Knife-and-fork dining on golden memories
By Lennox Grant
Story Created: Jan 15, 2011 at 11:36 PM ECT
(Story Updated: Jan 15, 2011 at 11:36 PM ECT )
In one memoir-worthy moment of the 1990s, a Port of Spain lawyer gave pro bono advice to two journalists over lunch at his office. The menu consisted of chicken dhalpuri and Carib in frosty bottles.
This journalist retained as much from the media law precepts our host expounded as from the example of civilisation he set. He served the dhalpuri in chinaware plates on a table set with knives and forks.
I learned to enjoy, and even to prefer, having roti with knife and fork. How eccentric is that: humble pavement food presented and consumed as a dinner entrée.
Such preference turned out to bear social identification, and to have political implications. So I learned when Basdeo Panday loudly scorned those in the exodus from the UNC toward the COP promised land. He called them "knife and fork Indians".
A knife and fork non-Indian (like my 1990s lawyer), I nevertheless felt myself defined as alien. On the basis of personal, roti-consuming, culture, I could not belong to the UNC "base" claimed as of right by Mr Panday.
Today, little more than a place in history belongs to Basdeo Panday. Under other leadership, his party took office in alliance with those once despised for allegedly having hands too soft to be counted among the hewers of wood and drawers of water, constituting "base" people fingering their roti off sohari leaves.
Reverse discrimination survives, however, and even rules, to favour the "base" over the knife and forkers. On Thursday, the image of a grand piano on the Express front page looked like an exhibit in a prosecution.
Attorney General Anand Ramlogan was prosecuting a case bigger than the allegedly larcenous disappearance of a single grand piano from the Prime Minister's residence. Wearing the moral crusader's robes for a culture war, Mr Ramlogan imprecated the very idea of importing a grand piano into a Trinidad and Tobago already supplied with pans, dholaks, djembes, majeeras and tassas.
Ten grand pianos had been imported, he charged—an abomination crying out for justice: "We consider this to be a most shameful and disgraceful wastage of public funds."
Down-home T&T tastes had nothing in common with such music as could be played on a grand piano: "All we know about is a lil Bob Marley music and a lil kaiso. That's all we listen to."
On behalf of "we" the people, then, the Attorney General was asserting a limitation on musical sophistication so severe as to be philistine. He was on a roll.
An opposition MP asked: "What is wrong with a piano?" Advocate–turned-aesthete Ramlogan was quick on his feet: "The day you could play a good chutney or calypso on it, come back and talk to me."
The missing grand piano could be the one that had appeared, serendipitously, on the jazz festival stage on San Fernando Hill in September 2009. Offering a CrimeStoppers' tip-off, this citizen recalls seeing the open-lidded instrument standing there, rhetorically, as a tuxedo-clad man emerged from the wings, bowed, and sat at the keyboard.
Aldwin Albino had come to perform, solo, his album of calypsoes by Lord Kitchener. Albino played the Kitch tunes not for jumping up, but arranged in what one critic called "formal vestments".
Possibly, then, the missing grand piano and, certainly, the musician who could play a "good calypso" on it, were last seen and heard, that evening, in Mr Ramlogan's hometown. But I doubt if hearing Kitchener's "Pan in A Minor" played as an etude would have convinced him of the value of the grand piano investment.
Etude? We knife and fork people are hopeless! And, apparently, friendless in the People's Partnership among whom grand pianos, and symphony-size steelbands playing Panorama music, represent a damnable legacy of shameful and wasteful PNM extravagance.
Mr Ramlogan damns and blasts the acquisition of ten grand pianos in harmony with Arts and Multiculturalism Minister Winston "Gypsy" Peters' ever-escalating rhetoric against steelband Panorama. "We cannot frivolously be spending money all over the place," Mr Peters said, defending his nickel-and-diming cutbacks on performance pay for pan players.
Acquisition of grand pianos was a small contribution, but the Manning-PNM years witnessed what looked to me like the unheralded development of a mass movement in musical interest and development. With private business support, a Music Literacy Trust was founded. A concert-focussed Jazz Alliance was born. At Queen's Hall in 2009, a homegrown T&T symphony orchestra performed for the first time.
The Manning administration supported and promoted the controversial G Pan, and made top national awards to its inventor and to two legendary tuners. In that period, the UTT established professorships in calypso and in steelband studies.
Following his private dream, Mr Manning in 2007 founded the 27-member Divine Echoes orchestra as a unit in the Prime Minister's Office, dedicated to "the renaissance of formal, elegant ballroom dancing to live music." Splendidly equipped, with eye-catching women musicians, the band held promise and excited hope in at least this band-music lover.
With Kamla Persad-Bissessar in the St Clair Avenue Office, the Echoes have fallen silent, leaving us knife and forkers to sigh that the Manning years may have been the closest we ever had to a musical golden age.
