Of all the Pan Pioneers discussed on this forum,he seems to have been forgotten.
Nerlin Taitt was a champion pan soloist and steelband pioneer and
innovator in South Trinidad in the 1950' and 60's who was also a great
guitarist.
He played with the Dutchy Brothers and also with his own band the Nerlin
Taitt Orchestra, and was a well known musician in the South in those
days.
He migrated to Jamaica during the Rock Steady era , and is credited for
being the innovator of the distinctive reggae guitar strum, which is
derived from the guitar pan rhythm we used to call the "after strum".
This one individual embodies the connection between the predominant
musical art forms coming out of the English speaking Caribbean- Reggae,
Calypso and the Pan.
He was a true Caribbean Culture man and should be recognized as such.
The following link is to an article by Jim Dooley about the life of the
Rock Steady , Pan and Calypso legend Nerlin "Lynn "Taitt
http://www.cyberus.ca/~jdooley/Taitt.htm
This is how he was remembered in the Jamaica Gleaner.
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/glean.../ent/ent1.html
And on WACK FM
http://www.wackradio901fm.com/index....ral&Itemid=132
Rest in peace, Nerlin "Lyn" Taitt
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Is it some kind of profound secret ?
Pan Guitar
by Keith Smith
Tuesday, February 2nd 2010
Yes, you read the headline right and, no, I didn’t mean to head the piece ’Guitar Pan’, the piece being about a Trinidadian who revolutionised Jamaican music, who died last month and of whom indefatigable researcher Kim Johnson recently wrote:
’Nearlin Taitt enjoys the distinction of being famous for being not famous enough. Having created the sound of modern Jamaican music, Taitt is well-known to cognoscenti as the musician who deserves more credit than he’s been given.
He has been the subject of a prize-winning documentary, Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady; and Lloyd Bradley in This Is Reggae Music, The Story of Jamaica Music, points out that ’Lynn Taitt, is given the most credit as the man who consolidated the various musical advances and solidified the rocksteady style.’
Yet reggae historian and author of The Rough Guide to Reggae Steve Barrow describes him as, ’one of the great unsung heroes of Jamaican music.’ And Wikipedia states that ’Taitt’s contribution to Jamaican popular music includes his often-overlooked role as arranger and session leader for many, if not most of the recordings that he appeared on.’
Perhaps this is because Taitt is Trinidadian - born in 1934 in San Fernando - and cut his musical teeth as a panman.
In the late 1940s Nearlin and his brother Cedric Taitt and the other boys of the neighbourhood hung around Bataan, a nearby steelband, until its leader Herman ’Teddy’Clarke gave them a few old pans...
At Christmastime the boys put aside their pans to go paranging, Kenrick, Angus and Cedric had harmonicas while Nearlin played a cuatro.
Small gigs at school fairs gave Seabees enough respectability for Mrs. Taitt to tolerate them although she never approved until Nearlin won the 1956 Music Festival prize for ping pong solo.
By then he was a committed musician....
He was also playing guitar with another group of neighbourhood friends, the Dutchy Brothers...:
DeVlugt had a club on the wharves, the Dutchy Club. One night a drunk sailor had left his guitar there; or maybe someone stole it from him. Either way the guitar was given to Taitt to hide. He immediately began to teach himself to play.
Taitt played electric guitar with the Dutchy Brothers for two years in the late 1950s until he formed his own Nearlin Taitt Orchestra, and in 1962 they were hired by some calypsonians for a Caribbean tour culminating in Jamaica. Alas, after the tour the calypsonians absconded back to Trinidad without paying the musicians. Taitt, whose solid-body electric guitar was new to Jamaica, was snapped up by the astute businessman and bandleader Byron Lee, who had to lend him clothes to perform in.
Although he helped Taitt in the difficult period, even lending him clothes to perform in, Lee sought to keep him on a short leash, having him reapply every year for a work permit. Nonetheless Taitt took to ska like a hog to mud. He swung the music away from acoustic to electric guitar and was soon able to establish his own band, The Comets.
