Lancelot Layne’s Crossing Over

“I love Zanda,” a musician friend remarked as we stood by listening to the pianist, as explosive as ever on his keyboard, despite his age.

“He doesn’t play the usual chords that you’d hear, you know…so it makes it difficult for other musicians playing with him.” Zanda is a musician who brings to the stage the energy and excitement of music. There’s a particular freedom one hears, even more so when one looks at his onstage persona.

It’s a sort of “don’t think about it just do it” sound that one hears.

“You mean he doesn’t play by the book then?” I asked.

“Oh no! Of course he plays by the book. It’s just a different book,” he replied.

I laughed.

The event at Big Black Box that Sunday evening was the first in the two-day Emancipation celebrations in honour of Lancelot Layne, widely known as the Godfather of Rapso Music. The features: Trinidad- based Scottish painter, Peter Doig’s painting that is also the cover artwork for the double CD of Layne’s music that was also released on that night.

The film documentary, Crossing Over (1988), a Banyan production, was divided into two parts, an illuminating account of Layne’s travel to Ghana where he investigates highlife music in Ghana through one of its acclaimed practitioners Koo Nimo. There are, not surprisingly, striking similarities to some of the Afro-Trinidadian rhythms and musical developments. The second part moves to Trinidad where Nimo arrives as Layne’s guest. His visits with steelpan men, tassa drummers and calypsonians provide him and viewers who travel the landscape with him, an insight into the range of music that is a part of Trinidad’s cultural heritage. There is a musical exchange between the Ghanaian musician and some of the Trinidadian practitioners, making for a lively discourse on the ability to seamlessly interact through sound.

Perhaps our major difference is language, yet the music masks it and all we hear is a heritage. Some familiar faces appear: Len ‘Boogsie’ Sharpe, Lord Kitchener, Pretender and Ras Shorty I among others.

The crowd at Black Box was moved to sing along with Kitchener in his rendition Africa My Home and Shorty’s Om Shanti Om. The mood was light, nostalgic, an occasion like Emancipation naturally marked by a sense of light-heartedness yet a sense of loss. As a close friend remarked, “the film cast light on the last burst of the last golden age that has long been forgotten…” For some of the young ones, two of whom were part of my party, it was an education.

For those who had lived through parts of the era, in a sense this event marked the spirit of the emancipated - where groups of people can meet in brotherhood, sharing a similar experience through film, taking that journey with Layne, hearing Kitch sing once more and looking at Pretender extemporise.

It conjured memories of a time when these two art forms were at their height. Zanda’s music follows after, an art easily taken for granted for those with the freedom to practise it. This too is the part of the celebration of emancipation.

It is the freedom to use whatever instrument of choice we feel best suited for our self-expression, like highlife or calypso do in their appropriation of Western instruments to express the experiences and sounds of the Ghanaian or Afro- Trinidadian people.

The 3 Canal initiative was a commendable one made in the spirit of rapso for we cannot but be tied to the spirit of the music that we practise. And rapso demands a conscious connection to the people and self. Crossing Over is a tribute to Layne’s roots. And even though he smells death in the holding chamber of Cape Coast Castle, where slaves were once packed, before being shipped out to regions controlled by the British, the smell of death, while it may have stayed with him, does not linger in his body. Part Two can thus comfortably open out onto the airy highway and freedom of the Trinidad landscape.

The musical colours follow and therein we sense the healing.

The hurts of the slave trade that many carried through emancipation, and into independence, cannot continue to be a part of the dominant legacy of our island.

Its violence, upon which much of Caribbean history has been built, needs to be purged out or at least healed to some degree. To continue to reinforce the dark side of the legacy, as some have done, is to keep people grounded in that memory, to keep anger and fear constant.

Lancelot Layne changes the direction and takes us further out.