NCC hat-trick for Ronnie & Caro

Ronnie and Caro Mas Band have retained their National Carnival Commission (NCC) Band of the Year title for their 2018 presentation of Life’s Checkered Board.

The large band, owned by veteran soca artist Ronnie McIntosh and his wife Caroline, copped their third consecutive title when the results were announced yesterday.

The band had previously won the Medium Band of the Year title for four consecutive years between 2008 and 2011, before it grew into a large band.

In an interview at the band’s Woodbrook mas camp just before he began celebrating with staff last evening, McIntosh said while they were happy titles were not the driving force behind the band’s annual presentations.

“When we first started we were not concentrating on the titles. We won the first year we came out, but that really was not the plan,” McIntosh said.

Saying the band was focused on providing good customer service, he said most of their 1,000 masqueraders were returning customers and foreign nationals.

“Customer service is one of the things that’s making us famous and making people come back and recommend us to other people,” McIntosh said.

He also said his masqueraders did not need much prompting to stick within their sections at judging points and were synchronised for much of the parade route.

“Presentation is important. It does not mean that you have to do theatrics, drama and fireworks. It is just how you come across stage and give the judges and people an opportunity to see the band and costumes,” he said.

In second place in the large band competition was The Lost Tribe’s presentation Seven followed by Paparazzi Carnival’s Nomadik Nation.

The top three results were the same for the Port-of-Spain City Corporation’s Downtown competition for Carnival Tuesday. It was the fifth time that Ronnie and Caro had won the corporation’s Carnival Tuesday title.

In the medium band category, K2K Alliance’s We Stand United beat Republic Bank Exodus Steel Orchestra’s The Eyes of God, which was designed by former multiple Band of the Year winner Peter Minshall. In third place was Jus Wee and Friends’ presentation Wee Take Flight. Like Ronnie and Caro, the win was K2K Alliance’s third title in as many years.

NCC BAND OF THE YEAR RESULTS

Large Bands
1. Ronnie and Caro Mas Band - Life’s Checkered Board - 1275
2. The Lost Tribe - Seven - 1245
3. Paparazzi Carnival - Nomadik Nation - 1204
Medium Bands
1. K2K Alliance - We Stand United - 1270
2. Republic Bank Exodus Steel Orchestra - The Eyes of God - 1235
3. Jus Wee and Friends - Wee Take Flight - 1198
Small Bands
1. Tribal Connection Cultural Promotion - Call of D Tribes - 1192
2. Utopia Mas - Folklore: A Collection of Animal Tales - 1191
3. Belmont Exotic Stylish Sailors - Masters of the Art - 1182
Mini Bands
1. The Orginal Jab Jab - Spirit of D Whip - 1196
2. Simply Cultural - We Claiming We Space - 1184
3. Rhapsody in Blue - Blue Madda Dan Dem - 1164

Source: Trinidad Guardian

Book closes on Benidict Morgan, iconic mas man

Huddled around an old photo album in a small apartment on Nelson Street, tales flow of the extraordinary life of well-known mas man Benidict Morgan.

Two of his daughters, Annette and Christine, smile as they give story after story. It is clear how proud they are of their father, their sadness at his death at the age of 90 on August 8 mixed with the joy of so many wonderful memories.

Though he was popularly known simply as “the Original Bookma

Benidict Morgan portrays the popular Carnival character
 The Bookman at the staging of Camboulay.

n” because this was what he played for the last 20 years or so, he played all kinds of Mas throughout the course of his long life.

Christine remembers when she was a child he played the Art Gallery. “People used to stopped us all the time. On the costume there were pictures of Trinidad from long ago, the tram car, things like that. He lived for his mas. He said he played mas since he was seven,” she said.

“He played with Mac Williams, Saldenha, he played with so many bands, even Peter Minshall in Rats and River. He played sailor. He played Roman soldier. He play a mas that looked like a knight in shining armour from head to toe complete with a shield and spear.

“He was a pan man too, a Casablanca man in the early days of the band,” she added. “He had a tattoo on his arm from the band. All the old members had the same tattoo. He was proud of it.”

Christine takes out his birth certificate to show that this name is Benidict and not Benedict and that he was born on Besson Street in 1927. “His mother was Willimina Morgan, but I don’t know anything about her as she died when he was 12. After that he had to look after himself and his sister. He was a fire officer in his younger days, and then later in his life he became a prisons officer.”

