The Anguilla Summer Festival Bands Committee is prepping the stage for a much anticipated BandoRama and Band Clash competition 2015.
At a just concluded Music Development Workshop on Friday the 5th June, 2015 at La Vue at South Hill. Lennox Vanterpool, one of Anguilla’s well respected and admired musicians, made an appeal to band arrangers and musicians alike in enhancing their products and the gifts of music generally.
Mr. Vanterpool one of two music professionals that facilitated at the workshop, told the local bands to “Live Your Purpose.”
By virtue of your wide appeal and your media access, popularity and fan base, you are leaders. Equally or more important in many ways than political leaders or church leaders. This is at once a blessing and a problem because you have the stage, the microphone and the large audience. You also possess the game changer – you get to make the music that will influence and inform a very impressionable and fragile youth population.
This is an awesome responsibility against the backdrop of what we will have to determine to be our own definition of having a good time or pleasing the fans. Remember as leaders you cannot effectively lead by following your followers. You have to become thermostats and set the temperature and not merely thermometers measuring the existing degree of heat.
You see, quite apart and exponentially more important than winning a competition or selling a popular album, is saving lives and preserving the future of our country through the nurturing of our youth and the building of strong social frameworks that can encourage and sustain a rich heritage. According to Cornel West, “moral integrity, political consistency and systemic analysis must be at the center of what we think and how we act.”This I suggest,should be the mantra that guides your work.
Having our lyrics and our music take on a relevance and voice that speaks to the existential social scene is something that musicians and music as an art form has done for centuries. Slaves did it through the Negro Spirituals, Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith did it in the Blues, John Coltrane and Wynton Marsalis did it in Jazz, Rachmaninov did it in Western Art music, hymn writers like Wesley and Newton and Fanny Crosby did it through the hymns of the faith, Mahalia Jackson did it in Gospel, Bob Marley and Lucky Dube did it through Reggae and Sparrow did it through Calypso. Eminem and 2Pac did it in Rap. Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones did it in Rand B- remember USA for Africa? Ras Shorty I and Nick Friday did it with Soca.
With what societal ills will our local bands grapple? Will current issues like youth violence and hunger and sexual promiscuity, alcohol and drug use weigh heavily enough on the minds of our writers and composers and performers as to occasion a similar response? I submit that there is an inherent entertainment value already present in Soca which makes the desired message easier to communicate and easier to digest. These are deep challenges and issues which need immediate and overdue attention here in Anguilla and you hold the perfect position to make it happen.
First and foremost you must find your vision for the music you produce and then seek to meet that threshold with every song, every arrangement and with every performance. This approach highlights one very important fact however. You must be original and not an imitation. You must be original in ideas and in the way these ideas are represented in the performance.
You may question the possibility of originality and creativity in an art form that seems so saturated and imprisoned by genre-tainted walls. But we have several examples of this in our relatively young history of Caribbean music. Just remember the advent of Soca and its relationship to its Calypso parent or Dance Hall from its mother, Reggae. Through creativity and original thought with the proper mix of time, talent and effort entirely new genres and sub genres are born. Trinidadian Soca further evolved into Ragasoca and Socaparang. So in our case is “Angsoca”or “Socaxa”or “Socafolk” possible? I am sure it is. Irksome labour and perseverance with committed sacrificial effort can yield wonderful results.
How easy it used to be for even the untrained ear to differentiate between Imaginations Brass and Jam Band. The issue was not good or bad music. The fans decided that and had their rivalries on that level. The issue was how these groups and their leaders developed and moulded a vision and cut their preferred pathway relative to a unique, distinctive style and sound.
Likewise here at home we see the emergence of individual style with our bands although I would like to hear more creativity and originality and less sameness even within the same genre. For example I once heard a soca song that had one chord- for the entire song- one chord. A one chord song in soca. I am sure that there are more songs like this by now too.
We must be able to do better than that though. We certainly must, or we will end up moving in the direction of Rap. The thing is, we have Rap already. We have Rap and Rap has its own unique story and history. Soca is not Rap. The absence of a number of musical elements including harmony and melody is characteristic of Rap. Creativity therefore, must operate within the ambit of the genre – specific music. There is nothing mono – chordal to my mind about a good Soca tune.
This difference, this creativity, and the originality in music of which we speak then, must come from a position of knowledge. I cannot overemphasize the need for a dedication to intelligent listening and studying and patient acquisition of skills and the research of resources from great composers, arrangers and performers of every musical style. Wide,varied and attentive listening to the musics mentioned above can provide a good starting point for a strong composing and arranging base.
Moreover, Alan Lomax an American folklorist researched and recorded folk tunes of our Anguillian ancestors and this body of work is available for perusal and research at our public library. This is another excellent opportunity to develop your scope and to utilize the resources available to personalize and nationalize our soca sound.
It is one thing to have capable judges and a professional criteria for judging. It is also a good feeling I suppose, to command great popularity and garner rave reviews among adoring fans. It is quite another matter though, when there is hardly anything to judge by way of the musical elements. In a genre which is originally built on form and arrangement, harmony and melody: where one could readily recognize dynamics and varying pitches and discuss timbre, instrumentation and texture, it becomes a matter of respect to retain most or all of these features even while experimenting with creative change. It is even a greater national disservice when, as ministers of Soca music, the spiritual, emotional and civic matters of our island are ignored and serious national scourges and concerns become fodder for comic relief. Elements of responsibility and decency must inform your compositions and performances. Every time a band takes the stage in Anguilla’s present moral tailspin, it is incumbent upon that group to exhibit an awareness, demonstrate a concern, and through its music lead a battle that is representative of existential societal activity.
“Summing it all up, friends, I would say you will do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from Me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” (Philippians 4-8,9 The Message).
Happy music making
Lennox Vanterpool.
Mrs. Esther Roach Davis of St. Maarten was the other facilitator.
(Published without editing by The Anguillian newspaper.)
