The NY Times
EAST LANSING, Mich. — The trumpeter Etienne Charles stood in a Michigan State University classroom on a recent Tuesday evening — about 2,000 miles north and 50 degrees Fahrenheit south of his native Trinidad — and spoke to the undergrad big band that he directs here. The horns were having trouble nailing the inflections on “Chega De Saudade,” the bossa nova standard, so Mr. Charles sang the lines out loud, vocalizing a kind of hand-drum pattern.
Then he told the horns to play back their parts, this time with the syncopation sharpened up. “Right now we’re a little too far on the straight side,” he said. Emphatic rhythm has always been the engine oil of a jazz big band, but Mr. Charles has original ways of addressing that history, inherited from his own homeland traditions.
His earliest instructors taught primarily by ear, and built from the rhythm up. “Whatever songs we were singing in the choir — whether it was a Caribbean folk song, a chorale, a hymn — we would always learn the lyrics first and then say the lyrics in rhythm. And then after that they would teach us the notes,” he said over lunch at a restaurant near campus earlier that day. “We were always rhythmically on, as a result.”
Mr. Charles, 35, has been uniting Trinidadian methods with jazz ideas since he moved to the United States in 2002. He’s found that if you let them, they combine organically. Along the way, Mr. Charles has developed a magnetic sound on trumpet — clear and mellifluous, with a deep sense of economy; redolent of both Roy Hargrove and Chocolate Armenteros — and he’s becoming a composer to be reckoned with. Last year he became the newest member of the SFJAZZ Collective, contemporary jazz’s premier all-star band.
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