A Carnival Tabanca

I don’t know about you, but my favourite post-Carnival songs are of old and recent vintage by two of my favourite performers in any musical genre – Lord Kitchener and Bunji Garlin.

I know there are calypso/soca aficionados who can rattle off another half a dozen finely-crafted offerings by others they consider to be near equal in value. But hear me out nuh.

Forty-four years ago, Kitch sang: “The sun is descending/The moon is approaching/And the crowd is gone/It seems like nobody is interested to carry on/Well the stand is like a wooden shack after a storm/Not a pan or a mas’ is around to perform./All I can see is some broken old bottles so far/An indication the Carnival is over …”

Even those of us who witness the celebrations from some distance cannot help but experience a sense of sombre nostalgia, framed by Ed Watson’s wonderful arrangement of this Kitchener classic from 1979 – The Carnival is Over.

Then, in 2014, Bunji Garlin captured the essence of the departing festival with Carnival Tabanca: “I am a real Carnival tabanca/Hard Carnival tabanca/As soon as Carnival done this year/Well I just start catching fever/When the doctor come diagnose me/Tell meh wife me well, is not dengue/Is just delusions and delusion have/Me thinking Soca can you help me.”

Some of us who suffer mainly from Panorama tabanca could have barely sat still when Arima Angel Harps offered an Aviel Scanterbury interpretation of Bunji’s haunting melody – assembled by the young arranger almost entirely for purposes of feeding the tabanca rather than meeting the requirements of inflexible competitive parameters.

Though I usually limit my involvement in the annual event to what happens with pan and spend a little time with the kiddies in St Joseph (which I missed this year), followed by about an hour of Tunapuna mas’ at dusk on Tuesday, I keep sufficiently informed to advise general feelings about what transpired.

Comrade BC, who has much more experience than I do with all aspects of Carnival, thinks that pan remains a relatively uninfected feature of organised activity. Even my admittedly limited exposure to the other elements leads me to a similar conclusion.

Though there remain chronic maladies associated with the staging of Panorama, the musical instrument and all it means to and for us in T&T remains to me the most spectacular event of all. It is in fact, and not by mere vainglorious declaration, “the greatest show on earth.”

I have used this space in the past to allude to the flattening of the elitist curve that occurs each time we engage in the festivities – never mind the push back of the VIP and VVIP phenomenon. Pan plays a unique role in all this, even among the hot spot tourists who have been frequenting the panyards.

There have been justifiable observations about the systematic degrading of lyrical content in the calypso and the clichéd contributions of ‘mas. There are experts who can speak in more informed ways about this, but my general impression is that there has, in general terms, been no improvement (in general terms) over what prevailed in the past.

I opened by referencing Kitch and Bunji – past and present masters of their art. The standouts both of then and now have always been part of a minority. Nothing wrong with that, actually. The consumption of art is substantially a function of taste.

To me, some of the most pleasant pan moments this year came from steelbands that did not win. On January 17, for example, the Supernovas Junior Band played Canboulay in the open air in the shadow of the Lopinot valley of the Northern Range. It was a moment of poetic brilliance I was moved to capture in watercolours.

Then one evening before a scanty crowd during practice, Arima Angel Harps with two tiny pre-teens in the front row, played Carnival Tabanca, and all previous chatter and moving stopped.

Finally, as witness to the evolution of Duvone Stewart as one of the most successful pan arrangers of all time, I went to the “favourites” folder on my YouTube channel and viewed for the 100^th time, Renegades’ 2019 preliminary performance of Hookin’ Meh.

Near the end of the tune, Duvone saluted the people in the nearby high-rise apartments who were waving rags and garments through their windows. There was as much emotion in that moment as in the closing flourish (Patsy Calliste with arms raised) at the end of Black Man Feeling to Party this year. Grounds for a serious tabanca.