Morgan was one of the few people left playing the Bookman, one of the leading figures of the Devil Band which had its heyday in our Carnival during the first decades of the 1900s.

Originally known as the mythological winged demon Beelzebub, the Bookman carries the Book of Law in one hand and a large pen in the other which he uses to record the names of the subjects of his kingdom.

In the evolution of this portrayal, Bookman characters would write the names of historical/political figures, both local and international, who they deemed to have gone to “hell” through their misdeeds.

There are just a few people left now who consistently play the Bookman. Sylvan Joseph is the main one, while Winston Daniel and his sons play a variety of Beasts, Lucifer, Satan and the Grim Reaper. There are also others who play various characters from year to year, especially the Dragon, but they are also a handful.

The Crosstown Carnival Committee has been trying to keep these traditions alive on Carnival Friday with their Dragon Festival and over the last two years tried to re-imagine Patrick Jones band, Khaki and Slate.

Notably, in 2010 there was a wonderful presentation of a number of the Devil Band characters on Carnival Sunday organised by Lari Richardson with students from UWI’s Creative Arts programme.

What does the future hold for traditions like the Bookman, will this become a figure only seen in old photos?

Or will the theatrics and splendour of this elaborate Mas find revived wings in the fertile imagination of the new generation of Mas jumbies like ten-year-old Jude Sankar, the youngest son of Mas woman Tracey Sankar, whose immediate response when he heard of Morgan’s death was: “I will play Bookman. I will play this mas for him.”

HISTORY OF BOOKMAN PORTRAYALS

Portrayals of the Devil have very early origins in our Carnival, with references as far back as 1848 in the writing of Charles Day.

By 1900 the popularity of playing the Devil was well established, though not as yet formalised into a band of characters.

A major milestone in this type of Mas came in 1906 when Patrick “Chinee” Jones, a leading Mas man and calypsonian of his time who sang under the name “Oliver Cromwell/The Lord Protector” organised the first devil band called Khaki and Slate inspired by illustrations in a copy of Dante’s Inferno.

This first Devil band included Lucifer, a Dragon, along with traditional red devils which were then renamed as imps. Over the next three decades, when this type of Mas was very popular, the number of characters increased, as did the level of drama in its portrayal.

Errol Hill records in his book Trinidad Carnival that Beelzebub/Bookman was introduced in 1923.

Jeff Henry in his book Behind the Mas writes “with a facial expression dripping with mischief and sensuality, he is an enchanting monster. His feet are hooves turned backwards. He carries an extraordinarily large book, with a large pen in hand and ink well on his heel. Bookman is Hell’s recording secretary. He wears an immaculate gown, beautifully decorated in bright colours, with sequins and embroidered gold braid. His movements are smooth and gracefully exquisite. Among his carefully chosen intricate movements are glides, spins and freezes. Occasionally he moves in slow motion. In a ethereal moment, he twirls and dips his pen in the ink well, pointing to one of the spectators and calming writing something down in his book. The action means the person he points at, or someone close to them, is going to die. The mad scramble to get out of the way when Bookman dips his pen for fresh ink is something to behold.”

Henry goes into great detail on the many characters of the Devil Band were divided into three distinct categories: Rulers/Gownmen, Beasts/Dragons and Imps. Each was introduced by a specific piece of music.

Devils bands were always led by Lucifer, then there was Beelzebub/Bookman, Satan-the Second King, Sun of the Morning and the Bride of Lucifer, who was Queen of the band and it’s only female member. There was also the Ghost figure who represented Death, and a figure known as Gentleman Jim. Next in line were the Uncaged Beasts and the Dragons known as Caged Beasts-Satan in Rage attended to by the Key Imp who unlocks the chains of the Beast. And finally there was a host of Imps whose basic costume was tight fitting with wings, tails and half masks with horns carrying an assortment of axes, scrolls, scales to weigh sin, bells, dice and cards. Imps famously portrayed elaborate rituals and dances for the Dragon to be able to cross water. Among other Devil Band characters were ones known as Billiards, the Prince of Darkness and the Wooly Man.

