyxsonians are creating songs for the steelband and the notion of bands coming to Panorama with their own compositions has become commonplace, but Sharpe’s adventurous arrangements and Phase II’s independent spirit keep it just one step apart from its competitors.
Postscript
Early on Carnival Sunday Morning, three hours after midnight and eight hours after the competition began, Petrotrin Phase II rolled its pans onto the Queen’s Park Savannah stage to perform its final arrangement of Len “Boogsie” Sharpe’s collaboration with Black Stalin, More Love.
The band emerged winner of the competition, scoring 283 points, five ahead of Neal and Massy Trinidad All Stars.
In addition to adding unpublished material to the story that appeared in the Sunday Guardian, this story also corrects an error in fact about the composer of Mas in May and the year I Music was first performed.
Phase II wins
1987 - This feeling Nice
1988 - Woman is boss
2005 - Trini gone wild
2006 - This one’s for you Bradley
2008 - Musical vengeance
2013 - More love
The band has placed second in the competition 11 times.
Local Lives 14
25/02/12 18:46 Filed in: Carnival
The whip cracks
Ronald Alfred whirls the massive whip above his head with deceptive ease. The rope is heavy and more than an inch thick at the grip, but it fluently follows the circuit of his arm and the deft twists of his wrist.
The whip makes a slow arc above his head, then just before a full circle is complete, he pulls it back over itself, the force of his upper arm doubling and the finely woven end of the length of rope speeds up, eventually moving so fast that it exceeds 1,230 feet per second, creating a vacuum that results in a sonic boom, the sharp sound of a whip well cracked.
Anyone can crack a whip, given a little practice. It’s even possible to do it with a wet towel, but few people can create the kind of thunderclap explosion that Alfred does, a sound that even from several feet away, you feel as well as hear, the pressure of displaced air pushing against your eardrum insistently.
It’s just as well that Alfred is a massive bear of a man, his arms the size of a models’ legs his shoulders and chest thick with a working man’s muscles.
It also helps that he has been doing this since he was a child, the third generation of the Alfred Brothers’ Couva Jab Jab band and the oldest continuously practicing masters of the tradition of pure Jab Jab masquerade.
The band is small, but Alfred’s reputation is large. He is the go-to man for this isolated branch of Trinidad and Tobago’s culture, and he’s travelled widely cracking his whip in the service of his country.
But the whip’s mighty crack and the jingling of the bells are only the surface of this mas. There is also the aspect of the mas that Alfred describes as ‘the game.’
Two jab jabs will begin to circle each other, each angling the mirrors on their chests to dazzle each other before whaling away at each other with shorter, fighting whips. They wear no padding, and sometimes, when they confront other jabs, no shirt or mask either.
In a video captured at this year’s stickfighting finals the Original Whipmasters meet an opposing team who challenge them then steadily back off. Alfred ends up facing his son, Ronaldo, barebacked and sweating, standing still while his son hits him repeatedly.
“The blood was in my head,” he answers after I ask him why he did nothing. “If I had raise my hand against him, I might have lost control.”
Alfred’s mastery of his craft and generosity in sharing his knowledge has led to the creation of other new jab jab bands, but few challenge the band to the game, and nobody wants to fight Ronald.
“Men will come up to me, look me in the eye, hold my whip and say, we challenging the band, but we not challenging you.”
Four generations of a family’s mas
The band is gathering at Picadilly Greens for Sunday morning’s traditional mas parade. The smaller performing group, which shrinks to as few as three, father, mother and son, the group who paraded at individuals at Victoria Square just a few nights earlier, has grown to two dozen masqueraders, most portraying Jab Jabs, some in American Indian costumes.
Shalima, Alfred’s wife, has shed her previous roles as mother, seamstress and jab jab to lead the growing contingent of befeathered masqueraders in the band.
Sixty masqueraders will fill out the ranks of the band for Carnival, including three Dames Lorraine and three Midnight Robbers.
“It isn’t what we usually do,” Ronald Alfred explains, “but people want to play with us.”
It’s all made possible by quiet strength that his wife of 16 years brings to the band, stitching together more than the delicate materials of their colourful costumes.
Shalima Buckreedee moved to the quiet agricultural Couva area where the Alfred family has lived so long that there’s a “Whip Master Avenue.”
She might have caught Ronald’s eye, but the life of the jab had caught hers.
She pestered Ronald’s father, Winston Alfred, then the king of the band until he finally relented. The king finally told her on the Wednesday before Carnival, that she could play if she had a costume. Winston underestimated the quiet determination of Shalima, who had already made her costume.
