Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

sounds of our times

Emory Cook, a Dacron-wearing audio geek from upstate new york, was the perfect man to record the sounds of trinidad’s independence

Discussed: A Velvety-Smooth Complexion, Dead Rooms, The World of the Ear, Kilts on Parade, Royalty-Free Records, Presence, Denizens of Panyards, Rum and Coca-Cola, Gin and Bitters, A Historic Verbal Duel, White Sounds, A Pure Heart

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n the spring of 1952, as a genera- to spend their disposable dollars on home tion of young men boosted by the “hi-fis.” These developments didn’t just GI Bill began buying new homes, transform the soundscape of the United and new big-finned cars to park States; the rise of the LP shaped the culture outside them, the last great era of and politics of hundreds of nations just then IAmerican capitalism was getting under way. transforming themselves from colonies of The American business of recording and selling sounds was old Europe into new member states of the U.N. In March also changing. In 1952, teen fans of pop music, like “ethnic” of that year, the New York Times published a column (under fans of country western and rhythm and blues, were still the headline high fidelity—does it exist?) that laid wearing out 78-rpm singles, or lightweight 45s, on their out a new philosophy of sound for a hi-fi world. barroom’s jukeboxes or bedroom consoles. But a new vinyl The column’s author, though hardly a household name format—the 33⅓ Long-Play record—had begun appearing today, was as instrumental as his better-known contempo- in stores, and a new consumer audio-equipment market raries were in shaping the LP age. Emory Cook began his was on the rise, aimed at getting those prospering veterans Times column lamenting the fact that the phrase high-fidelity,

43 Emory Cook recording storm sounds, circa 1954 Photo by Walter D. Bursten. Courtesy of High Fidelity magazine which was at the time plastered onto the flesh.” A high-fidelity recording, American recreational life”—was audio equipment and records of wide- in other words, should capture not built around Cook’s ideas. And by ranging quality, had become “a banal merely a sound itself but the context the end of the 1950s, interest in high expression.” In the early ’50s, adver- of its airing in the world. fidelity would forge the economies of tisers were selling everything from Since Thomas Edison’s inven- scale needed to make high-end audio “high-fidelity” lipstick to “high-fidel- tion of the phonograph, in 1877, equipment a part of many Americans’ ity” Dacron shirts. Cook counseled his many of Edison’s followers had pur- lives, midwifing the emergence of a readers that anyone could become an sued a recording ideal the obverse new social type—the audiophile— expert at recognizing “the fearful dis- of Cook’s—the idea, as Edison put and fostering the advent of “live” crepancy between reproduced music it, that “I can record the voices bet- recording and stereophonic sound. and music.” To do so, he suggested, ter than any person in a theater can Cook shaped these trends as a devel- they need only go to a concert: hear them”: that the aim of record- oper of high-end audio equipment, ing a voice or viola should be to cap- and then as a maker of records— Listen there for the velvety- ture its “pure tones,” without earthly which captured sounds ranging from smooth complexion of the echoes or extraneous sound. Cook choral singing to bullfrogs croaking overtones of the string section; was hardly the first to reject this ideal: in a pond—to evince his ideas about hear the abrupt rubbery sound the debate over whether one could (or how best to use it. But perhaps the of the rosin on the soloist’s bow; should) “record the room as much as most interesting and persistent aspect commit to memory the make-up the music” had enflamed audio engi- of Cook’s influence is the resonance of the piano note, especially the neers since the advent of electronic his ideas—and records—found in “attack,” or beginning of each recording. In the postwar years, true- another place entirely. note. Feel the physical sensation blue Edisonians may have been on the Cook spent the early 1940s of bass in pitch, not boom. Listen, wane, but there remained plenty of aboard U.S. warships, working as a if you can, less for enjoyment this enthusiasts for the foam-walled “dead radar engineer, where he honed his time, and more for memory—and rooms” they favored. Cook’s Times skill with electronics. The experi- for days afterward you will be an column was notable not merely for the ence broadened his awareness of a expert judge of high fidelity. depth of its animus against those engi- world beyond America’s shores, and neers (“It’s like dying, being in a dead by the late ’50s Cook’s sonic passions Cook bewailed the fact that room”), but for heralding an emer- led him far afield of his Connecticut “modern studios have evolved to gent consensus among high-fidelity lab—most notably, to the Caribbean the point where they are unnatural enthusiasts that sound and space island of Trinidad. Entranced by the places in which to originate sounds.” were intrinsically linked: that a great challenge of capturing Trinidad’s He contended that recording music recording could make of a listener’s great steel bands on record, Cook also in an acoustically “flat” studio—a living room another place and time. fell for the buoyant sounds and intri- sound-absorbent space free from the During the following half decade, cate wordplay of the island’s other world’s overtones and echoes—was Cook came to be recognized as both great music, calypso. Impassioned a practice to which all music lovers the leader and primary symbol of by this aural world, Cook set up a should object. “We listen to [music] the high-fidelity craze. That trend— company in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s for its emotional or spiritual impact,” which attended the large-scale move- capital, to record and press records he wrote; “and, to be effective in that ment of America’s populace from city of the music Trinidadians played direction, the reproduction must lead apartments to new suburban homes, during their yearly carnival celebra- us back in fancy to some concert where, as the editor of High Fidelity tions, creating the definitive records hall or auditorium—or night spot— magazine put it, “the living room was of those traditions just as Trinidad where once we heard it alive and in establishing… itself as the center of was gaining national independence.

