David Michael Rudder (b. May 6, 1953, Belmont, Trinidad and Tobago) is one of the top calypsonians of his generation. In 1977 he joined Charlie's Roots, one of the top bands in Trinidad and Tobago. He spent many years as one of the vocalists with the band. In 1986 he burst into prominence with his album The Hammer which produced two big hits, The Hammer (a tribute to the late pannist Rudolph Charles) and Bahia Girl. This was followed in 1987 with Calypso Music, a brilliant encapsulation of the history of calypso. In 1988 Rudder released his best album to date, Haiti which included the title track, a tribute to the glory and suffering of Haiti, Engine Room, which captures the energy of the steelband, and Rally 'Round the West Indies which has become the anthem of West Indies cricket.
David Rudder interviewed by Maya Trotz for Jouvay.com. Toronto, January 2nd, 2004.
"Life to me is about looking at what are the positives. What can we get so that we don't repeat it? That was the warning in Haiti and it's also saying to people in the Caribbean that we were brought here on the same ship, but the English speaking Caribbean does not know what is going on in the Spanish speaking Caribbean or the French speaking Caribbean. We are looking outwards to different places and at the end of the day all we have is ourselves. Sugar is not the greatest thing on the face of the earth again. In our own little way we have to see how we can look out for each other. I just basically use the whole philosophy of pan Caribbeanism to say, "hello, the only way a family can be strong is to stay together." It's not that I am trying to send a message, but to say this is how I feel. That's what is coming out of me as an artist."
David Rudder is the man with the hammer when it comes to nailing down profound lyrics and musical compositions of, about and for the Caribbean. Much like a musical messiah with over 20 albums, he produces music that resonates within us to really appreciate our Caribbean world and hope for a better tomorrow. Songs like Engine Room, Bacchanal Lady, and The Hammer have become classics and he continues to bring hits like Trini 2 De Bone which has the world singing, "sweet sweet TNT." This phone interview was originally going to be done via email and the questions were sent to Mr. Rudder with this introduction: "You are very much an icon and a revered artist in the Caribbean and the wider diaspora, and I must tell you that even though we are conducting the interview via the internet I am very nervous. Please feel free to answer as many of the questions as you wish; some of these were actually suggested by members of our email list and islandmix.com where I asked more of your fans what they wanted to know about you. My sister also helped to formulate the questions. Finally, a little personal note.....in 1986, The Man with the Hammer performed at the National Sports Center in Georgetown Guyana. I was 13 and accompanied my older sister and some of her friends to the concert. She got a little carried away, jumped on stage and grabbed your mic as though you needed a back up singer. The show ended right there, but you had already performed your whole set I believe. I hope. Now after nearly 20 years of listening to your music we, like many in the world, are addicted."
Jouvay.com: You have a very special connection to Guyana. Your site says, "Rudder's first big break came when Christopher "Tambu" Herbert, lead singer with Charlie's Roots, fell ill after an exhausting tour of Guyana and suggested his friend Rudder as a temporary replacement." Do you secretly thank Guyana for making this happen (was this the opportunity of a career), or was it just a matter of time before you "bruk out."
David Rudder: I already had my own solo career going on in Trinidad that was going pretty well and when Tambu lost his voice Roots approached me to come in and hold on until he got better. He did recover and I set a good vibe in the band and so I stayed on with them, but I never saw it in that way. I always felt that music was my destiny and nothing was going to stop that from happening.
JC: Well, you know I am Guyanese. We try to push it whenever we can.
DR: My wife is half Guyanese also (and Trinidadian).
Jouvay.com: Very soon after in 1986 you entered the Calypso Monarch competition and copped all of the awards with The Hammer and Bahia Girl, but then you stopped competing. Why?
DR: Well, the competition was a means for me to display my talent and move on. The whole system of the carnival in Trinidad could be a bit of a treadmill. Every year you do the same thing. You try to win a competition and move on. To me my emergence in the thing coming from a music band and normally music band singers are not the ones who enter calypso competition was a first in its own way. And then coming and beating everybody, all of the veterans..it's like joining a karate class and you just get a yellow belt and you beat a black belt. That's the reason why it became such a phenomena in Trinidad. After that, you know my life is not about competition. It was just a stepping stone. Here I am. Everyone knows who I am and it was just for me to make music and move on.
Jouvay.com: Guyana and Trinidad are somewhat unique in the CARICOM family of nations because of their ethnic composition (and here I mean not just the presence of East Indians because other countries like Jamaica and Suriname have that as well, but the fact that in both Guyana and Trinidad the two dominant groups are African and Indian, descendants of slaves and indentured labourers). In your music you frequently unify rhythms from both the East Indian and African cultures, and in one song you explicitly imagine the Ganges meeting the Nile. How frustrated are you that this is not a reality in the region and that racial politics continues to dominate and infect the national stage?