Striving for the sound of a tenor pan Taitt developed a percussive ’bubbling’ style of guitar picking, which is now standard repertoire for Jamaican guitarists. He became a highly-demanded session musician, working with all the important producers to provide music for every important musician at the time: Derrick Morgan, Desmond Dekker, Lee Perry, Ken Boothe, Bob Marley, Joe Higgs, Alton Ellis, Phyllis Dillon, Delroy Wilson and the Skatalites.
Over the five years he would arrange and record over 1,500 songs as session leader. Such phenomenal output was only possible because Taitt possessed a single-minded focus on music that bordered on the obsessive, practically sleeping in the studios and when he wasn’t playing music, composing it. Asked if during those years he played dominoes, the Jamaican national pastime, he replies: ’I don’t play any games, it doesn’t teach me anything in music.’
Once offered leadership of the Skatalites Taitt refused because he thought it should be led by a Jamaican. Yet it was precisely his Trinidadian background which gave him such prominence (in addition to his considerable appetite for work), and in 1966 it put him in leadership of the whole music scene.
It happened one day when Hopeton Lewis came to record in Ken Khouri’s studio, where Taitt and his band the Jets were working. Lewis’s song was ’Take it easy’, a message perfectly in keeping with the times, when the urban unemployed ’rude boys’ affected a cool, laid-back menace. But the song wasn’t right at ska’s fast pace. ’I tell Gladdy Anderson, I say: ’Gladdy, slow down that pace, let’s hear how it would sound,’ says Taitt. ’But as you do that, the song get longer and slower, so there is a lot of spaces because it’s not fast any more.’... (Continued, Thursday)
Keith Smith
Thursday, February 4th 2010
Part 2
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’Take It Easy’’ sold 10,000 copies in a single weekend, Kim Johnson continued, writing in Caribbean Beat, Caribbean Airlines’s in-flight magazine which I hear you can now get in bookshops on the ground and high time, too...
’This was not simply a slower version of ska but a completely different, new sound, whose influence we hear in today’s reggae. For instance, the electric bass plays clusters of notes rather than a continuous line which are followed by the guitar that brings them all to the fore.
Other songs are claimed to have launched rocksteady: Alton Ellis’ ’Girl I’ve Got a Date’’ and Derek Morgan’s ’Tougher Than Tough.’’ It doesn’t’ matter: Taitt arranged and played on all.
’Everybody loved what Lynn Taitt was doing. It caught on like wildfire,’’ guitarist Ernest Ranglin told Lloyd Bradley.
The entire music industry fell in line behind Taitt, whose band backed almost every important rocksteady hit, including Desmond Dekker’s first, ’007’’. In countless sessions Taitt would first lay out his slow, cool guitar chords, giving room for the other musicians, organ, saxophone, trumpet and especially the vocalist, to produce the sweetest melodies.
Ernest Ranglin explains, ’Lynn Taitt was keen to try new things. Everybody wanted something new - the musicians, the crowds, the producers-but it hadn’t come together as such until he start to organise the sound’’.
Taitt’s innovativeness was also deeply ingrained in his personality. Focussed exclusively on music, he was and remains continuously trying something new, attempting to take things higher. As a boy, after he learnt pan he taught himself to read music. After he learnt guitar he taught himself piano. ’Nearlin was always trying to improve,’’ recalls his brother Cedric. ’If he do one thing today, by tomorrow it’s better. Once he tried to retune a music box; he opened it up and was pulling the wires because he didn’t like the key it played in.’’
Prince Buster, singer, producer and maestro of ska, says, ’He was an excellent player and was never a man who was satisfied with how things were if they stayed the same for too long. Even though he was the person who really bring in rocksteady as we know it today, he was always looking for ways to move it on as soon as it was established.’’
Then in 1969 rocksteady was abruptly supplanted by reggae.
