On the Patio with Peanuts Taylor
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
So it’s summer now and yer on da patio with yer laptop wase-tan away into margaritaville? Hey mon! You should be drinkin’ da rum punch! Whatchya be typin’ anyway? You write-tan a nah-vell? Listen now! Ya friends be comin’ over one time to have a good time, and ye best be closen’ dat damn notebook and bringin’ out da drinks and fixins! Meantime, av yer flip book dare download these tunes one time - dat dare anyway!
Downloads:
Mama La La
Nassau Mambo
Canela
Mayba Solo
I filed this under Latin because of the standout beats, even though most people refer to it as Calypso or Calypso Jazz, or Goombay as they call it in the Bahamas.
The Bahamas has spawned and nurtured a wide range of drummers. Possibly the best known is Berkley “Peanuts” Taylor, whose name is synonymous with Bahamian music. His dynamic and hypnotic beat has been entertaining listeners in Nassau and around the world for more than six decades.
The oft-repeated legend is that as a four-year-old he passed the over-the-hill nightclub of internationally acclaimed dancer Paul Meeres.
“I can sing and dance better than you,” bragged the youngster.
“You’re nothing but a peanut,” said Meeres and the little boy went into his act on the spot. Meeres hired him and he shared a stage with 300 pounds of joy, “Princess” Augusta Lewis. They were billed as “Big Bina and Peanut the Wonder Boy.” By age 18 he was touring Asia and Europe with a 25-member entourage.
Taylor had a series of nightclubs over 30 years. He has performed around the world - including Havana’s Tropicana in the buoyant 1950s - as a musical ambassador for The Bahamas.
In 1993 his efforts earned him an MBE - membership in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Taylor took a group of 22 musicians to Cuba in 2000 to demonstrate Bahamian Junkanoo music and culture. The next year he performed at Percussion 2001 in Cuba with musicians from Europe and Africa. He was the first non-Cuban to receive Cuba’s cultural medal of honour and was made a professor of percussion at Havana’s Superior Institute of Art.
Water taxi driver Basil Rolle, whose uncle, Ernest Stubbs, formed the original rake ‘n scrape band, Lacido and the Boys, joined the group as a teenaged singer and drummer in 1980.
“We used to use the traditional goatskin drums,” he says, “but we use traps now because it often took half an hour to heat up the goatskins to get them tight enough to play.
“We used Sterno and sometimes had a little Sterno can built right into the drum. We used to burn our hands heating up the drums, and then my uncle brought new drums from Indiana.”
More on the drumbeat of the Bahamas at caribbean.com.
