During calypso’s American ascendancy, US companies shipped records in large quantities to their UK labels. In 1957, for example, “The Banana Boat Song” was a UK hit for three different acts – Harry Belafonte, Shirley Bassey, and future actor Alan Arkin’s pop/folk group, the Tarriers. Although British audiences had previously seemed to prefer their calypso with an earthier tone, British record companies were dazzled into believing that the US music business was showing how things should be done. However, spectacularly missing the point of calypso, they pulled out as soon as sales palled – if these glamorous Americans couldn’t find traction, how could a bunch of unknown West Indians?
Even EMI came to think their calypsonians would never pay back any more than their export sales, so it fell to London’s thriving independent record labels to take up where they let off. Emil Shallit, an immigrant of indeterminate Eastern European origin, seized this moment to move to the forefront of the calypso market.
A CHARACTER SO COLOURFUL he deserves his own paintbox, Shallit had arrived in London just after the war. He claimed to have been an Allied spy, and that the startup capital with which he founded Melodisc Records in 1947 was a pay-off for his clandestine services. He had originally based his office in the US, licensing American jazz and blues for British release. That allowed him to do what he did best – schmooze New York hipsters. After falling out with his business partner, he decamped to London where he looked to record rather than simply licence in. The music he knew most about was black music.
Sure of his ability to go anywhere and get on with anybody – apparently, that’s what made him such a good spy – Shallit moved among the subcultures of London, and seemed innately to understand what they wanted. Time and time again, his small company was agile enough to shift from style to style on no more than his say-so. Not tied in to any particular distribution channel, he could put Melodisc records anywhere he thought they’d sell. If that meant using a cosmetics wholesaler to put the records in hairdressing salons, or a food importer to get them into African-owned grocery stores, he didn’t need a series of management meetings and a risk-assessment strategy. During the 1950s, Emil Shallit built Melodisc into one of the largest independent labels in London, while himself becoming a radical and important figure in the development of British black music.
Shallit was aware how important it was for music to be genuinely of a genre, while shrewd enough to realise that any transplanted music also needed to represent its new home. He understood that the core market had new influences and experiences to reflect, and, vitally, that any cultural crossover to a larger audience could only happen if it acknowledged those surroundings. During the 1950s, Melodisc was the first label to record West African Londoners playing highlife with contributions by West Indians. It also brought in Jamaican artists like Miss Lou to cut mento in London, backed by Jamaican players who’d been steeped in the capital’s music scene for years, and was one of the first labels to recognise the value of Caribbean jazz, promoting the likes of Joe Harriott and Russell Henderson to be bandleaders.
The backbone of the Melodisc catalogue, however, was calypso. Shallit had employed Denis Preston to produce some of Melodisc’s earliest releases at the start of the 1950s, but he proved to be more of a facilitator than proactively creative. Seeking to move the music forward, Shallit soon replaced him with Rupert Nurse, a Port-of-Spain-born multi-instrumentalist and childhood friend of Lord Kitchener, who became Melodisc’s musical director, A&R man and in-house producer. Shallit knew Nurse from the clubs, where he had played jazz, calypso and swing since arriving in the UK in 1945.
As a working musician and orchestrator, Nurse had the theoretic and practical understanding to feel confident about taking chances. Long determined to modernise calypso by applying big-band jazz and swing arrangements to a traditional framework, he’d left Trinidad after incurring the displeasure of the local musical establishment for doing exactly that. It was thanks to this musician-friendly approach, on the other hand, that Melodisc had no problem hoovering up Parlophone’s calypso roster when that company abandoned the genre towards the end of the 1950s.