• Maria Nunes is a photographer and cultural activist who has a special interest in the preservation of T&T’s Carnival traditions.

source: Trinidad Guardian

Broadway to Biennial: A Carnival Timeline 1930-2015 By Claire Tancons

 "With Caribbean migration to and from European colonial capitals and North American urban centres, Carnival, and other festivals such as Junkanoo, have influenced and in turn been influenced by artistic developments and social events around a reconfigured, postcolonial, circum-Atlantic circuit.

This timeline chronicles the creation of diasporic pan-Caribbean carnivals from Harlem to Notting Hill in the pre-and immediate post-Independence era, as well as in Brooklyn and Toronto in the mid- to late 1960s.

It traces the emergence of Caribbean carnivals and festivals on theatre, dance, and Broadway stages in New York and London, in metropolitan contemporary art galleries and biennials from São Paulo to Havana to Gwangju, at the Olympics and other games since the 1980s as well as in protest and other movements, all the way to Occupy Wall Street.

 Cursory yet never compiled before, this account seeks to record the impact Carnival has had on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices as well as critical discourses on art and performance, participation and the public sphere among an increasingly global ever growing number of creative domains. It highlights the contributions of artists, critics and curators, many of whom are collaborators of En Mas’, while pointing to the way in which these events have provided benchmarks for their practice–from Lorraine O’Grady’s attendance of the Caribbean Carnival musical in Boston in the 1940s to Marlon Griffith’s experience of Peter Minshall’s Rat Race in Port-of-Spain in the 1980s.

Like most exhibitions about the Caribbean produced in the English speaking world, this timeline is predominantly about the English speaking Caribbean even as it strives to account for accomplishments in the Spanish and French speaking Caribbean as well—even as it also shows how Carnival continues to dismantle such boundaries in a post-colonial, multi-focal, global arena.

 Like En Mas’ , this time-line places a great emphasis on the Trinidad Carnival and its diasporic exports, due, in part, to the unprecedented reach of the Trinidad Carnival model—akin to, say, the recognition of Jamaican music globally.

 And like En Mas’ as a whole, it is only but a bench-mark towards further studies and future creative endeavours." (source;Claire Tancons)

For more on 'Broadway to Biennial' use this link.

A reclamation of mas

A  new mas band is set to portray West Africa and at the same time create a paradigm shift to what has come to be known as “beads and bikini” mas. 

The band, De Core T&T (sister company to De Core international based in London), will portray ‘Reclamation’. Its focus will be on West Africa with eight ethnic earth tones as well as vibrant blue, yellow and green hues. 

The sections include Entertainers, Musicians, Artizans, Gift Bearers, The Diviner (male and female), Warrior Priestess (warrior male) and Dancers.  

The band’s spokesman, Earl Thompson, said the materials used in the costumes are authentic and came from Nigeria.  He said the mas has been properly researched to produce a noteworthy and authentic product.  Thompson said the band is made up of an organisation of individuals who are concerned about the direction local mas has taken and intends to change that.

Thompson said the concept and inspiration for the 2014 portrayal came after visiting Nigeria. He noted that the essence of the diverse culture and practices were captured in each of the sections.  

“I go to Nigeria every year and what is interesting is that all of the costumes come from Nigeria. The horse whips, the talking drums, the sections decorated with cowrie shells are all authentic. The mas was well researched. We are displaying a Durbar cerebration called by a chief to display the excellence of the tribes. Reclamation is reclaiming our wealth, our creativity and our energy,” Thompson said.  

He described the costumes as relevant. He said the mas camp, which is located in Belmont, also seeks to eradicate the negative stigma on the community.

“There is a negative stigma attached to Belmont and we are trying to change that, this is why our sections are relevant. We could have been situated in Woodbrook or anywhere else but the reason why we are concentrating on Belmont is because Belmont was one of the known slave populations in Trinidad. We are strong on the belief that we need to reclaim that space in a positive way and ensure that our offering is one of substance and meaning to the people.  We want to reintroduce standards to the Carnival. We also want to reintroduce that creative energy that we once had as an offering to the world,” Thompson said. 

He said the all-inclusive band caters to both young and old masqueraders. 

“Everybody who has seen the costumes have shown interest, however we are still hearing that it’s too much clothes. People get so accustomed to the concept of the beads and bikini type of mas. But we want to put back clothes on people.  People have become too comfortable with playing themselves instead of playing mas. But we will be playing mas in every sense of the word. We want people to start wearing creative costumes again. We have quite a few young people interested in the band. We are hoping to bring out a medium band so we will see how it goes,” Thompson said.  