David Rudder: You know people say artists can make a change, but I am not sure about that. What we can do is suggest and if it does do something, if one person is moved by it, it is a tiny bit of success. The reality is that I was given the gift of creating music and writing music in such a way that people connect. So, to me I would be forfeiting my gift by not saying anything. And it's something that is very close to me; the fact that we are so divided in the world we live and on many different levels. So, recognizing that we have these two main groups in society who are still wary of each other I always try to suggest something. Who knows, someone might listen. That's as far as I go.
JC: Related to this; you have also sung about Caribbean unity, about recognizing Haiti's gift to the world instead (especially since yesterday was their 200th anniversary of independence) of thinking of Haiti as a write off, as a place that deserves our charity and our pity and not as a place that gave the world the Haitian Revolution and the first Black Republic. In your most recent album you have written movingly about the zero-sum standoff in the Middle East with songs like Jaffa Road. So one could say your work urges us to genuinely imagine a better and more accountable world.
David Rudder - Trinidad Calypso
Pictures on right by Marie Jo Mont-Reynaud.
DR: That's right. In a deeper sense Haiti could be our future. Each and everyone of us in the Caribbean. Yeah, we in Trinidad have some oil and we are doing alright financially on one level. At the same time this was the first Republic in the New World. The first free Republic and led by a slave. You can't get more intense than that and look where it's at now. We look at tragedies and we say what can we garner from the tragedy. What can we get out of it because life to me is about looking at what are the positives. What can we get so that we don't repeat it? That was the warning in Haiti and it's also saying to people in the Caribbean that we were brought here on the same ship, but the English speaking Caribbean does not know what is going on in the Spanish speaking Caribbean and vice versa or the French speaking Caribbean. We are looking outwards to different places and at the end of the day all we have is ourselves. The wider societies don't really have time with us again. Sugar is not the greatest thing on the face of the earth again. In our own little way we have to see how we can look out for each other which might be the key to our survival. I just basically use the whole philosophy of pan Caribbeanism to say, "hello, the only way a family can be strong is to stay together regardless of language, race, ethnicity or whatever." It's not that I am trying to send a message, but to say this is how I feel. That's what is coming out of me as an artist.
JC: I definitely think your music speaks to alot of the societal problems that we have. I think your songs are some of the most sensible political speeches from and about the region. And at least you have one person listening.
DR: It's funny that you talked about Jaffa road just now because Jerusalem, another song on the CD that I did a couple years before, suddenly this box came from the middle east. Someone had taken the song up there and a Palestinian family sent some gifts for me and said thank you very much for the song. So, it was like, you mean it got there? The person who wrote said the kind of effect it had on these people was pretty amazing to see. And I felt good about it because it said, Hey, somebody actually listened and it made sense and it might make them feel a little better that someone in another part of the world is actually listening and kind of understanding their plight. That's all a song can do really.
JC: That happened this year?
David Rudder: No that song was done about three years ago. That's the reason why I did this very slow version with just the piano (Blessed Album) because I started to do the song and the lay out with just me and the piano player and the effect that it had was so intense and I said I'll do this version and it just gone through the roof in a sense. Outside the Caribbean community, Trini to the Bone was the big song in the Caribbean community, Jerusalem was the one that attracted most of the people.
JC: It's so timely. In an interview with Sunil Ramdeen of C-TV in Toronto, you say that the Blessed album is a manifestation of how much you are relaxed and happy in spirit, and you wanted to show that Trinidadians have a journey through Carnival which gives life, while people in other parts of the world are only giving death. I find Blessed an extremely sad album though, because we are a part of the world and you can't listen to songs like Jaffa Road and not have a part of your spirit die. How would you respond to this?
DR: The thing about Jaffa Road is I was saying that we have our problems in the Caribbean, but we have not reached that level as yet. Songs like Jerusalem and Jaffa Road is saying to the Caribbean people again, "Watch out." We have our division but we deal with them in a certain way. We can become an Israel and a Palestine. We can become anybody. We could have suicide bombers. It could reach that level of intensity because these people were not like that before. What has driven them to become like this? When a crime happens in society you never feel like it can happen to you. Societies who look at things in other parts of the world and say, "Ah, that won't happen here." You are fooling yourself because at some point they were saying that too. I say to people in the Caribbean, look, we have our problems, but let's try to rise out of these problems. So I try to interject these songs about other parts of the world saying I recognize your plight, but at the same time I hope people could see we are not there as yet. Let's try not to get to that point.
David Rudder - Trinidadian Calypso
JC: It's interesting. I am in Toronto now and I recently met a family friend who lost 7 of her siblings and her father when her house was set on fire during the race riots in Guyana in the early sixties. That's something that was completely not taught to us in school and I am thirty now. So, many young people have this image of the Caribbean that we are somewhat immune to such things.
