Toasting Kitchener, honouring calypso

Toasting Kitchener, honouring calypso
Trinidad Express Editorial, Friday, April 27th, 2007

Had he lived Lord Kitchener would be 85 this month and tomorrow a 300-man steelband will end the Cricket World Cup with his classic, "Pan in A Minor". The closing ceremony will not, of course, be in Kitchener's honour but his fans throughout the Caribbean may use the occasion to raise a toast to "The Grandmaster" given the coincidence with his birth month.

At the same time his family and close associates have been busying themselves with the setting up of a museum in his honour to be housed in his former Diego Martin home named "Rainorama Palace' because it was largely from the proceeds from the runaway 1973 Road March that he was able to set himself up in relatively impressive style.

While the actual ownership of that house remains a source of legal dispute there should be no argument against the idea of a permanent place in honour of a musician whose long-lived and remarkable calypso career is part of this country's past and present history, with his repertoire finding a ready audience among generations that were not born during his run as the "Road March King", far less when he was born.

The Government has indicated an interest in the project but we believe that it is one in which the wider community should be involved, with the public being given an opportunity to help in its funding through the purchase of the works of one of calypso's most famous sons.

The difficulty here, however, is that there is no single issue of Kitchener's music that would make that possible, no informative and attractively packaged CD set (given Kitch's output it may well have to be arranged in volumes) to whet the appetite of those who would want to use it simply for pleasure or for scholarly study.

Trinidad and Tobago is not very good at these things, leaving the work that we should be doing for other people to do. It is not that we, necessarily, have to be overly possessive of our own. It is that because of our own sins of omission a lot that should be done does not get done, raising the possibility that much of Kitchener's work will be lost to the future.

That would be a travesty and our hope is that some relevant agency, the Trinbago Unified Calypsonians Organisation perhaps, could bestir itself to set in train the processes that would lead to the permanent documentation of various aspects of the art form that has helped to define Trinidad and Tobago in the eyes of the world, with the Kitchener canon being a good place to start.