Etienne Charles: Trumpet's First Chantwell

Etienne Charles: Trumpet's First Chantwell
DanMichael Reyes By

Sign in to view read count








With Creole Soul, Charles advocates composers from Bob Marley, Thelonious Monk, Winsford Devine, and Bo Diddley while penning six of his own compositions. It features the Marley classic "Turn Your Lights Down Low," a song that Charles has long been a part of Charles' repertoire, and Monk's "Green Chimney." Perhaps a song that best captures the mood of the Creole Soul is the Bo Diddley tune "You Don't Love Me," a song played as a blues by artists like Willie Cobbs and Junior Wells, as a rocksteady for reggae artist Dawn Penn, and now a jazz tune by Charles. Dawn Penn's version can still be heard on movies and TV commercials, and has been sampled by artists from Lilly Allen, Wu Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, Beyonce and Rhianna. It is a song that was originally written as a blues that has enjoyed life in other genres giving it a sort of creole soul.

Creole Soul is also about a return to composition for Charles. "I hadn't written music since Folklore (Self Produced, 2009), so I was like 'OK, time to write some music,'" says Charles. "It's a direct reflection of what I've been listening to. I've been listening to a lot of French Caribbean music, a lot of music from Martinique, and Haitian music."

For songs like "Turn Your Lights Down Low," "Green Chimneys," "You Don't Love Me" and "Memories," Charles says that he wanted to "accentuate the idea of mixed cultures."

"The music is about being of a mixed culture or mixed heritage," Charles reveals. "It's about the many many things that make us who we are."

One facet that makes Charles who he is and defines his music is dancing. Music and dance always go together. There are still a few who remember when swing was also considered a dance and not just the sound of Elvin Jones' drum set. Even within classical western music, the idea of dancing to music is prevalent. Gigues don't just serve as Baroque classical pieces that conservatory students have to learn for juries, they are the 17th century equivalent of today's Harlem Shake. "I grew up— every time I heard music, there was dancing involved, every single time," recalls Charles. "My sister's a dancer, [so] every time I went to her dancer concerts there were always African drummers playing, or there were always music playing and they would dance to the music. So I was accustomed to seeing movement with sound—they always go together. Funnily enough, my favorite gigs are the ones where we're playing with the specific purpose of people dancing. I believe it's more challenging to keep people on the dance floor than [keeping] them interested in a concert hall."

"I always encourage people if they feel like dancing to get up and dance. I'm not one of those people who [will] get offended if you decide to shout and make some noise. I'm always encouraging them; to me, the most fun I have is when people actually get up and dance. Because it's an exchange of energy, we're playing and they're dancing, and we're going back and forth."

"But it's a challenge, and specifically our goal is to make people tap their toes, bounce their heads, and snap their fingers, shake their butts, and get up and move. That's our purpose, that's what we come out to do. Be it swing, calypso, reggae, funk, everything we play we try to make as deep in the groove as possible so that people feel the urge to get up and bounce. The bounce to me is everything in music. For me, it's about dancing—especially Caribbean music, it's about making that booty shake."

Charles' rendition of Thelonious Monk's "Green Chimneys" is one example of the bounce he commands. A bounce that is closely related to what Jelly Roll Morton calls "The Spanish Tinge."

"With 'Green Chimneys' it's almost like a habanera type rhythm, which is common sense based on where Monk grew up in San Juan Hill," comments Charles. "He must have [heard] calypso music. Caribbean music and New Orleans is all about beat four, [so] I connected the bass line and the melody on beat four to help accentuate that. A lot of people play 'Green Chimneys' as a second line beat. But we did it with a calypso beat instead of second line."

Charles' conviction about the bounce and dancing go so deep that he also shares it to his students at Michigan State University where he is an Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies. "I was teaching this camp at Michigan State," recalls Charles. "I was conducting one of the big bands at the camp. I do this also with my university students—I teach them how to dance to the music. I will put the original recording on and I will make them dance. Why? If you don't know how to dance, you don't know how to make somebody dance. If you don't know how to dance, there's no way you know why that person wrote [the] music to connect to the bounce—if it's dance music."

"If you're talking about Count Basie's music, that's dance music. A lot of Duke Ellington's records—that's based on dance rhythms. You talk about calypso, funk and R&B; that's all dance rhythms. So I'll put on 'September' and I'll make them two-step so they learn how to two-step to Earth, Wind & Fire. Then I'll keep that same tempo and put on a Count Basie [record] so they're two stepping to Basie, then it connects to them that it's the same two-beat vibe. Then I'll take something from The Meters like 'Hey Pocky A-Way' and make them two- step to that, take some calypso and make them two-step to that. I sit them back down and we play the tune and it grooves like 28 times better. It immediately connects to the body and the brain, you immediately know where to syncopate and where the bounce [is]. It's probably one of my most helpful tools as a teacher."