DR: Yes, I remember the race riots in Guyana.
JC: You were alive back then? Moving on, do you think that where you are influences the kind of music you make? If so, what would you say have been the main influences on the Blessed album? I ask this because so many people have commented on how nostalgic for the region they get listening to this album, and how Trinidad keeps haunting this album, as if it is written by someone who was not necessarily in Trinidad, but who was thinking of that place straight through the production.
DR: It's written from the angle of someone who is very Trinidadian. It's like having your face against the wall. You know the wall is there, but you can't really see the wall because your nose is pressed against it. Within Trinidadian society there is a great burden that is placed on the artist. My not going for carnival caused such a...
JC: ruckus.
DR: Right. That meant that they were putting too much of burden on one man. I mean if the Prime Minister leaves the country nobody would mind. So, how come I...after all of these years I had been doing it for such a long time...at some point you get drained. A friend of mine came here and said, "It's not that you did not carry the meat and fish as usual, it's just that today you did not bring it personally. You sent it." They can't see it from the angle that you actually tried to provide something for them. Thing is it is alright if people can't give back to you, but at some point in time you have to replenish and the only place you can replenish is within yourself. And when you replenish from within yourself you are drained at some point. I had to step back and I am seeing the wall. I have seen the wall and now I have a different perspective on how this wall is and what the wall is and I can see the graffiti. I guess that's the feeling, it comes from someone who has stepped back and looked at the picture as opposed to be up against the wall.
David Rudder - Trinidadian Calypso
JC: I guess it's very nostalgic for many of us who live outside of the Caribbean also. As the UNDP Goodwill ambassador for Trinidad and Tobago what were your responsibilities?
DR: Actually it's for the Caribbean because at that point they had none. They have since gotten people like Wendy Fitzwilliams. I used to represent the English speaking Caribbean at that point and still am. In the UN I have realized that most of the focus is on women and the plight of women. I have always argued in there that half of the problems with the women have to do with the young men. My main focus has been on doing what I can for the young men in the region. Most of the problems, the gangsterism, the drugs the killing is done by the young men. That's where my focus is.
JC: So you work for programs for men in the Caribbean?
David Rudder: I'm starting a foundation in Trinidad. My first project, I am working with boys in St. Michaels which basically is a juvenile detention center for young men. The only thing I have is music so i am trying to organize a steel band for them. My musical director has volunteered his time free of charge to train them to read and write music. Hopefully it can develop into scholarships and then try to spread it through the region to different institutions. Hopefully, each year we can send somebody out to make better of themselves. That's my goal right now.
JC: It's an important group your are working with. My current roommate works with a charter school in the bay that teaches students who apply to go there instead of juvenile hall (Life Learning Academy on Treasure Island, CA) and I know that those kids have had and continue to deal with alot of hardships in their life. I see much success with her program so I wish you luck with yours. Let's move on to Calypso Dreams. It premiered at the Mill Valley film festival in California on October 7th. You are one of the main figures in this documentary, many times breaking the music and the culture down for us. How did you get involved with this project and how would you like to see it develop?
DR: They came to Trinidad and someone suggested they talk with David Rudder and I did some interviews with them and it worked well for their program. Actually I had to do some more, but I could not. They tried to tie the program around the things I said. I have not seen it as yet. I just did the interviews and that was it.
JC: We have to get at Geoff for that one. I actually saw it and it's really good.
DR: I'm glad.
JC: The award winning production team for Calypso Dreams hails from Northern California with no Trini blood or bone, yet captures most of the legends of kaiso on film and produces a piece that chronicles a very important part of Trinidadian culture. Local companies like Banyan have long been archiving performances and interviews of the artists, why do you think a project like this has never surfaced? And do you think the perspective of the documentary would be significantly different if done by a Caribbean person?
DR: The problem with Caribbean productions is that no one wants to fund them. Caribbean society, especially Trinidadian society tends to take things for granted. We are talented people and we tend to take it for granted. It's only when people come from outside the region with better funding because most local production companies can't afford to do it that these people somehow get it done. Banyan and all of these companies have been struggling for many years asking government, asking firms and people in general to help out. Sometimes they get the funding from overseas. Art is seen in the Caribbean as a God given gift. Most developed societies see art as an integral part of the development of the society because it reflects where the society was, where it's at and where it's going. Two things we don't do in the region is (a) emphasize the importance of art and (b) emphasize the importance of education. Most developed countries put their budget for education at at least 11% of the GNP. Most of what we "third world countries" put is 5 and 4 and 3%. I remember the Japanese after the war, they just put 12% of whatever they had into education. That's just education. The more people are educated the more they are in tune to what's going on in society and the importance of the creativity to them. We don't see it that way. We can play pan and so on and somehow we just feel that things will just happen and it just does not work like that.
