BRATTLEBORO-The Vermont Jazz Center lifts off its 2024–25 concert season on Saturday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m., with the dynamic Trinidadian trumpeter, composer, and percussionist Etienne Charles.
Come learn the stories of Charles's explorations and enjoy the band's serious grooves at the VJC on Saturday, Sept. 21. Calypso, funk, reggae, and jazz music will postpone the chilly, fall winds of Vermont. These joyful sounds will make you want to dance and feel like carnival really does exist.
Charles has traveled the world, seeking connections and differences between the rhythms and forms of Caribbean folkloric music. His band, Creole Soul, is his musical laboratory.
Charles's search has led him to disparate regions throughout the Caribbean, where he has reached out to local musicians, lived in their communities, eaten their food, and created music with them.
His findings simultaneously illuminate musical connections between unexpected locales, all while celebrating their cultural uniqueness. The results are a pleasure: fascinating arrangements and compelling melodies that take the listener to a rich, percussion-driven universe.
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The ensemble that Charles is bringing to the Jazz Center reflects his multicultural approach: the acclaimed Cuban pianist Axel Tosca and North-American guitarist Alex Wintz join three musicians of Haitian descent: saxophonist Godwin Louis, drummer Harvel Nakundi, and Alexander L.J. Tóth on basses.
Etienne Charles was born on the island of Trinidad in 1983. He holds a master's degree from The Juilliard School, a bachelor's degree from Florida State University, and is now an associate professor at Frost School of Music in Miami.
According to DownBeat magazine, Charles improvises with "the elegance of a world-class ballet dancer." He has been written into the Congressional Record for his musical contributions to Trinidad and Tobago. In 2015, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2016, he received a grant from Chamber Music America and was a featured panelist and performer at the White House during National Caribbean-American Heritage Month.
That year, he also received the Jazz at Lincoln Center Millennial Swing Award.
In 2022, Charles received a Creative Capital Award to pursue a multimedia project, "Earth Tones," which features sounds, stories, images, and short films about musicians living in at-risk coastal communities affected by global warming.
Charles brings a careful study of myriad rhythms, from the the French, Spanish, English, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean to his own creative output. As a sideman, he has performed and/or recorded with Monty Alexander, Roberta Flack, Frank Foster, Ralph MacDonald, Johnny Mandel, Wynton Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, Maria Schneider, the Count Basie Orchestra, Eric Reed, Lord Blakie, and many others.
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Each of Charles's successive records takes him deeper into understanding and communicating the experience, methods, and structure of Caribbean music. He started to reveal his path in 2006 with Culture Shock, a recording that fuses calypso and New Orleans vibes with a modern-jazz sensibility.
His second album, Folklore (2009), tells stories from the point of view of traditional Trinidadian characters. This was followed by Kaiso in 2011. In the promo for that recording, Charles states: "Kaiso is an old West African word, and it comes from the form of encouragement you give to an artist while doing something: a fight or a dance or a song. Kaiso: it's what you would say when you enjoy something. It evolved over hundreds of years and it has becomes the reference [nickname] for Calypso."
That record is a tribute to the history of calypso and its great performers like Mighty Sparrow, whose music, Charles believes, deserves to be listened to and honored.
It is fascinating to know that Charles's family is also part of the calypso tradition; his first professional experience in music was playing with his father and grandfather in their steel drum ensemble.
Charles's next album was 2013's Creole Soul, which Etienne describes as "a melting pot of ideas, colors, sounds, tones." He thought about what it means to be Creole and how that affected the people of the West Indies, New Orleans, and other places where Creole families form the fabric of the community. He visited Haiti to gain insight into the experience of the Creole people and their use of Haitian Creole as the nation's official language.
In the promo video for that disc, he reflected upon his journey.
"In the world we live in today, it's impossible not to be a Creole, it's impossible not to have a blend of ideas, a blend of traditions, a blend of sounds that inspire or shape or determine who we are," Charles said. "There's a little bit of Creole in all of us. We all have a mix of feelings, of sounds of ideas and influences, a mix of doctrines.
"That's what makes the world an amazing place where we can all be together."
In his 2016 release, San Jose Suite, Charles chose three cities named San Jose - in California, Trinidad, and Costa Rica - and connected them via their music and culture, via research on African immigrants and the descendants of African immigrants there.
In his promo video, Charles explained that he used the project to explore "the effects of colonialism in the New World."
"I'm writing music that speaks to history," he said. "I think that now it's our job to have documents that in many different ways portray the history of the Americas as they pertain to 'the New World.' I think that the more ways that you have to tell a story, the more people will understand the story."
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Tickets for Etienne Charles and Creole Soul at the Vermont Jazz Center are $25+ for general admission and are available at vtjazz.org or at [email protected].
Tickets can also be reserved by calling the Vermont Jazz Center ticket line, 802-254-9088, ext. 1.
For information or arrangement about accessibility, call the VJC at 802-254-9088.
All performances at the VJC are subsidized by generous sponsorships to make ticket prices affordable.
Eugene Uman is director of the Vermont Jazz Center. The Commons' Deeper Dive column gives artists, arts organizations, and other nonprofits elbow room to write in first person and/or be unabashedly opinionated, passionate and analytical about their own creative work and events.
This Arts column was submitted to The Commons.