Registration for ‘Reclamation’ continues at the mas camp at 17 Altorf Street, Belmont.     

SOURCE: Trinidad Express 

Papua New Guinea sing sing festival

Adeola Dewis posted this fascinating video of the’ sing sing festival’ in Papaw New Guinea on her facebook group ‘Mama this is mas'. Almost immediately you can draw parallels between the traditions of these South West Pacific people and Trinidad’s carnival,  within the first 20 seconds we see a procession that resembles a mas band and a group of musicians playing what Trinidadians understand to be Tamboo Bamboo, that percussion instrument that preceded the steel pan.

This got me thinking, what are the origins of the Tamboo Bamboo? Assuming African descendants in Trinidad started using it after the banning of the skin drums, what and whose tradition influenced this choice of instrument, and how is it that the people from Papaw New Guinea have similar instruments? Not only that, the guy in the video says these traditions precede a fight over land, women, or pigs, which once again this draws parallels to the old steel pan clashes which were also over territory and at any time a woman...

These rituals of power, run deeper than we think...

Registration begins for Carnival 2014

KANYE WEST, DOPENESS, AND MAS

This Zane Lowe interview of Kanye is a fantastic, as a recording artist, West is loved and loathed by many, but say what you will, no one can deny his genius. In this interview West not only vents his frustrations about the people or organisations that seem bent on preventing him from expanding artistically and financially all his talents, but he also talks about rap and the industry and the mediocrity that now sells as the ‘dopeness’.

“Dopeness is what I like the most , dopeness, people who want to make things as dope as possible, and by default make money from it, the thing that I like the least, are people who only want to make money from things whither there dope or not and especially make money and making things as least dope as possible.” 

“There are plenty musicians that sold the fuck out and changed the art of music where people don’t hold that

to the highest level of genius anymore...If there is a high level visual artist or clothing artist they will be held at a higher level of genius than a musician because the things in music that are selling the most are the least inspired by the most part and the least genius...”

The aspirations and passions that west wants for the industry and himself and the masses that is stunted by the mediocre majority can be paralleled to contemporary mas in Trinidad and her satellite carnivals.

  Mas now lacks the creative passion, that once made it great, single celebrated genius such as Bailey, Berkley and Minshall, and their carnival presentations that not only defined the periods they were produced in and are now established part of Carnivals memory and woven into a nations history, have been replaced by big brands with multiple designers who don’t have a clue of what they are doing. There are no one eyed men in this kingdom of the blind. 

As a child the carnival magazines by Key publications educated and entertained, not the magazines today, you hear stories, see documentaries describing how George Baileys mas changed the way Afro Trinidadians saw Africa and them themselves, I listened as Minshall use the analogy of the panorama competition to explain the transformation of a mas, I learned of the splendour and opulence of the Titanic and the disaster that befell it on the savannah stage via Wayne Berkley’s Titanic. Such was the ‘dopeness’ in mas, the ability to depict, to define and defy, expressing creatively in a language that all understand in mediums we understood.

We have already seen what most of the big bands have to offer for 2014, more of the feathered sameness no dopeness or to paraphrase Kanye West, the things in mas that are selling the most are the least inspired by the most part and the least genius...

 Take in Mr West.

From Samba to carnival: Brazil's thriving African culture

The cultural heritage stems from the estimated four million slaves that were brought to the country over a 300 tear period, at least four times as many as to the United States.

Brazil was the last country to abolish the slave trade in 1888. More than half of Brazilians now identify themselves as black or of mixed race, according to the latest census.

Rio de Janeiro   now has the most famous carnival in the world attracting an estimated 1.1 million visitors to the city this year and with 5.3 million people taking part in the street parties, according to the English language newspapers the Rio Times.

Samba dancers perform during a parade celebrating
Brazil's independence from Portugal 190 years ago, at Independence park in Sao Paulo.
Samba was developed in Brazil
 by the descendants of African slaves and draws on West African influences.