Melodisc sessions took place in Esquire Records’ makeshift studio, in the basement of Bedford Court Mansions in Covent Garden. Nurse used a core of Trinidadian and Guyanese musicians – saxophonist Al Timothy was the effective bandleader, with pianist Russ Henderson, guitarist Fitzroy Coleman, trumpeter Rannie Hart and clarinettist Freddie Grant as regulars. He then brought in players like Joe Harriott, Latin-style trumpeter Peter Joachim and John Maynard on trombone to make up a bigger band sound – essentially the same unit that backed Kitch and the other singers on their bigger club dates. Nurse also introduced the steel pan into the recording sessions. That was an unusual move, as despite the instrument’s Trinidadian roots it was seldom used in calypso backing bands. Nurse simply loved its sound, and felt that its semitone capabilities added an extra harmonic layer within his jazz arrangements, giving the music instant appeal.
As Nurse’s method was entirely opposite to the standard ballroom method of sprinkling calypso-ish rhythms and accents atop standard dance-orchestra arrangements, his results were always going to be genuinely calypso. He also wrote out formal charts rather than depending on improvised arrangements. Far from restricting the players, this gave them more freedom, as it built a reliable framework within which they could operate. Suddenly, a new level of sophistication gave the melodies a whole extra dimension and depth of structure. While the rhythm section drove the momentum, supplemented with brass riffs, the melodies were so securely anchored that players could weave their own patterns. Innovative yet still making complete sense, the new approach brought calypso up to date, and made it a much more powerful means of communication. It also allowed continuity within a band if the musicians changed.
The bebop sensibilities that were always around dovetailed perfectly, giving things a London jazz flavour, and Nurse’s innate sense of swing kept the music easily accessible. Top singers like Kitch or Roaring Lion could now sing with all their energy, instead of the semi-crooning style that better suited ballroom calypso. In giving the singers free rein, Nurse knew that they would carry the calypso swing, and leave the band free to play jazz. Obvious examples of this include “Calypso Be” by Young Tiger, which ironically decries bebop and beboppers against a background that embraces it:
‘This modern music got me confuse
Tell you, friends, I’m quite unenthused
I like Pee Wee Hunt and the great Count Basie
But can’t make head nor tail of this Dizzy Gillespie …’
Similarly, Kitch’s “Bebop Calypso”, which eulogises bebop with list of recommended artists and records. A talented melody writer, Kitch loved working with his old friend Nurse. He’d sing his calypso tunes to the musician, sometimes down the phone, and the arranger would write them down and come up with the orchestration.
THE MELODISC STYLE BROUGHT CALYPSO right into the modern era, giving it an edge that impressed jazz fans while making the Caribbean music sound familiar enough for broad appeal. Musicians loved it because it gave them a chance to show off on record as well as on the bandstand. One of those players was Russ Henderson, a jazz pianist and steel-pan player who came to London from Trinidad to study piano tuning in 1951, but quickly opted for life as a full-time musician. Still active and perpetually cheerful at 87, Russ remembers backing jazz players, highlife musicians and calypsonians at Melodisc, as well recording there under his own name. He still marvels at how those sessions turned out:
‘Although there was a good live music scene in London back then, there wasn’t much recording. At the time Melodisc was really the main company doing West Indian recording, and they recorded African highlife as well, like Ambrose Campbell, so there was always a lot of African influence. They recorded jazz, too. But this was very good, it was like a big melting pot in there. Rupert Nurse had his key players – I was one of them – who were Trinidadian and West Indian musicians, mostly from a jazz
background, but knew all about calypso. Then there would be other players who might be West Indian or might be African, or even English like Cab Kaye [Finley Quaye’s father, a singer and pianist born in London to a Ghanaian father and English mother in 1922]. Because we all played in the clubs together, you know how musicians are, they say to each other “Can you play this gig?” or “Can you play that gig?” So if Rupert Nurse would say he needed a trumpeter for tomorrow, you’d see somebody that evening in a club that you’d bring with you. We didn’t care where we was actually from, because we were all of us black in London.
