Gone, but not near to being forgotten

Gone, but not near to being forgotten
Keith Smith, Trinidad Express, Friday, October 9th, 2009
http://www.thetobagonews.com/index.pl/article?id=24993636

I wish the late Lord Kitchener's ex-wife, Valerie Green, the best of luck in getting the Prime Minister, who has the vetoing say, to give the Grandmaster, as I continue to dub him, a posthumous Order of Trinidad and Tobago, the "old man" having famously refused the Chaconia Gold because he believed he should have been awarded what was then the Trinity Cross.

Sparrow told me at the time of his receiving of the said Chaconia that "you have to take what they give you" which is true in the sense that one does not want to set oneself up as the arbiter of one's contribution to the public good but, still, I could see Kitch's point-surely in the "Land of Steelband and Calypso" the man who is, arguably, the greatest calypsonian ever deserves the highest national award.

The only argument, I suppose, against Kitchener being the "greatest ever" is Sparrow with the Kitchener clan arguing that unlike Kitchener, Sparrow did not write all his own calypsoes, but against that the Sparrow set could very well argue that their hero wrote some great ones and, besides that, there was his unmatched ability as a performer and singer, the late "Jazzy" Pantin telling me once, eyes open wide, how Sparrow could "sing like a bell."

Chalkdust who, I continue to insist, must be numbered among the great calypsonians, is a Sparrowite in that regard, not that he doesn't revere "Kitch" but, as he put it "God gave each of us calypsonians some thing, but he gave Sparrow every thing_Sparrow could compose, he could sing, he could dance, he could act and he could tell jokes"

Still, for all that, there is none to dispute Kitchener's kingship. After all he traversed, I would think, two, maybe three calypso eras, the most triumphant, perhaps, being after his return in the mid-sixties when the "old man" not only fought up with the young ones but knocked them out, copping road march after road march title, extending the pan kaiso genre that he had invented in the '40s and putting down some timeless classics with his "Carnival Over" becoming the broadcast media Carnival Tuesday signature sign-off song-as I had urged from the very beginning.

Still, for all that, though, Ms Green is right in that Kitchener does not seem to have been all that rated in the very highest of circles, the University not giving him a doctorate a la Sparrow on the grounds that ours is a Caribbean university with Sparrow, receiving his award, for his undoubted Caribbean insight and reach whereas Kitch, well, the university did not think it was well-placed to give out awards for music, the Grandmaster's music, apparently, not enough and complete in itself.

Well, I have lived to see the likes of "Boogsie" Sharpe and Black Stalin receive honorary degrees so who is going to try to persuade me now that Kitch was not as least as deserving, only political correctness and wariness of being perceived as wanting to lessen the attributes of the two (as if that is possible where the respective panman and calypsonian are concerned) preventing me from bawling that it is an injustice that cries out to heaven to this day?

Ms Green is right-Kitch was one of the greatest composers and entertainers this country has ever had and no one could take his place. As the ex-wife who had every cause to feel wounded by the man's unconscionable treatment of not only her but their children (they, all but left out in the cold) you have to know where she was coming from when she said that we should "forget about the man he might have been but remember his music"-as some of the leading newspapers in the world continue to do, the Wall Street Journal, for example, commenting recently on the sophisticated stylings he introduced into kaiso.

Next year will be ten years since Kitchener died. By no means has he been forgotten but, a decade on, Trinidad and Tobago should be planning any number of retrospectives if only to show that, premier awards apart, this genius is not only known in his country but acknowledged to the max.