Musicians that are featured on Creole Soul that help him achieve his bounce are tenor saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart, alto saxophonist Brian Hogans, guitarist Alex Wintz, pianist Kris Bowers, former Juilliard classmate Ben Williams on bass, drummer Obed Calvaire, percussionists D'Achee and Daniel Sadownick, and a guest appearance from voodoo priest Erol Josue, on vocals.

"I wrote the music with these musicians specifically in mind," says Charles. "Because I've been playing with them for so many years, I know that these are the things that would feature them well and these are the things that they would naturally add on to. On 'Creole,' a Haitian tune—Obed's Haitian! So that was right up his alley. I told him that I wanted that Haitian thing and he was like 'Yeah, yeah, yeah!' and it was natural! Then you have Kris Bowers [who] is a great jazz player and an unbelievable pianist. But he can also sit down at the Fender Rhodes [and] bring that color to it. Alex Wintz, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, and all those guys, we've been playing together for years now. Ben Williams has been one of my best friends. We went to school together."

"I heard Alex on Brian Hogans' record. Brian and I have been playing together for years so he was a natural fit. He came into the session and just killed it. D'Achee the percussionist and I have [also] been playing together for years. It's really a band record, when I listen to it I actually feel the love. I feel like it's just us hanging out in the studio and we played some music."

Though Charles is a trumpeter, he is also proficient in playing cuatro and the steel pan. On, Folklore, Charles composed the music on cuatro and steel pan. For the new album, he wrote all the tunes sitting behind the piano except for "Doin' the Thing," which is a tribute to trumpeter Blue Mitchell. Writing the music on cuatro and steel pan helps keep ground the music to its Caribbean roots. Certain timbres from instruments that are native to the Caribbean certainly help give life to the composition process. But another avenue that is essential to Caribbean music is call and response, of which Charles is instinctively mindful when he writes.

"I always think about call-and-response when I write, because it makes the music conversational," says Charles. "It's engrained in me as a musician and composer who is coming out of the African Diaspora and the Caribbean. It's engrained in me that music must have call-and-response. It's one of the defining characteristics of jazz. It's definitely one of the defining characteristics of African Diaspora music or black music.

"With the first track, 'Creole,' the first thing I wrote was the lavway. Lavway means the hook or the theme. It's a word we use in Trinidad to refer to as the chorus or the theme. An example of a lavway would be Michael Jackson [singing], 'Billie Jean is not my lover.' The lavway of 'Creole' was based on a chant and it was the first thing that I wrote. The rest of the tune came out of that. It was a groove that we improvise over knowing that the lavway was going to come in. We bring in the lavway and improvise on top of the lavway. That's exactly what they used to do in the circles at Trinidad."

"During improvisation call and response happens naturally, but when I write I try to make sure I put it in. In the large scheme of the tune the call and response goes from Eb minor to Gb major. So it goes from dark to light. Basically, that's the call-and- response."

"I definitely think call and response is one of my [most] important parts of my writing. I looked at Thelonious Monk, and he's all about call-and-response. I listened to Horace Silver and Duke Ellington-Freddie Hubbard's writing is very call-and-response based between the rhythm section and the horns. Nat Adderley's writing—you can go down the list...David Sanchez. Their writing is definitely heavily based on that part of the tradition. It goes back to gospel, the preacher and the congregation. The chantwell and the tribe, it all comes back to the improvisations with chants going."

But Creole Soul isn't just limited to Caribbean traditions, Etienne Charles also shows that he is adept to modern compositional tools as well. "I wrote the bass line for 'The Folks' with a twelve-tone row," explains Charles. "I kind of hid in a way that makes it normal to hear. I wrote it from three formal patterns C, G, B, Eb, then Ab, Bb, Db, F, and then F#, E, A, B. So it's three sets of tones of four that don't repeat themselves. Then I put chords to it that would naturally work harmonically so they completely conceal the fact that the bass line is [based] from a twelve-tone row. That's basically a conversation between two people—my parents. The way the melody works, they move parallel, then contrary, then they move parallel again. It's about how two people move and live together."

Selected Discography

Etienne Charles, Creole Soul (Culture Shock, 2013)

Etienne Charles, Kaiso (Culture Shock, 2011)

Etienne Charles, Folklore (Self Produced, 2009)

Scotty Barnhart, Say it Plain (Dig Music, 2009)

Cynthia Scott. Dream for One Bright World (CDBY, 2009)
Ralph McDonald, Mixty Motions (CDBY, 2008)

Etienne Charles, Culture Shock (Self Produced, 2006).

Photo Credit

Courtesy of Etienne Charles

Related Video


More Articles

by Libero Farnè
Published: March 18, 2017
by Paul Rauch
Published: March 8, 2017
by Rokas Kucinskas
Published: February 24, 2017
by John Kelman
Published: February 19, 2017
Read Laura Jurd: Big Footprints Interviews Laura Jurd: Big Footprints
by Ian Patterson
Published: February 16, 2017

Post a comment

comments powered by Disqus


Support our sponsor

Support All About Jazz's Future
