Customer Reviews

Calypso Awakening: From The Emory Cook Collection

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4 star:		(1)
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This CD is a remarkable achievement, both musically and technically.

Musically, this is the real stuff--calypso music recorded on location in Trinidad by Emory Cook in the mid-1950s. It is vibrant, exciting music, reminiscent of early jazz. Although the lyircs to these pieces often critique very real social and political problems at the times ("Federation" and "No, Doctor, No"), others are bursting with humor ("Booboo Man"). Still, I find that this CD always puts me in a good mood. It's a great disc to pull out on a dull rainy day to spice things up a bit.

Technically, this CD is nothing short of amazing. These are not your typical historical field recordings. Emory Cook founded his own label, Cook Records (under which these titles were originally released) to show off his technical expertise in sound recording. These recordings are the ultimate in hi-fi! And, they are among the earliest stereo recordings. Long before it was possible to capture a stereo signal in one groove on records, Cook developed a type of record that required a double tonearm to track two separate grooves on different parts of the record. Each groove contained one channel of musical information, so when played simultaneously on a properly modified turntable, they provided the listener a true stereo recording-this in the early 1950s. The folks at Smithsonian Folkways (which acquired the Cook label in the early 1990s) have done an outstanding job remastering these stereo recordings for CD, and the result is a very enjoyable listening experience.

The accompanying booklet is also excellent, with extensive notes about the musicians and selections, printed lyrics, and photographs. Definitely recommended.

This commercial release from the Smithsonian vaults a la the Cook Collection is a treasurehouse of some of the 50's hottest. There is a good sense of the spontaneous Calypso Tent experience, which as the magazine blurb above points out, was Cook's recording forte.

But we can easily forget that Calypso originated as a music to accompany stick fighting. Bongo Man (Bongo Night) by Wrangler might remind us of this with its frantic beat. But the lyrics on two of these songs is noteworthy. In Carnival Celebration, Small Island Pride makes himself out to be a Carnival hoodlum "To show you I aim for trouble, on mih right hand is mih steel knuckle." He goes on to tell us he's got an icepick in his left pocket and a fighting stick under his jacket. This guy is armed to the teeth and by the end of the song, he declares his willingness to die. In fact, he says, "I done pay off mih lawyer, so he could pay off mih undertaker."
Indeed, there were such characters stalking the Carnival back then and we find more and more of them the further we go back into Carnival's rebellious past. We can trace fighting songs all the way back to Africa but they have never occurred in such great profusion as in corporate Hip Hop.
The other unfriendly, but side-splitting, tune on here is the Picong Duel between Sparrow and his then boss, Melody, who ran the Tent that Sparrow sang in. The extemporaneous insults fly and you can decide who wins. Here's another pan African trend that's shown up in today's Hip Hop. The parallel is heightened further by the fact that this is not quite a friendly duel.
Because Sparrow would eventually leave Melody's employ and over the next few years would release a string of insulting tunes about Melody, among them Madame Dracula about Melody's wife. Check that one out on Mighty Sparrow volume 4. On that same CD, the last verse in Simpson (the Funeral Agency Man) also takes a potshot at Melody's ugliness.
No, the beef between these two guys, from all I've heard as a boy in Trinidad, was quite real. But no one ever got physically hurt.

I ordered this CD after hearing a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the pioneering sound recording engineer Emory Cook earlier this year. The extract played was of Lord Melody singing "Boo boo man" in a calypso tent in 1956. I had never heard any recorded version of the song before as far as I knew, but I recognized it straight away and was overcome by a wave of nostalgia, because my mother used to make me and my sister laugh by singing it when we were children in the 1950s. I suppose she had heard the Harry Belafonte version on the radio.
Anyway, I was very happy to receive the CD, and enjoy listening to it. The exceptional quality of the sound recording in a "live" situation transports the listener in time and space, and you can imagine yourself as part of the audience in a calypso tent in Trinidad in the 1950s. The 30-page accompanying booklet is also very informative, including bibliography, discography, and the words to all the songs. Altogether an excellent product, of the quality one expects from the Smithsonian Institution.

Be warned: before I purchased this album I had little interest in calypso. Afterward, I was a complete convert, and have been amassing a collection of historical calypso albums ever since. This isn't the somewhat sanitized Harry Belafonte calypso you may associate with the genre -- it's gritty, political, filled with social commentary ... a rich expression of Trinidadian life and culture.

The remastered sound quality of the recordings is excellent, easily the best I've heard. Buy this album by all means, but be prepared to discover that you've developed an insatiable addiction which will keep you shopping for more.

As an amateur musician and Reggae fan, I was curious about the origins of modern Caribbean music. This is it! Not the studio-refined Calypso of Harry Belafonte, but true roots music, with the biting social commentary that Bob Marley gave us later. The enclosed book is very informative.

Calypso voices backed by Swing-style wind instruments, acoustic bass, guitars, and Caribbean folk instruments. Truly a breath of fresh air for the musically jaded. My favorite listening CD.

I stumbled across this album only because I wanted to listen to some "island" music while on a recent vacation in the Caribbean. Like most people, my exposure to "Calypso" music had been limited to top 40 hits being played on steel drums at pool side bars.

This album blew me away. It is a masterpiece. It brings you to the birth of Calypso in the 50's and 60's. It is fascinating to hear its roots of jazz and swing and how Calypso has influenced the development of modern day music. It is also a lesson in Calypsonian traditions and culture. You learn how important these talented artists were (and are), standing at the center of these peoples' culture and in being news messengers and social commentators. Although the recording quality is excellent, it is not perfect, which only adds to the feeling of being there and being brought back in time to hear history. Props to Emory Cook here.

All this aside, the album is just simply fun. The music is great, the stories even greater. I laughed out loud at some parts (particularly the song "Taxi Driver," which is entirely about a guy trying to register and then fix his car). The duels played out over several songs between Lord Melody and Mighty Sparrow are wonderful and represent the precursor of rap "contests" (or whatever they're called) of today.

This is raw, virgin, unadulterated, real, early Calypso. It is not the commercial calypso of Harry Belafonte or tourist calypso. If you simply love music (regardless if you're travelling to the Caribbean!), I can't more highly recommend this album.

(PS, I was so taken by this album that I bought the DVD, "Calypso Dreams," which is a relatively unknown documentary of Calypso music. There are terrific interviews with the greats, including Sparrow, Lord Melody, and many of the other greats.)

I never get tired of this album - the rhythms are delightful and the lyrics are humorous. Gets better and better with each listen. Yankees gone and Sparrow take over!

One of my fave albums! Emory Cook's brilliant on-the-scene recordings capture the vigor and excitement of the Trinidad calypso scene at its '50s-early '60s apex. Highlights IMHO include Lord Melody's wry Come Go Calcutta and Mighty Sparrow's No, Doctor, No. Excellent notes and vintage pix in exhaustive booklet are worth the price of admission by themselves.

As a calypso lover, this is the best. The performance of Lord Melody and the calypso King Mighty Sparrow on this album is something else.

Such beautiful memories of when my folks played music like this.
It was a time whem life was so simple, laid back, and easy going..