Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand by Jocelyne Guilbault and Roy Cape (review)

Roy Cape is arguably one of the hardest-working musicians in the West Indian carnival music scene, yet his exhaustive career as a musician and bandleader has been only superficially appreciated to date. Together with the ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault, the two have produced an ethnographic biography of his life on the road as a musician and eventual bandleader of the well-known Roy Cape Kaiso All Stars. Guilbault and Cape produce a work that is innovative in its methodology and approach. For his part, Cape reconstructs his life narrative, as a child in the orphanage, through apprenticeship in the calypso tents, to an exhausting life of work as a musician both at home and on tour. His memories of performances reveal the transformation of Trinidad’s musical life during the transition to nationhood in the 1970s, through migration and connection to diasporic networks, and the innovative developments of soca and stadium fête performances. In this part-ethnography, Guilbault builds on her extensive career researching Trinidad’s carnival scene and observations of Cape’s performances. Together, the effort to create a collaborative dialogue is revealing and ambitious in its overall scope.

In chapter 1, Guilbault documents Cape’s early family life and childhood spent in the orphanage. She supplements this early history with a view of the orphanage system in Trinidad and its value as a musical training ground. Her documentation of musical education in the orphanages and their connection to the Police Band (and steel bands) is a significant contribution. Chapter 2 describes Cape’s early development and transition from a young struggling musician to a thriving and working saxophonist. Guilbault documents the relationship between dance bands, studio musicians, and the calypso tent bands of the 1960s, as well as musical repertoire and practices of covering foreign popular music at this time. Cape’s biography is interrupted in chapter 3 as Guilbault analyzes Cape’s evolving performance aesthetic and sound production throughout his career. She suggests this evolution is a metaphor for historical changes in Trinidad’s musical soundscape. Chapter 4 returns to Cape’s life in the 1970s and 1980s as he transforms into a bandleader (after a brief unsuccessful migration to New York). In this chapter Cape’s life is presented as hectic and hardworking given the performance demands of the calypso tents and year-round international touring schedules; unfortunately, little is revealed of the dynamics between bandleaders and musicians off the stage. In chapter 5, Cape and Guilbault attempt to construct a visual ethnography that represents the life of a working musician. The photo documentation in this chapter, while revealing, generally emphasizes performance and reflects a lack of candid visual documentation off-stage. Chapter 6 is a collection of oral testimonies of fellow musicians, singers, and those who worked with Cape over the years. Guilbault notes that these testimonies reflect the strengths of his collaborative music making and musical social networks, which have enabled him to perform year-round, despite the seasonality of carnival. In the final chapter Guilbault sums up Cape’s career achievements as remarkable, particularly in his ability to evolve (from musician to bandleader, from calypso to soca) and to thrive in a music scene that suppresses the ability to survive solely on one’s craft. Ultimately, the effort is an admirable collaboration, both in producing new perspectives to existing Caribbean scholarship and in demonstrating that there is still much to learn from “behind the scenes” of the West Indian carnival music industry.