Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

Musician and instrumentalist Charlo Alfonso’s upcoming concert, Project Charlo, will take place on  January 9, 2020, at Kafe Blue (formerly Kaiso Blues Cafe), Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain. The concert is being held in aid of raising funds towards Alfonso’s final semester at Northern Illinois University, where he is doing an MFA in Steel Pan Performance.  Alfonso said he has to raise approximately US$2,700 for student, international and tuition fees to complete his final semester. 

The concert will feature performances by Alfonso and his band, JAISO, composed of vocalist Quinton Neckles, Nick Thomas on drums, Denilson Gulston on percussion, Lemuel Patterson on bass, Anthony O’Connor on tenor saxophone, Nathan Maxwell on trumpet, Johann Andrews on trombone, Irwin Roach on tenor saxophone and Alfonso and Lemuel Davis on pan. Alfonso said he formed the band while doing his undergraduate degree at UTT. The name JAISO is a fusion between the genres of Jazz and Kaiso.

Alfonso said he began playing pan in Trinity College Moka, where it was compulsory in Form One. “I was like I guess I’ll play because I have no other choice, and then I guess the teachers thought that I was fairly competent at it, despite not being able to read music, they saw stronger capabilities. I was the only Form One at the time playing among the Form Five and Form Six students performing with the school band, and that made me gradually fall in love with playing pan. I continued playing when I transferred to Queen’s Royal College where a lot of my friends there were instrumentalists as well, so they were always playing a whole bunch of different instruments together. I myself picked up bass guitar and saxophone and drums and we used to perform together as the QRC band and the rhythm section and playing calypso in school. But it wasn’t until we left school in 2014 that we started performing on the music scene in Kaiso Blues Cafe and elsewhere.”

Alfonso said he composes arrangements of previously written songs, and occasionally writes his own compositions. “I do my personal arrangements and add my own twist onto songs. For the most part, with the band that I have formed that is performing at the show, I do all the arrangements. We’ll be playing some fusion between jazz, kaiso, some funk, a little R&B, it’s all about fusion.”

The musician said when he finishes his degree, he wants to come to back to Trinidad to teach at the college level and eventually open his own performing arts school. “I would like to teach steelpan, teach more performers and proper jazz and get especially younger people, into jazz performance and putting their own styles on it, because for me calypso and jazz are one and the same. When we analyze jazz and calypso, musically they’re almost identical and they also developed along similar timelines, for example one of the first calypso recordings was recorded four years before the first official jazz recording. They sound identical, the only difference is we have a calypso beat and in America they have a different drum pattern that goes behind more or less the same instrumentation, the same melodic content, the same harmonic content, ours is a little more dance appropriate, and jazz in America is usually more artistic, our calypso still follows the artistic format but it’s just that the average person could dance and enjoy it, whereas jazz is sometimes a little bit harder to digest for the average person.”

He said learning music and pan “is one of the most important things you could give to children, especially growing up because one, it’s our own, it will instil a stronger sense of pride in young people, and two for the future of music students, it is very very effective in the teaching of music literacy. A lot of musicians start off not being able to read music and learn how to play through practice. Both aspects are really important: being able to play by ear and being able to read music, and in Trinidad, more often than not we focus on the playing by ear aspect and don’t necessarily develop our reading ability. So when I start teaching I would like to help develop both, so you become an even more competent musician.”

Alfonso said patrons should attend the concert because, “especially in Trinidad it’s not very often you’d find a young band, all under the age of 25, performing jazz and performing calypso and that old school type jazz and funk and R&B with a very big energy and stage presence and we have very high energy whenever we perform together, because we all feed off of each other. It’s not very often that you’d see, especially young adults as we are, actually enjoying performing jazz with our take on it, so it’s not playing what the jazz pioneers played, we have our own style and we add our own flavour and elements to it.”

The show begins at 7 pm on January 9. Tickets cost $150. For tickets, call 735-6911.