PROFILE OF A COMPOSER
By Alma Pierre
c. 1990
Pan is Beautiful V/ World Steelband Festival begins on October 20 and runs until November 5. This year, a competition was held to select the test pieces for both the conventional and the old time steelbands. The test piece chosen for the old time steelbands is Before These Days, composed by Ovid Alexis. Let's learn something about this composer.
Ovid Alexis graduated from Berklee College of Music, Boston, U.S.A., with a major in Arranging. He now runs his own music school and also works as a free-lance musician (keyboardist). Sometimes he performs as a soloist or with a group.
He also works as a recording artist and does composing and arranging for vocalists and instrumentalists. He has judged in local song festivals and taught for two years in the Creative Arts Summer School of the Extra Mural Department of U.W.I.
TAUGHT HIMSELF
Ovid was born on October 28, 1959, one of a family of nine children. He has five brothers and three sisters. He attended Hockett Baptist Primary School in Laventille, and later, Mucurapo Junior Secondary and South East Port of Spain Secondary schools.
Ovid was encouraged in music by his mother, and has been involved in it from a very early age. He recalls that he first played a song all on his own when he was about four to five years old. This was a calypso, "Archie buck dem up," and he can still remember exactly what he played.
There was a piano at home and he was always experimenting with sound at the instrument. Between the ages of five and seven years, he taught himself to play a number of songs from The Sound of Music.
His first piano teacher was David Lovell, who taught him along with his brothers and sisters when he was about seven years old.
Ovid Alexis has performed in a variety of situations. While at school at Mucurapo Junior Secondary, he assisted by accompanying other students in performances, and continued to help in this way for a few years even after leaving the school.
During the early and mid-1980s, including the years when he studied at Berklee College, he toured with different groups, sometimes his own; played at many hotels, universities and other venues, for various kinds of functions. He is particularly happy to have studied piano at Berklee with Orville Wright, another Trinidadian, who has recently been made head of the Ensemble Department, and considers himself very fortunate indeed to have studied advanced arranging with Bob Freeman.
He has accompanied many top local artistes such as Carol Addison and Charmaine Forde. In 1987, he performed with Len "Boogsie" Sharpe at the Percussive Arts society Convention in St. Louis Missouri, U.S.A.
There are some experiences that Ovid recalls with fondness tinged with pride, wonder, humour our other emotion, as the case might be. For instance, Ovid was able to complete a four-year course at Berklee College in two and a half years. This was achieved by dint of hard work, and having earned some credits on entry. He was nominated for a Performance Award on graduation in 1984.
PLANS POSTPONED
Ovid was forced to postpone his plans to enter Berklee College in 1978 because in October 1977, he was involved in a serious motor car accident. He spent 11 days in hospital, three and a half of these in a coma, and suffered from amnesia even after he was discharged.
As a result of the accident, he could not walk or feed himself as he had lost his sense of direction and balance, and he had to learn to walk all over again. Determination and will power put him back on his feet in a remarkably short space of time.
He still chuckles when he remembers that at the age of 12, he did a gig at Luciano's in St. Anns for about one month, playing four nights a week. This came to an abrupt end when his mother put her foot down because it was affecting his schoolwork.
Needless to say, feeling the effects of this exercise, Ovid used to sleep in class!
There is one thing of which he is particularly proud. In 1986, he performed at he Caribbean Jazz Festival in Barbados with the Trinidad and Tobago Calypso/Jazz Ensemble.
One of his own compositions, Shaske, was reviewed in Downbeat magazine and described as the highlight of the Jazz Festival.
OWN COMPOSITIONS
Ovid plans in the near future to record and release an album of his own compositions. Winning the test piece competition for the old time steelbands is the most recent accomplishment in a line of successes.
Ovid confesses that he is looking forward to hearing how the bands will perform this piece, Before These Days, in the up-coming festival.