There were several reasons, such as the rise of new producers Lee ’Scratch’’ Perry and Bunny Lee, engineer Osborne ’King Tubby’’ Ruddock; the new artistes they had to groom; and the new sound they discovered. Scratch Perry signed a group of rebels avoided by other partners, the Wailers. King Tubby moved in another direction by omitting vocal tracks and having a DJ, U-Roy, chant in their space. But central to the demise of rocksteady was the sudden abdication of its king, the restless Lynn Taitt.
At the peak of his fame Taitt was invited to set up a band in Toronto for the West Indian Federated Club. It was meant, like his 1962 sojourn to Jamaica, to last a fortnight. Instead he stayed a year and then decided he liked the place.
Today 74-year-old Taitt lives in Montreal, still writing and arranging and creating new songs. Another documentary is being made on his life and times. He is unwell but until recently jammed with La Gioventu, a group which plays from Motown hits to Jewish traditional music at parties and weddings. In 2002 he performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival, where the sets were mainly ska but Taitt dazzled audiences on the tenor pan. It was as if he had never left home.’’
Taitt’s ’unwellness’’ was such that he never got well but was felled by the ’terrible disease’’ that is liver cancer on January 20, Jamaica’s Gleaner newspaper remembering:
There are many conflicting stories about the early days of Jamaican popular music, but not many persons challenge Taitt’s claim to being the creator of rocksteady. ...
Born in San Fernando, Trinidad, as Nerlin (sic) Taitt, he was one of the most prolific musicians in the rocksteady era, which musicologists say lasted three years. His arrangements and distinctive rhythmic riffs helped make hit songs for Alton Ellis (’Girl I’ve Got A Date’’), Desmond Dekker (’Israelites’’), 007 (’Shantytown’’), Johnny Nash (’I Can See Clearly Now’’), The Melodians (’You Have Caught Me’’) and Keith and Tex (’Stop That Train’’).
Derrick Harriott produced ’Stop That Train’’ but also worked with Taitt on some of his own hits as a singer, including ’Do I Worry’’ and ’Walk The Streets’’. He described Taitt’s style as simple, yet effective.
’He used a piece of metal over four of his fingers (on his fret hand) and got this Hawaiian sound that every producer loved,’’ Harriott explained. ’If Lynn Taitt played on 10 songs, it was guaranteed eight of them would be hits.’’
Taitt said he was originally a steelpan musician who started playing guitar late, at age 17. He first came to Jamaica in July 1962 with his Nerlynn Taitt Orchestra to help celebrate the country’s independence from Britain, the following month....
Taitt was among a handful of musicians from the Eastern Caribbean who settled in Jamaica in the early 1960s. Others of note were his countryman, singer Lord Creator and the Barbadian vocalist Jackie Opel....
Musicians from the 1960s remember Taitt and his red Hofner guitar as fixtures at recording studios. He said his roaming was largely commercial.
’Sessions back then paid one pound, 50 cents. I was living in a foreign country and had to make a living,’’ Taitt recalled...
Over the decades (perhaps four, certainly three) I spent mixing with musicians in Trinidad the name ’Nearlin Taitt’’ would come up, usually in that jingoistic Trini way as the man who ’invented’’ reggae. I never took it all that seriously until I read Johnson’s piece in CA’s in-flight magazine. Months later he was dead and I was reading Net tributes like these:
’Will be missed by all; the true King of Rocksteady.
RIP Ner’lynn Taitt’’
’My heart is broken now that the great Lynn Taitt is gone, but he will no longer be suffering the pains of that terrible cancer. His beautiful music will live on. RIP Lynn: (You are an inspiration).’’
On learning of the death, I called Kim to ask permission to lean heavily on his piece for this piece because I told him I wanted as many of Taitt’s countrymen to know that once there lived one of their fellows who did all this, no call for a minute’s silence, understandably, going out from any of the Panorama or Carnival fete stages, Taitt as unknown here in death apparently as he had been in life.
ksmith@trinidadexpress.com