It is Wednesday night at the Trane Studio on Bathurst St., and the place is hopping – you have to squeeze your way to the bar. Onstage, a slim young man with a guitar has the crowd swaying to an irresistible calypso beat.
By Donna YawchingDrew Gonsalves and his band Kobo Town may not think of themselves this way, but they're a musical bridge between two cultures, and a tenuous link to what may be a dying folk art.
"Man in handcuffs pleads to the charges," he sings, and his listeners – having been prompted – respond: "Made up their mind and they want to take his life" It's a classic calypso ploy, call-and-response, pulling people into the spirit of the music.
It's also about capital punishment – an unusual topic for a bar song. But the rhythms are infectious and the melody catchy, so the audience jumps in with gusto. That, too, is characteristic of calypso – the ability to address serious subject matter without killing the party.
In the audience, Roger Gibbs, who heads an association of calypso performers, is one of Kobo Town's biggest fans.
"What Drew is doing is wonderful," Gibbs says. "He's drawing on the traditional calypso vocabulary...giving it a fresh and authentic sound."
Back in Trinidad, calypso is anything but fresh; its roots have withered in its birthplace.
The classic calypsonians are fading from the scene and a younger generation, influenced by everything from American R&B to Jamaican dub and dancehall, prefers a fast-paced party music that has no interest in complex syncopations or social commentary.
In Toronto, however, where an immigrant Trinidadian community clings nostalgically to the familiar rhythms, traditional calypso still has a strong following.
"I lean toward the old side," confesses Guney Cedeno, a well-known performer on the local calypso scene. "In much of the new music today, there is not much of a message or substance that can survive the way the older music can survive. After the season is over, you don't even remember the name of the song."
Cedeno has won various titles at the competitions put on each year by Gibbs' group, the Organization of Calypso Performing Artistes (OCPA). He has excelled as Calypso Monarch, Soca Monarch (soca is party-style calypso) and Extempo Monarch ("extempo" is the art of creating calypso verses on the spot, extemporaneously).
Being in Toronto "really opened my eyes to different levels and styling, in order to communicate to the wider audience," says Cedeno, who has lived in Canada for 20 years.
"Trinis are the main support for calypso music in the city," he says, but he often recognizes non-Caribbean faces in the audience who are "true lovers of calypso music. You have to meet them halfway."
Gibbs says Toronto events put on by his group have generated a "good body of original material....We have calypsonians here from all the islands. We have some real talent in this community."
One of these talents is Tara Eulith Woods, better known as Macomere Fifi and revered as Toronto's Calypso Queen. Woods is from Tobago, Trinidad's sister isle, but has lived here since 1987. Calypso seduced her after she had left her homeland.
"I never sang calypso in Tobago," she recalls.
"When we are away from our culture, that is when we miss it most. It's a love born out of necessity – it's not around, so you do whatever you must to hold on to it."
Woods thinks calypso is "slowly catching on" with the wider public, through exposure at various community events.
"A lot of people can identify with the political commentary," she says with a chuckle.
She has used calypso at a Pickering high school as an alternative teaching tool to address serious topics such as racism and abortion, and was impressed by the level of enthusiasm among all the students.
"Some of the best (calypsonians) were not from a Caribbean background," she says.
This ability to cross cultural divides is probably calypso's best hope for the future. Take the case of Gonsalves' band. Half of Kobo Town's musicians are from Trinidad, but the bass player is Jamaican, the drummer's roots are Slovenian and the woodwinds man is a Canadian of an Indonesian-Chinese-British background.
Robert Milicivic, the drummer, has played with Gonsalves since their high school days in Ottawa.
"There's lots of space...for creativity," he says of calypso, "which is not always the case in other music."
For him, Kobo Town's diversity is its strength. The musicians bring elements – such as flute and violin – that would not be found in purely traditional calypso or reggae arrangements.
"Drew writes the music, but (the arrangement) is quite a democratic process," Milicivic says.
"If you have an idea that's different, we try it out. If it works, that's great; we keep it. We end up with more ideas than we would have if everyone came from the same background."
Gonsalves says the band's music is solidly rooted in traditional calypso, but also incorporates elements of dub and reggae.
"Dub and calypso both come from a long tradition of storytellers and wordsmiths, so I find they go together nicely."
Like Woods, Gonsalves, 30, is a Trinidadian who came to calypso only in Canada. His family migrated to Ottawa when he was 13. Back then, coming from a privileged middle-class background, he had no interest in calypso, the music of the masses.
"I had the same self-disdain of Trinidad culture that we were all raised with," he recalls.
"No respect for it at all."
Being an expatriate changed all that.
Homesickness sparked his interest in the place he had left. He began to read Trinidadian history and listen to the music that was a "cultural window" into the past.
"All the things that you take for granted in your own culture, your own country, only begin to shine out when you are in a contrasting environment," he says.
"You realize what formed you. I only got a chance to appreciate it once I was away from it, and could look at it from the outside."
What attracts Gonsalves to traditional calypso is its ability to tell stories – often with humour, always with passion.
Growing out of slavery, the music evolved into a take-no-prisoners form of social satire, a safe way to criticize those in power and comment on the vicissitudes (or absurdities) of daily life.
"What I like about calypso is that it's music that was meant to say something," says Linsey Wellman, Kobo Town's woodwinds player.
"I like the outspokenness and the cleverness of the great calypsonians. It's nice to be in a group that addresses what's happening in the world, but that is equally concerned with creating great sounds."
Strong melodies and a waist-moving beat were the spoonful of sugar that made the medicine go down very easily indeed.
Gonsalves' song "Abatina," about domestic violence, is a perfect example of this. Even as you sing along to a very harsh tale, you can't stop your body swaying to the music.
"All the band members have a reverence for traditional calypso and try to stay true to that spirit," Wellman says.
"I hope that at the heart of many of our tunes lies an old-time calypso song, and that all we've done is dress it up a bit with some more state-of-the-art instrumentation."