‘It was important for the music, because at Melodisc it had a feel it didn’t get anywhere else. There was jazz and calypso mixed elsewhere, but this was calypso but played with a real jazz swing, we could solo … everything … and some of these guys were the best jazzmen in London. Also, what made it so much like jazz was that we all brought bits of our own musical backgrounds and musical tastes to the studio, and everything counted, because Rupert Nurse could organise it. We [the musicians] all understood what he was doing because that was the kind of thing we’d been trying, so it was a joint effort really. He wrote the charts, but it was down to us to interpret them in our playing.
‘It was very good for us as people too, because it brought different people together. Before I came to England I hadn’t a personal African friend. We knew of a few Africans, and we could say, “Oh he’s from Ghana”. But once I came here, I went on tour with African drummers when I travelled in 1952 to Belgium, and I recorded with Jamaicans … everybody. When you got over here, there would be the question of, “Where are you from?”, but it didn’t matter, you were Caribbean! Or you were African! We all became friends and we all learned a lot from each other – not just music, but about life. As a Trinidadian, I used to think that coming into contact with other people like that was the greatest thing that happened in my life. Making us get to know the other islands, because when I was at home you didn’t really get to know anybody else from elsewhere.
‘Really it wasn’t just for us musicians that happened, it was happening in life too. So many of the people that came to England at that time were getting to know people that they would never have met if they’d stayed at home [in the West Indies]. People socialised and worked together, and realised how they had to support each other. That everybody had something to offer the others.’
THE CROSSOVER WAS COMMERCIALLY useful too. With a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing between London and Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone by musicians for studio and live work, the London recordings had a considerable influence on the development of local high-life music. West Africa, and Ghana (then the Gold Coast) in particular, had been a huge market for Parlophone’s calypso, and Melodisc followed suit. Such Lord Beginner tunes as “Gold Coast Victory” and “Gold Coast Champion” went down a storm, and he toured the region extensively. The biggest London hits were Kitch’s “Birth Of Ghana”, celebrating the new nation’s 1956 independence, and Young Tiger’s “Freedom For Ghana”; twenty thousand copies of each were exported to Africa. Young Tiger was such a star in Nigeria that when the country became independent from Britain in 1960, its new government asked him to write a national anthem – he declined. The other Caribbean islands were not forgotten either. Both Kitch and Beginner cut Jamaican-friendly songs – “Jamaican Woman”, “Sweet Jamaica” and “Jamaica Hurricane” among them – but the most striking example was Young Tiger’s “Jamaica Farewell”, in which the singer’s broad Trinidadian accent can be heard rueing the day he left his lovely Jamaica.
Russ believes that those calypsos did much to break down barriers between the immigrants and native Londoners:
‘What we were doing at Melodisc helped English people to get to know us a bit more, because they didn’t have a clue about calypso before those records Kitch started making. When we played in the big ballrooms in the West End, most of the time it was rhumbas, sambas and show tunes, because they wanted music for dancing. All they knew about calypso was songs like “Mary Ann” or “Rum & Coca Cola” that was left over from the war. We played calypso at the West Indian ballrooms or the late-night jazz clubs or a place like the Sunset, which was owned by a Jamaican, and used to have a cabaret on.
‘When Rupert Nurse added jazz to the basic calypso, it moved it to where it began to appeal to English people because they knew how to dance to it. Up until then, unless it was some dance band playing Latin or something with a bit of a calypso beat, they didn’t know what to do. After this, they figured out how to dance to it. Which was the best thing that could have happened, because it introduced the Caribbean culture to the English.’
There was no record-label exclusivity within the capital’s calypso community; under various, often hastily conceived group names, the same players would crop up recording for anyone who would pay them. For example, the singer Marie Bryant recorded the same song, “Tomato”, for two labels using pretty much the same backing band. This led to something of a boom in London calypso recording; although Melodisc dominated the market, they didn’t have it all to themselves.
