Cover of University of Calypso, a new album by pannist Andy
Narell and Lord Relator (Willard Harris).

University of Calypso, a new album by pannist Andy Narell and Lord Relator (Willard Harris) gets off to a rollicking start with Harris’ Gavaskar, a witty anecdote about West Indian cricket that the singer clearly enjoys, adding an extra “rrrr” as he rolls the Indian cricketers’ names off. It’s a song that illustrates everything that’s great about this new album. Harris and Narell are committed to delivering an authentic kaiso experience, replicating with a band of top-tier musicians a sound that essentially died in T&T in the 1980s.

Today’s calypsonians typically pursue the dance music goldmine that’s offered by soca. A few pursue the narrow sideline of music tailored for the steelband, and only a few more remain committed to the narrative storytelling style of topical music that’s on display here. In his Relator persona, Harris is better known now as a living archive of not just vintage calypso, but also a skilled mimic of the vocal styles of the calypsonians who performed them. He’s used that skill to deliver hilarious sketches, casting vintage calypsoes in the singing styles of popular pop singers, and to lovingly parody the unique tics of popular calypsonians.

None of that is on this album, and that’s just as well, since seeing Relator doing it as much fun as hearing it. The selections that Harris has chosen to work with here reflect his preference for funny calypsoes, both his own and, overwhelmingly, the work of Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), represented by six numbers out of the 15 on the album. Harris’s reading of Kitchener’s Love in the Cemetery, a hilarious early work that demonstrates the master steelband theme composer’s underrated capacity to weave together a funny story with clever metre and lyric.

Narell and his band provide solid but almost invisibly respectful backing to Harris on most of these tracks, sounding for all the world like a particularly tight calypso session band from the 50s or 60s. The band doesn’t start to seriously rip until the first instrumental, Pan in Harmony, by Kitchener, and only lets loose twice more on the album, on the other two pan focused numbers, Terror’s Sugar for Pan and Steelband Music, also by Kitch.

A diffuse delight

On these numbers, the rich harmonies of the music, all from that unique sub-genre of calypso music known as the “pan tune” by steelband connoisseurs, offer the band an opportunity to stretch out and fill the music, with Paquito D’Rivera, in particular, offering challenging counterpoint to Narell’s pan runs. University of Calypso is a delight, if an ultimately unsatisfying one. This listener was left with a powerful sense of unfinished business as the album wrapped up with the delicate charm of Kitchener’s My Brother, Your Sister.”

The collaboration between Narell and Harris is, by turns, an engaging love letter to a style and approach to calypso music that’s now almost exclusively found on scratchy vinyl albums, a revival of some almost forgotten but still very entertaining classics, an aide memoire of the greatness of Kitch’s Calypso Revue and an exploration by a more than capable jazz band of the deep musical legacy of the genre.

Spread over 15 songs, it tantalises at all these, but accomplishes none of them definitively. The hugely entertained listener is left to hope that University of Calypso is but the first semester of a course with great potential.