JC: I totally agree with you on that one. I also know that Geoff them had tried to get funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (US) and he actually ended up funding most of the project himself.
DR: It's tough all over with art right now because alot of budgets are shrinking and the people who suffer are the artists and so on. The point is, they have the National Endowment for the Arts, the French have an Art Ministry. Maybe our Minister of Culture might be inclined to be cultural. We hope.
David Rudder - Triniad Calypso Albums
JC: Hopefully all the buzz about cultural heritage in the UN will rub off a bit on the Caribbean. I do agree that the Caribbean as a people need to invest in education and art. It's so hard with the influx of the drugs now and I can speak of Guyana. It's so hard to turn kids away from that, especially when so many in power are involved. Years ago you acted in "Sugar Cane Road", does Calypso Dreams signal your return to film?
Daviv Rudder: That was just a documentary thing. Between those two I did the music for two Hollywood movies. Basically I am actually in the midst of writing a musical based on one of my songs. Tony Hall from Banyan, he teaches out of the University of Connecticut, he has a friend there who is interested in funding a play based on one of my songs. So I am busy writing about twenty five songs. Hopefully it will be launched in Trinidad during the 2005 carnival.
JC: What song is it based on?
DR: It's a song called The New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club on the Zero album. So that's where I am right now.
JC: Andy Narell who you collaborated with on Hammer also hails from Northern California. You both performed with the Chabot College Steelband Orchestra a few years ago to a sold out crowd. You must return to the bay soon. That was my first time seeing a majority white steel pan group playing and grooving to your music. Does that happen in many places around the world?
DR: Am, a few places. I had done the Hammer a year he was in Trinidad and he wanted to do a version of it on his album so we got together then and have become very good friends. He's actually experimenting with recording steelpan music in a different way in France right now. I understand it is a very revolutionary style of recording. I'm anticipating with bated breath to hear it. It's surround sound like you get in the movie house.
JC: It's so interesting to learn that steelpan is taught in alot of schools in the States, in New York.
DR: There are more steel bands in European countries than in Trinidad. Even Japan, France, England. How this thing is growing.
JC: Have you performed in Asia before?
DR: Only Japan. I always thought they had these conservative people, but I did not see any. They were getting on bad just like the Trinidadians.
JC: I know I was just in Singapore and I thought the same thing and had a big shock when I discovered their nightlife. Many people speak of soca or calypso moving to the next level. What do you think they are speaking of and who in the business today do you think can do that?
DR: I never really understood that you know. I don't even think they know what they are talking about. It seems like a good idea. It's a good idea to start with, but most times you hear it for so many years and you hear the same thing over and over. Like the carnival costumes, maybe they moving to another level too. We wearing a different type of bikini this year. Maybe they'll move from an artificial type of material to cotton. I just want to make music and do the best I can.
Jouvay.com: Do you presently work with any young artists in an advisory capacity?
DR: Only person who I am sort of close to is Roger George. He used to be like my understudy in Charlie's Roots and he's doing pretty well. Right now with the family I am trying to groom these little ones to be the best that they can be. That's where I am at right now.
JC: How many kids you have?
DR: Five. Since I have been married I've had three.
JC: Oh wow. Congratulations and congrats on turning the big 50 last year.
David Rudder: Oh, Thank you.
JC: You told Mr. Ramdeen in January 2003 that you were taking a well deserved rest and vacation. Is that vacation over and are you energized to spread the gospel of your music once more? Will you be in Trinidad for carnival in 2004?
DR: I am still re-energizing. The energy is good, but the music I am doing for the play is another area. And I am very much excited about that. Anyway, I have to go now. (After this interview the Trinidad Express confirmed that David Rudder would be performing at the Narmandie in Trinidad for carnival 2004).
Jouvay.com: OK, Mr. Rudder. Thanks so much. One last question. On a more personal level, your wife is half Guyanese. Will we soon be hearing a song about Kaiteur and Stabroek, metagee and pepperpot?
David Rudder: I don't know. I don't create like that. If something comes to my head, you never know. I am not a craftsman. I might be reading something and it affects me and something comes.
Much thanks to Mr. Rudder for doing this interview. Francis Ragoo (Miami Socafest), Bad Land Music (Toronto) and Geoffrey Dunn (Director of Calypso Dreams) all helped getting me in touch with him and Desa Philadelphia (Hollywood correspondent for Time Magazine) was critical in recording this phone interview. Alissa Trotz, a Professor of Women's and Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto helped to edit the questions, many times signifantly increasing their length and insightfulness. Any questions or comments regarding the content of this page please contact Maya Trotz.
