Caribbean Beat — 25th Anniversary Edition — March/April 2017 (#144)

“I would hate to be a superstar,” said André Tanker to writer Judy Raymond, who profiled
the beloved singer-composer in July/August 1997. Both his live performances and his
recordings were relatively rare, but his death in 2003 — on Carnival Friday night — left a
still-gaping absence in T&T’s music scene. Nearly twenty years after she interviewed him for
Caribbean Beat, Raymond looks back at a musical talent that lives on in our cultural DNA:
26 • Trinidadian musician
André Tanker
July/August 1997
Photo by Mark Lyndersay
André Tanker’s music might have been
washed away in the torrent of soca that
floods Trinidad at Carnival every year. But
instead it’s outlasted almost all the local music
produced since he died in 2003, at sixty-one.
Tanker grew up in the middle-class Port of
Spain neighbourhood of Woodbrook, home of
the Invaders steelband, where he learned to
play pan, and the Little Carib Theatre, where
Beryl McBurnie was reviving folk dance and
Orisha drummer Andrew Beddoe played for
Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop.
But Tanker didn’t appreciate them fully
until Afro-Trinidadians reclaimed their
heritage in the 1970 Black Power Movement.
“It gave you a perspective on who you are,
what motivates you, why you like what you
like,” Tanker said, looking back in 1997.
That was when he understood he was
entitled to draw on his entire birthright:
calypso and reggae, jazz, blues, soul, Latin
American music, African and Indian.
“Children of a one great love,” he sang.
Like many intuitive artists, he wasn’t
easy to interview: low-key and laconic, he
preferred his message to be conveyed by
his music. Likewise, he was more composer
than performer, though he played vibraphone
and flute, and he sang his songs of love and
the oneness of humankind, though his voice
wasn’t his greatest asset.
Walcott described Tanker’s work as
“disciplined enough to be simple”; it was also
rich enough to have enduring appeal. Even
now, Trinis catch themselves humming “Wild
Indian”, “Basement Party”, “Sayamanda”.
His talent lay in blending traditions to make
something that was at once fresh and familiar.
27 • Barbadian soca star
Edwin Yearwood
September/October 1997
Photo by Roxan Kinas
28 • Parang season
November/December 1997
Illustration by Christopher
Cozier
29 • Masks of Carnival
January/February 1998
Photo by Sean Drakes
30 • Kite season
March/April 1998
Photo by Sean Drakes
31 • Jamaica at the World Cup
May/June 1998
Photo by Doug Pensinger/Allsport
Previewing that year’s FIFA World Cup
in our May/June 1998 issue, Georgia
Popplewell concluded, “For the first time
since 1974, Caribbean people will really
have a team to root for.” She was referring
to Haiti’s national team, which unexpectedly
qualified for the 1974 World Cup in West
Germany — and to the Reggae Boyz, the
Jamaican national team, which made history
in 1998 as the first football team from the
Anglophone Caribbean ever to go to the
sport’s most prestigious tournament.
“For a small country,” wrote Popplewell,
“a national sports team is . . . a repository of
civic dreams and aspirations.” Such was the
case for Jamaica — even if the Reggae Boyz
didn’t advance out of the finals’ first round.
Five years later, it was Trinidad and
Tobago’s chance. Beating Bahrain in a
qualifying match, the Soca Warriors booked
their tickets to the 2006 World Cup in
Germany — and T&T became the smallest
nation ever to qualify for the World Cup, a
victory in its own right.
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