From that Carnival, the all-male Alfred brothers band would include at least one woman and Shalima would become a key part of the band’s growth and success.
Her influence is everywhere, in the neat detailing of the costumes and in the familial warmth of the band when they gather.
Other women play now as well, but none of them cracks a whip like Shalima. Her son with Ronald, Ronaldo is an accomplished whipmaster himself, often cracking two whips simultaneously and their youngest boy trains with vigour.
Ronald Alfred whirls the massive whip above his head with deceptive ease. The rope is heavy and more than an inch thick at the grip, but it fluently follows the circuit of his arm and the deft twists of his wrist.
The whip makes a slow arc above his head, then just before a full circle is complete, he pulls it back over itself, the force of his upper arm doubling and the finely woven end of the length of rope speeds up, eventually moving so fast that it exceeds 1,230 feet per second, creating a vacuum that results in a sonic boom, the sharp sound of a whip well cracked.
Anyone can crack a whip, given a little practice. It’s even possible to do it with a wet towel, but few people can create the kind of thunderclap explosion that Alfred does, a sound that even from several feet away, you feel as well as hear, the pressure of displaced air pushing against your eardrum insistently.
It’s just as well that Alfred is a massive bear of a man, his arms the size of a models’ legs his shoulders and chest thick with a working man’s muscles.
It also helps that he has been doing this since he was a child, the third generation of the Alfred Brothers’ Couva Jab Jab band and the oldest continuously practicing masters of the tradition of pure Jab Jab masquerade.
The band is small, but Alfred’s reputation is large. He is the go-to man for this isolated branch of Trinidad and Tobago’s culture, and he’s travelled widely cracking his whip in the service of his country.
But the whip’s mighty crack and the jingling of the bells are only the surface of this mas. There is also the aspect of the mas that Alfred describes as ‘the game.’
Two jab jabs will begin to circle each other, each angling the mirrors on their chests to dazzle each other before whaling away at each other with shorter, fighting whips. They wear no padding, and sometimes, when they confront other jabs, no shirt or mask either.
In a video captured at this year’s stickfighting finals the Original Whipmasters meet an opposing team who challenge them then steadily back off. Alfred ends up facing his son, Ronaldo, barebacked and sweating, standing still while his son hits him repeatedly.
“The blood was in my head,” he answers after I ask him why he did nothing. “If I had raise my hand against him, I might have lost control.”
Alfred’s mastery of his craft and generosity in sharing his knowledge has led to the creation of other new jab jab bands, but few challenge the band to the game, and nobody wants to fight Ronald.
“Men will come up to me, look me in the eye, hold my whip and say, we challenging the band, but we not challenging you.”
Four generations of a family’s mas
The band is gathering at Picadilly Greens for Sunday morning’s traditional mas parade. The smaller performing group, which shrinks to as few as three, father, mother and son, the group who paraded at individuals at Victoria Square just a few nights earlier, has grown to two dozen masqueraders, most portraying Jab Jabs, some in American Indian costumes.
Shalima, Alfred’s wife, has shed her previous roles as mother, seamstress and jab jab to lead the growing contingent of befeathered masqueraders in the band.
Sixty masqueraders will fill out the ranks of the band for Carnival, including three Dames Lorraine and three Midnight Robbers.
“It isn’t what we usually do,” Ronald Alfred explains, “but people want to play with us.”
It’s all made possible by quiet strength that his wife of 16 years brings to the band, stitching together more than the delicate materials of their colourful costumes.
Shalima Buckreedee moved to the quiet agricultural Couva area where the Alfred family has lived so long that there’s a “Whip Master Avenue.”
She might have caught Ronald’s eye, but the life of the jab had caught hers.
She pestered Ronald’s father, Winston Alfred, then the king of the band until he finally relented. The king finally told her on the Wednesday before Carnival, that she could play if she had a costume. Winston underestimated the quiet determination of Shalima, who had already made her costume.
From that Carnival, the all-male Alfred brothers band would include at least one woman and Shalima would become a key part of the band’s growth and success.
Her influence is everywhere, in the neat detailing of the costumes and in the familial warmth of the band when they gather.
Other women play now as well, but none of them cracks a whip like Shalima. Her son with Ronald, Ronaldo is an accomplished whipmaster himself, often cracking two whips simultaneously and their youngest boy trains with vigour.
Local Lives 13
10/03/11 22:12 Filed in: Carnival
Catholics concerned about the state of Carnival bring a band and good example to the festival. Read More...
Local Lives 12
19/06/10 22:07 Filed in: Festivals
The Ganga Dhaaraa reflects the worship ceremonies of the Ganges River in India. Read More...