With London recordings as well as tracks licensed in from the US, Decca had a considerable roster. So too did Lyragon, an independent founded by Jack Chilkes, Emil Shallit’s original partner in Melodisc. Pye Nixa built up a sizeable made-in-London catalogue, while the jazz label Savoy imported tunes it had already put out in America. Even Parlophone dipped a toe back in the waters, but with strictly comedy, pop chart-chasing fare, as they revived the comedy line they’d started in the 1950s with Peter Sellers’ “Dipso Calypso” (1955) and Ivor & Basil Kirchin Band’s “Calypso!!” (1957) – so shouty and boisterous a dance track that it needed two exclamation marks – with Bernard Cribbins’ “Gossip Calypso” (1962).
ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT developments as the music migrated from Parlophone to Melodisc was a shift in lyrical approach. While Parlophone’s output had been witty, articulate, verbally dexterous and undoubtedly of Caribbean descent, the songs tended to come at things from as all-embracing a perspective as possible. Thus Lord Beginner’s “Housewives” focussed on the problems of rationing and stretching a housekeeping budget; Kitch’s “My Landlady” bemoaned interfering proprietors; Young Tiger’s “I Was There (At The Coronation)” rhapsodised Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation parade:
‘Her Majesty looked really divine
In her crimson robe trimmed with ermine …’
Now, however, independents like Melodisc and Lyragon, which saw themselves as catering to the core audience, felt less constrained. Increasingly, therefore, the next wave of calypsos supplemented the sophisticated arrangements with more raucous and colloquial vocals. And, of course, the bawdiness factor was ratcheted up.
As the origins of calypso singing – chatting about the slave master in a way that he couldn’t understand – had required so much to be said without actually saying it, innuendo was something of an art form. Caribbean dancehall crowds loved a lewd lyric. Melodisc put out such risqué gems as “My Wife’s Nightie”, “Short Skirts” and “The Big Instrument”, but pride of place went to Kitch’s double entendre-laden “Saxophone Number 2”:
‘From the time the woman wake
She wouldn’t leave me sax for heaven’s sake
She say she like to play the tune
That remind her of the honeymoon …’
If you wanted innuendo, calypso was always happy to give you one. Singer, jazz dancer and all-round sex bomb Marie Bryant’s recording of “Don’t Touch Me Nylon” was so suggestive it prompted questions in Parliament. Meantime, her record company put a stripper on the sleeve.
While this kind of ‘Ooh err, Missus!’ humour might seem somewhat puerile from a twenty-first-century perspective, in London in 1956, two years before the first Carry On … film, it caused quite a stir. The BBC was moved to sticker a selection of discs in their library with the stark warning ‘Do not play this record!’, while Marie Bryant’s 1954 Melodisc hit “Don’t Touch Me Nylon” – a
song about statically charged underwear – prompted questions in the House. Brixton’s Labour MP Lt Colonel Marcus Lipton, was so enraged that he stood up and spluttered about ‘gramophone records of an indecent character’, saying that it couldn’t possibly be ‘in the public interest that the wretched things should continue to be publicly sold.’
Incidentally, Marie Bryant was one of Melodisc’s more interesting London-based recording artists. Born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1919, she was dancing with Louis Armstrong’s band at age 15, had a residency at the Cotton Club, toured with Duke Ellington’s orchestra for three years. and worked in films and stage shows. By the time she moved to London in the early 1950s, she had become a black superstar and one of the world’s most sought-after jazz and exotic dancers – her YouTube clips are a joy.
ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE GREATER freedom of the independent labels was demonstrated when the cheerful optimism of “London Is The Place For Me” gave way to a starker view. When the police seemed incapable of stopping racist attacks perpetrated by Teddy Boys, Lord Invader’s “Teddy Boy Calypso (Cat-O-Nine)” proposed a straightforward solution. Kitch summed up how many new arrivals felt about their treatment in the capital in “If You’re Brown”:
‘It’s a shame it’s unfair but what can you do
The colour of your skin makes it hard for you…
If you’re brown they say you can stick around
If you’re white well everything’s all right
If your skin is dark, no use, you try
You got to suffer until you die …’
He also issued a clear warning to fellow immigrants that, in London, there was none of the shadism that might have made life easier for light-skinned black people back home:
Sounds Like London Page 4