An edited version of this article was published in the July/August issue of Caribbean Beat as “Nicholas Brancker; Beyond the Bajan Invasion“
Prolific Barbadian music producer and noted musician and bandleader Nicholas Brancker is critical to the spread of soca beyond the boundary of its Trinidad genesis, and equally important to the spread of the ethos of Caribbean musicians in the global music industry. Yet, somehow, his story is not a part of the wider oeuvre of island musicians’ stories that lay claim to recognised excellence in the arts. Caribbean Beat sat down with Brancker to get his story and put into perspective his relative importance to regional music. Beyond accolades and awards, his journey is a potential road map to sustaining a successful career in music in these islands.
Born in England to a Bajan father and Trinidadian mother, he would come back “home” as a child first to Trinidad then settling permanently in Barbados in 1970 as a prodigy. He was told that he started playing a toy piano, at age three, picking out melodies, before receiving formal piano lessons at seven years old. He says, “my interest in music is something that I do not remember starting. It has always existed.” Despite initial resistance, that formal training was acknowledged, in hindsight, as necessary. Family was also integral to his musical beginnings. “I was very fortunate in that both my parents loved music,” he notes. His mother was more musically experienced coming from a family of musicians in church, while his father existed in a Bajan household that “was a little less tolerant of the artistic side in that generation.”
Despite his father’s self-taught status, his first music lesson to his son, “was probably the most important one, because it’s the only music lesson I got that covers every single thing I do, every single time I play music or create it. And that is, you can make whatever you are doing your own, even if it has already been created… Every performance is me, in some way, diving into some artistic interpretation of something.” His father’s music choices of the blues also laid the pathway to seeing beyond the music, affecting how he saw Black music’s global impact, and the responsibility to “not lose sight of what music has always meant to us as a people. It’s not just a source of entertainment, it’s a spiritual source, it is a cultural source, it is an identity that we use to propel ourselves through history.” Deep listening and analysis to a broad range of popular recorded music of the Caribbean and America over the years paid off. Gigs and performances followed.
His movement from high school band keyboardist to bassist was natural: “From the first time I saw a bass being played, I said, ‘I need to do that.’ I never actually taught myself, I just picked it up and started to play.” The now established teenaged bassist who played in the Battleground Calypso Tent in Barbados in 1984, met Caribbean music legend Eddy Grant and impressed him enough to ask the university student Brancker to join him on his pending world tour in 1985-86. The choice to drop out of university was a no-brainer, but he also had to convince his parents that it was the practical thing to do at that time. In a full circle moment, in 2021, The UWI conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) degree.
The growth of his prolific production catalogue was the benefit of this formal and informal music training. His first record production credit was for an album by Bajan calypsonian Adonijah in 1984, and his most recent was for an EP by trumpeter and singer Kweku Jelani in December 2023. In the spanning four decades, an estimated couple thousand songs have been produced by Brancker: “I make music because I have no choice, I have this inside fighting to come out. It is not for accolades.” When Soca star Red Plastic Bag (“Ragga Ragga”, 1993) eschewed Trinidad soca producers for Brancker, it paved the way for a reverse flow from Trinidad to Barbados for sublime soca production. An industry of Bajan soca and calypso blossomed.
While spending a few months in Jamaica in 1994 working with Mikey Bennett — “Telephone Love” (1988), “Mr. Lover Man” (1992) — Brancker heard no music with the frenetic pace of Trinidad soca, nor stuffed sonic bandwidths of competing frequencies, which allowed the bass to pump. The science and a template for the new soca was formed. The spillover was a period marketed by Trinidad promoters as the infamous Bajan Invasion in the mid-to-late1990s, when the “groovy” tempo ragga soca music of Bajan bands krosfyah, Square One and Coalishun — “Pump Me Up” (1994), “Turn It Around” (1997), “Ice Cream” (1996), and more — dominated the radio airwaves and the Carnivals in T&T. The response, after the initial burst of euphoria, was almost xenophobic. It was “war” with Brancker being described as the “general of the Bajan invasion,” which perturbed him since he was half-Trini. “This is not how I envisaged the Caribbean functioning,” he recalled.
More than just a Crop Over musician and producer, he exhibits a wider understanding of the Caribbean and its popular music: “I can understand the idea that the grass is greener on the other side, and when you are not in that space something can seem more attractive than it is… you begin to take [familiar things] for granted. But, in terms of the artistic contribution of Caribbean people to the world, I can’t think of another group of people who have done more per capita for music on the planet than us. It is a shame that we tend to view ourselves still as less than.”
That mindset has made the mention of Brancker’s two Grammy nominations in 1992 for Best Contemporary Jazz Song, and Performance for “Love Is” by flautist Sherry Winston irrelevant. That said, he does not discount his twelve years in Roberta Flack’s live touring band — five years being associate musical director — nor his tenure with Eddy Grant mentioned earlier. These were important touchpoints in the eternal learning curve. Playing live is his new direction beyond his prior success as a soca music producer. He is looking to establish, “a more year-round artistically sustainable mode of expression.” with his new Nicholas Brancker Band. Last March, his Uplift: a Caribbean Fusion Concert was a recent example. It is a work in progress that is looking at collaborations with small orchestras in Europe as it plans to tour in the future.
Self-awareness, Caribbean pride, and knowledge are key and serious matters for generational transfer. “The idea of an artist being someone who you have a picture of, I feel a little limited by that…I take my musical gifts very seriously. The older I get, the more important it becomes to me to see a sense of strength and confidence, and awareness of position in younger musicians… They do not stand with their chest up in international environments, they don’t respect themselves in that way because they feel that somebody else is better than them.” He continues, “all that is different is the taste, not the standard of execution.” There is a certain essence that Caribbean musicians bring to the music that can’t be replicated ideally by others. “What I am selling is the brilliance of Caribbean musicians playing Caribbean music,” he says.
Authenticity reigns supreme in terms of his philosophy, reinforced by a lifetime of experience, and the ability to see a wider world, whether live with Eddy Grant or continuously listening to a lot of global music. According to Brancker, Grant was “unapologetically Caribbean, but still African in substance.” Grant’s philosophy ‘I am who I am, I can not be anybody else, was infectious and character-building. “You can only have influence artistically if you are authentic. I cannot assess positively anybody who carbon copies anything. The more varied your experiences are, the more you can bring to bear on what you are doing,” he says. He continues, “the other thing is that we need more voices in music creation in the English speaking Caribbean. We limit ourselves, and I would like to think that my voice has a value, and gives a wider breadth of what our expression can be.” This is not arrogance but confidence.
His two albums as leader, In Contempt (1996) and Touching Bass (2017), do not relate the prolific nature, and full influence of Brancker as a musician, composer, producer. He will keep releasing new music and developing a new cadre of musicians. His brand is secure, his work is the proof. As an influencer and mentor, Nicholas Brancker is a legacy maker in his own time.
© 2024, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.
