JIT BLENDS MUSIC
THROUGH FAMILY
Trinidad Guardian
January 1, 2000
Page 11
Jit
Samaroo was born in "Suri" Village, Lopinot in 1950,
the seventh of Sookram and Lackia Samaroo's 13 children. He attended Arouca Boys RC - a six-mile
round-trip trek - and after school helped in "the garden" which
Sookram kept to supplement his salary as a maintenance worker with the Ministry
of works, Lopinot.
Jit's
mother - an enthusiastic "dholak" player - died in the year of our
Independence; and the chore of taking care of the younger children fell to
Jit. He had already learned pan, having
at 10 joined the short-lived Village Boys pan-round-the-neck side. Now, at 12 - and in large part, he later
told "M", though we need not entirely believe him, as a way of
keeping the family together - he
started a Samaroo kids' "combo."
The
word reminds us that Lopinot was less isolated than its location suggests, and
that the young Indian belonged to the first generation of Trinidadians to grow
up - via that new invention, the transistor radio - with American pop
music. Samaroo was not yet 11 when
Elvis - he recalled many years later - sang, "It's Now or
Never." He was barely a teenager
when the Beatles began.
The
Samaroo children played parang in the village, Jit on the guitar and Sonilal -
"one of the most fabulous drummers we have in this country today,"
says Pat Bishop - on the scratcher.
(Bishop sees the memory of parang in the mature man's music, though
"not as sound, but more as rhythm.")
But he was already "a slave to pan," and at 14 he joined Lever
Brothers Camboulay Steelband.
There
he mastered the whole range of pans, and then set about transferring the guitar
chords he knew to them. And there also
- fatefully for the music - two Englishmen at different times encouraged
him. ("I suppose they saw
something in me that probably I didn't see at the time.") Lendeg White, the band's arranger, arranged
music lessons with "a guy in St Joseph." Gordon Maliphant, an agriculturist, paid for a correspondence
course.
"I
was around a lot of classical music," Jit says, " and I composed a
lot of semi-classical music; but always for pan. Right now I'm thinking about composing for a classical
orchestra."
In
the '70s, in one of his infrequent solo performances, Jit Samaroo won the Ping
Pong (solo) at the Steelband Music Festival.
And in that year too, Berch Kellman from San Fernando, pan tuner for the
Kids, Camboulay and Renegades, got Jit the job as arranger for Renegades - and
the glorious musical marriage of The Indian and The Africans, Handel and the
Hell Yard, Lopinot and Behind the Bridge, began.
Central
to an understanding of his music is in understanding the scale; and Indian
scales have an infinite number. But Jit
hears notes in families, which is really what a scale is. You don't go out on a tangent, there's an
order. His lower orders are playing
counter-melodies; he arranges one tune by the device of composing additional
tunes to accompany it. The Jit-Renegades
success story - seven panorama victories in the past 14 years - is too well known
to bear repeating; and only slightly less well known are Samaroo's innovations
- like the cross-rhythms in '89, in which, Jit recalls, "I combined
different rhythms, like zouk, samba, some kind of Indian stuff."