After the abolition of slavery, the rituals of the Catholic former colonialists and their former slaves merged to form the origins of modern carnival, according to the Rio Times. One explanation for the origins of carnival is that it began in a Catholic church, Our Lady of the Rosary, built by slaves in the 1700s whose masters wanted them to convert to Catholicism. "The black people that were part of this congregation, most of them came from Congo," said Joao Carlos Desales, a tour guide who took CNN around Rio de Janeiro. "So they were able to organize a celebration where they would choose a man and a woman, and they would be the king and queen of Congo. That celebration turned out to be the beginning of carnival celebrated in Brazil." Even many of Brazil's Catholic saints are said to have African heritage. St Benedict, whose name is remembered in Our Lady of the Rosary church, was a slave from North Africa, who promised to devote himself to Catholicism if he became a free man, Desales said. Brazil's patron saint, Our Lady of Aparecida, a black clay statue of the Virgin Mary, was -- according to some -- found by runaway slaves on their way to Quilombo, a community of runaway slaves. Quilombo communities continue across Brazil to this day. Luis Sacopa, president of the association of Quilombos, runs a restaurant with his 17 members of his family in a piece of jungle in what is now an expensive suburb of Rio de Janeiro. His grandparents found this piece of land after escaping slavery.

Salvador, in Bahia state, northeast Brazil, is the country's third largest city
 and was the country's first colonial capital. It has strong African roots and
 is the center for Afro-Brazilian culture

The family has fought a legal battle to hold on to its land against the threat of eviction, and now has official protection for their right to remain. "Thanks to god we have had success and we're still here at the end of our dispute," said Sacopa. "Thanks to god, the family has united, we're fighting and we're winning the fight against the elite in this expensive neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro." Sacopa said he was able to resist eviction with the help of his Orixas, gods of the Yoruba people of Southwest Nigeria, Benin and Togo. In Brazil, the religion is known as Candomble, and it has a large following in some Afro-Brazilian areas, particularly Salvador in Bahia state. Also on Inside Africa: Why Tanzanians believe in witchcraft Candomble was prohibited in Brazil up until the 1950s, but In Sacopa's restaurant he serves feijoada, a typical Brazilian dish originally created by slaves from their masters' leftovers.

Orixas, deities of the Candomble religion, have been built in Salvador,
 northeastern Brazil. Salvador, which has a large Afro-Brazilian population,
 has many followers of Candomble.

 A new Historical Circuit of African Heritage opened in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 to help tourists and descendants of slaves reconnect with the past slavery. The project began after workers installing a new drainage system in the central districts of Saude and Gamboa discovered hundreds of personal objects belonging to African slaves, according to the Rio Times. Archaeologists established that this was the site of the 19th century slave trading complex, the Cais do Valongo, or Valongo Quays. Many of the discoveries are now on display in the Valongo Gardens, the newspaper reported. Another discovery of recent years is the remains of a squalid slave cemetery in the courtyard of a home in central Rio de Janeiro. Renaldo Tavares, an archeologist who has been studying the discovery, said: "These are human remains mixed in with the garbage from the city. It shows how society in the 19th century treated slaves. "Bones, pieces of ceramic, bits from construction, tiles, animal remains, bits of food, society threw all sorts of things in here. Slaves were considered garbage by society."


Ana de la Merced Guimaraes, the homeowner who discovered the bones in her courtyard, said: "When we started a reform in our house, we found all these bones. We thought it was a family grave, but there was so much we thought maybe it had been a serial killer. "But then we calmed down and talked about it and called a lawyer and the police. And he said don't worry, we aren't going to accuse you, it's probably something very old. "A neighbor told us, a long time ago, your street was a slave cemetery." Brazil's third city Salvador, in Bahia state, northeast Brazil, has some of the strongest links to Africa. Salvador was the first colonial capital of Brazil and its central district, Pelourinho, now a UNESCO world heritage site, was the New World's first slave market from 1553, according to UNESCO.

SOURCE:Shasta Darlington  CNN

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YORUBA AFRICAN ORISHAS

Yoruba Orishas, the name used to signify gods/goddesses, are of the IFA religion which finds its origins in Nigeria, West Africa. The religion has since spread to Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, the Caribbean Islands and various other regions around the globe due to the expansion the the slave trade hundreds of years ago. Each representation of the Orishas was styled, photographed derived by the creative mind of James C. Lewis. Feel free to check out more of his work at noire3000studios.com

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Making Mas Man— End of a surreal journey

Peter Minshall works on the headpieces for his 1993 band Donkey Derby.
 PHOTO: MARK LYNDERSAY

