Carnival in the Caribbean, a riotous spectacle of drums, rhythm, dance, color and phantasmagorical characters, inspires jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles.
“I have always thought of Carnival as an all-encompassing art form that has elements of music, dance, theater, costume design, improvisation, satire, comedy,” Charles said ahead of his performance at the Manship Theatre, Wednesday, Feb. 27. The concert is part of the River City Jazz Masters series.
Charles based his sixth album, “Carnival: The Sound of a People, Vol. 1,” on Carnival in his native Trinidad. The opening track, “Jab Molassie,” begins with Charles’ field recording of Trinidadian musicians playing hypnotic percussion.
During parades in Trinidad, percussionists accompany terrifying Carnival characters called Jab Molassie. Wielding pitchforks and wearing horns, wings and tails, these fire-breathing, dancing, singing blue demons demand money from spectators.
A Guggenheim fellowship enabled Charles, an associate professor of jazz trumpet at Michigan State University, to study music and traditions across Trinidad. He recorded the devilish Jab Molassie drummers in Paramin, a rural village above Port of Spain.
“They play biscuit tins,” Charles said. “They call them pans. That rhythm became the bed for the tune. When they (the performers who portray the Jab Molassie devils) hear that, that’s when they transform into the Jabs, the devils.”
Like Mardi Gras in Louisiana, Carnival in Trinidad satirizes contemporary society. It also represents the island’s colonial past.
“Legend has it that Jab Molassie is the vengeful spirit of a slave who met his death in a vat of boiling molasses,” Charles said.
Following the biscuit tins intro on his composition "Jab Molassie," Charles’ and his band enter with ethereal piano notes and an otherworldly theme stated by trumpet and alto saxophone. He shapes cool American jazz around the Trinidadian percussion.
Taking their cue from the Trinidadian drummers, Charles and three more percussion players approximate the island’s drumming throughout “Carnival: The Sound of a People, Vol. 1.” Charles alone plays congas, djembe, keg drum, duddup, bongos, shakers, cowbell, iron and cajón.
For “Dame Lorraine,” another of the album’s Carnival character-based pieces, trumpet and two saxophones play a boisterous tune that would fit naturally in a New Orleans brass band performance. In his trumpet solo on the song, Charles also shows skill and imagination of the kind pioneered by the traditional jazz trumpeters he emulated, many of whom came from New Orleans.
More field recordings from Trinidad — including a call-and-response very like Mardi Gras Indian chants — animate the five-movement suite “Black Echo.” The album’s pièce de résistance, the suite evolves from dark strains based on Trinidad’s history of slavery to the unrestrained revelry of modern Carnival.
Charles expects “Carnival: The Sound of a People, Vol. 1” to be the first album in a series based in Caribbean music and culture.
“Carnival is an ocean,” he said. “It’s never ending, constantly changing, dynamic. The music for ‘Vol. 1’ just poured out of me. I feel like I didn’t even write it, like I was there at the piano while this music came through me. It was almost like communicating with ancestors.”
Charles moved to the United States from Trinidad to study at Florida State University with jazz pedagogue and pianist Marcus Roberts. He earned his master’s degree in jazz studies from Juilliard and began teaching at MSU in 2009.
From a musical point of view, New Orleans is a place of musical ancestors for Charles’ trumpet playing.
“New Orleans is important to anyone who plays music called jazz and beyond jazz,” he said. “Louis Armstrong was the first worldwide pop star. And his sound was definitely the way that the music grew.”
Charles studied the music of Armstrong and his fellow New Orleans trumpeters Joe “King” Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Manuel Perez and Bunk Johnson.
Charles feels both a cultural and musical connection to New Orleans.
“Caribbean culture is masked in New Orleans as New Orleans culture,” he said. “The funeral procession followed by rejoicing, that’s an African and Caribbean thing. You don’t see it anywhere else in the U.S. It’s something that we do. A lot of tradition in New Orleans — the baby dolls, the black Carnival Indians — you see it in New Orleans and the Caribbean.”