DALTON NARINE

It happened on Ash Thursday the year he gave us his last mas. The 2006 Carnival was as good a hurrah as befits anyone like him. As cultivated and bombastic, strong-willed and emotive, combative and refreshing as perhaps any artist who shapes art only to distort it to make you realise you’re gaping at yourself in a mirror of horror. Even at your ownpristine, naked beauty. The Eden of self. For, you, too, are God.  And across time, we never got to figure out who HE was, whom he had become, though Peter Minshall himself says it all. “On Carnival Tuesday night, Tribe is coming up, and this is where I observe a fact of modern Carnival life that I had not even known to exist. It was like a juggernaut, a cavalcade of 40-foot trailer trucks, about 20 of them, huge, towering above me, and ten of them were bars for the all-inclusive consumption of alcohol; and ten more were the shower sprinklers to keep the delicate folk cool on a hot tropical day; and ten more were food, and if there were any more left over they were in between those for music. “And they were going by like if it was the desert war again and they had an enemy to conquer. These huge trucks, and in between these chasms created by the trucks were these little sprinklings of people with a few little beads and a few little feathers. “I thought, my God, I had no idea that this was where de ting reach. Where the form had so taken over that it has absolutely eradicated the substance.”

He relaxes a little and eases back onto the stool, for he’s in a crouch, his eyes penetrating mine and waiting for them to breathe again. The pause lingers, it seems, for as long as the annual Memorial Park, Anthony-Quinn-in-The-long-Wait period before your band is waved onto the Drag. “It was biblical, this march of thundering trucks, the technology and the mechanism. Huge. It was quite spectacular in its own way. I felt like a little fella in a pirogue, you know, and the waves and the wake ...” He cups his chin in the palm of his hand, eyes straying on an old costume leaning against a wall across by so. And then it came, the wave blowing us both back in the day.  Oui foute! “I didn’t know it was so.” That scene in the Callaloo mas camp is a telling dialogue of an old actor like Brando, who had come back from irrelevance to write his own epitaph at the end of Apocalypse Now even as he was spitting robber talk flecked with mimicry from the Bookman from Hell. No one will ever dismiss Brando’s brief role in a long, harrowing tale. And I will forever recall that epic summation and distillation of where Minshall had been and where the mas was heading. He didn’t know it was so.

Director of 'Mas Man' Dalton Narine

I didn’t know either that the cogs in the mas that turned the wheels had long been worn smooth when I arrived at offices, public and private, cap in hand, a vagrant filmmaker on the prowl for change. “A documentary about Minshall?” she said. “What if he doesn’t bring another band?” Well, he designed 26, and, no, it’s a film about Minshall. I’d learned that from  Pennelope Beckles. “They’ll take you seriously if you call it a film.” The minister made a phone call and redirected the team to T&T Film Company, the only foundation for moral support, as it turned out. It wasn’t a grand largesse, per se, but it spirited us out of a pinch. I’m reminded of the line by sculptor Anna Serrao, who made mas with galvanise, our own metal, as Minshall termed it. “Not so much for how it looks but how it sounds in the rainy season. The dropping of the rain on it is not so far from the din and the melody of a pan. Such sweet shelter.” Minshall could talk, yes. But Serrao didn’t see it like that. “This is hard mas. Hard. It’s like we have to find a rationale for our craziness.” Those were hard, hard days, too, for the team—Benedict Joseph behind the camera and Danielle Dieffenthaller hosting meetings at her home to pitch for interviewees and strategise. We never did meet the ordinary woman who walked around with a fount of knowledge about the mas. Nor did we locate the John John villager who had planted in her front yard a standard from her Calabash character to ward off evil forces. What a story, she! And the times were especially not galvanising for me, because I’d always been the point man, going brave into the jungle —wary of the enemy, the rest of the troops at safe distance to the back. Every office settled in the bush. As example, an officer chose my pitching opportunity to talk randomly about things in general. Money may have been my objective, but for sure not his object or thing that he could hand out without stretching the ole talk, ad infinitum. After four trips to the “bank”, I eventually caught on to the ritual. 

The spirit broken, you become a sycophant because you must make nice, in letters, in person, on the phone. In the bush, where you’re held captive. Unless you realise it and end up receding back to reality. So, it wasn’t difficult making mas man. But it was excruciatingly painful doing so with the bank’s money. And myriad other forms of financing so that you’re able to skip from an interview session on the east coast of America to the west, where Hollywood treated you like a man. A filmmaker. Don Mischer, an exceedingly gracious and famous producer who ran the Atlanta and Salt Lake City Olympic Games, excused himself from a meeting in the midst of planning an entertainment show for the Super Bowl, American football’s World Cup, to chat for an hour about Minshall and how Minsh virtually ran meetings about the opening ceremonies. “All Peter had to say was, ‘Imagine, if you will,’ and he held us in the palm of his hands.”

Then you look around when he takes a call and count off 14 Emmys decorating the office. The guy I hired as camera operator, himself a filmmaker, looked at it as another ornate set, but with the Hollywood sign gracing the hill, yet bleeding through a window as backdrop. 

I had come from a good vibe in Greenwich Village, New York, where we had coupled two major interviews in a restaurant setting. The scenario unspooled radically well between the theatre director and the university professor, the only odd take on that cold morning  arriving unscripted from a cop who was about to ticket the rental car. And it’s all on video, the mad scramble to unhinge the mike on the lapel of the winter coat so I could  remonstrate in vain with New York’s Finest, and Joseph actually recording the predicament—force-feeding an outtake, though there was no technical error involved. Never trust your senses about an interview, for it will go to any lengths to get its way. And it’ll cost you. Indeed, filmmaking is a pricey endeavour. Like waking up to find that someone had keyed your car in the dead of night, bleeding off the paint as if it were coursing your vital vein. Instead, it was your own soul that had been scarred in broad daylight. If it wasn’t the shoe leather sponsorship trip wearing you down and out, it was the pick-up line Minsh gave when I initially called about the film that kept you going. He’d shunted the conversation that Sunday morning by assigning the moment to the cosmos. He must have known I’d been a pannist for years.

“The universe patient, eh?” he said, alluding to pan’s labyrinthian evolution over 62 years up till that day. How it start off fighting for its wee life and fending off know-it-all authority and its family who tried so hard to care for it, changing its face and voice and garb—even its reason for being—each member claiming her or a little piece of her; all such upbringing leading to a social network of friends and other countrymen, this new world at long last embracing her chromed and steely tone as a credible instrument for social change; all of that history bollixed up in the hills and the yards, and just now shrinking inside an outer universe that so patient, so patient eh boy? Well, that’s how Mas Man was born. Time knocking on the door for story to tell. I mean to say, look how the fella come from so far and get so big...big, big, big in the pantheon of the arts, pan and Minshall both. The one he calls the concert music of the Caribbean  and the other he reverently refers to as Mas Man. One and the same, if you ask me.

 After all it was a steel band derivative in mas, fancy sailor, which took a decade to mature from suck-meh-nose, that he carried in his head long before England called him to study this other world of upper-crust art. The rock of his belief in the mas, he would remind the old world of his epiphany of the streets dancing around him in his youth; crab, camera, cash register, clock, elephant, Donald Duck, cobra, fruits, flowers—anything a Trini sailor man could conceive to tote atop his head that would eventually turn new mas. New mas, indeed. That’s what he returned home from his studies to make. From the Land of the Hummingbird. Paradise Lost, where we bounce up in 1976 in Stephen and Elsie Lee Heung’s mas camp in Woodbrook. 

How you believe you could transport Milton’s epic poem into breadfruit art? Eh? Into we ting. Well, by God, he did it. Maybe the best mas ever, transforming even itself. And so I was hooked as I watched stanza after stanza unfurl before the camera... Minshall was the man then—and now. His name will live for a hundred years a bandleader said in the film, which The Callaloo Company sanctioned after, let’s put it this way, just one interview question. Minshall: “How are you planning to do this film?” Me: No narration. 
The stew required nothing else. I had the ingredient. I would have walked out of his home if my modus operandi wasn’t taken seriously. Minshall has voice, panache, cojones and erudition. Yet, there’s a missing link. He still can’t fathom the truth that the best footage is recorded on 11,000 tapes that dwell in 500 boxes in an old rum bond in Laventille. They remained untouchable for five years during the making of Mas Man. But in the bush you learn to make do with what you have, and editor Eduardo Siu and I are proud to roll out a three-DVD home video of a film that has won nine awards on six continents. More than five hours of Minshall’s Carnival art and Olympic artistry as a result of our take-no-prisoners attitude toward independent filmmaking.

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