44 His records played a crucial role in he landed a job helping to operate a the doctor is gradually drawing far- cementing those traditions’ touch- radio transmitter at WESG, in Ithaca. ther and farther away from me.” As stone status in the island’s culture, The job required him to keep an ear an audio engineer intent on captur- proving the power not only of Cook’s cocked to WESG’s wavelength from ing spaces whole cloth, this skill was ideas about how to record the world seven in the morning until nine at a great boon. Cook would go about but how vinyl LPs could help shape it. night, listening for signs that its sig- creating what audiophiles described nal had strayed from its allotted fre- later as “presence” precisely by includ- orn in 1913, Cook was quency. On his second college try, ing “foreign sounds” on his records, raised a pampered only Cook was able to wed his extracur- pace Edison, giving listeners a real- B child in upstate New York. ricular passions to passing grades. istic sense of where the sounds were “Mine was a case of an early trauma,” Spending nearly all his waking hours made, along with their spatial rela- he told the New Yorker in 1956, when outside class on a cot at the station, tions to one another. “Memories are the magazine ran a two-part profile he did his calculus problem-sets to motionless,” the French philosopher on the hi-fi king. “I never wanted to the steady hum and murmur of its Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics grow up to be a baseball player or a programs. The monitoring job fed of Space, “and the more securely fixed trolley-car conductor. Right from his interest in what he later called they are in space, the sounder they the start, I knew that whatever I was “the world of the ear.” It also provided are.” Emory Cook, for whom sound going to do would have to be done the means for him to nurture one of could be “an escape into the wild blue,” indoors.” Like many introverted boys his most renowned traits among his leading listeners back to where they born to the shortwave era, Cook future acolytes: his famously sensi- first heard them, certainly agreed. spent hours assembling and disas- tive ears. After Cornell, Cook worked sembling radio sets. His parents— Cook’s fabled sense of hearing briefly for CBS as a studio technician, unimpressed when he emerged from had been apparent from his boyhood. and then took a job with Western their cellar with an electronic burglar It had led his parents—who often Electric; after Pearl Harbor, he was alarm he’d made for them—didn’t had to repeat what they were telling assigned to the company’s Audio encourage his radio-head pursuits, him—to grow concerned that their En­g­ineer Force. He spent the war which only deepened their allure. son was going deaf. “The trouble,” hopping from destroyer to destroyer, His affinity for engineering didn’t he said, “is my ear is so damn selec- tasked with convincing navy gunners extend to the classroom. Cook’s main tive that it may pick out any one of a to stop relying on traditional range achievement at M.I.T.—from which number of sounds around me instead finders and find their targets by feed- he flunked out after a year—was to of the sound I ought to be listening ing mathematical data into new com- put together, from spare parts pro- to. Half the time, I have to read lips. If puterized radars instead. Back home cured around Boston, what he felt I take a hearing test, I’m apt to hear the in Connecticut, with a navy com- to be the finest radio and phono- air brakes of a bus down in the street, mendation for his service and a new graph unit in the city. Cut loose from and not the ticking of the watch that wife and baby to support, Cook was school, Cook enlisted in the Army determined not to earn his living as Air Corps. His two-year hitch as a a corporate flunky. During rare week- private at Wheeler Field, Hawaii, ends home from the war, Cook had commenced what would become experimented with various electronic an important long-term association­ recording devices, convinced he could with the U.S. Department of Defense; improve on their performance. He other than that, the two years passed asked some audio engineer friends pretty quietly. In 1935, Cook returned about why even the best devices to college, this time at Cornell. There couldn’t be relied upon to perform

45 at a consistently satisfying level; their wax. His road to solvency was plain. would sell one hundred thou­sand cop- responses left him nonplussed. “My He began his record label, Sounds of ies—was on its way to becoming the friends didn’t seem to grasp the fact Our Times, the next year. de facto “demo” record for salesmen that the reproduction of sound must Cook’s first commercial release of hi-fi audio equipment nationwide. be a blend of two sciences—engineer- was a recording of rare Christmas Sales of high-fidelity stereos qua- ing and acoustics,” he said. “Take the music boxes procured from a pair drupled over the next four years. “His recording of an orchestra, for instance. of New Jersey collectors; his second, records are as responsible as any other I’d found that it was perfectly possible Kilts on Parade, was waxed by a group single factor for making converts,” to reproduce the music on a record of bagpipers he found by ringing up a John Conly, the editor of High Fidelity, so that it was nearly perfect from Gaelic social society in the Manhattan said of Cook’s label. “Listening to the technical point of view—very phone book. Both these efforts were familiar sounds like puffing locomo- little distortion and a wide frequency snapped up by high-fidelity enthu- tives and chiming bell buoys, instead spectrum—but it still sounded lousy siasts. Cook’s third record, however, of symphony orchestras, makes it eas- acoustically, as if the orchestra had hit real pay dirt. Rail Dynamics was ier for the large part of the public that been jammed into a telephone booth.” recorded along the New York Central isn’t very musically inclined to real- Cook set to work in his garage. rail line between Peekskill and Penn ize what can be achieved with sound He began experimenting with a high- Station. Working mostly at night, to now that we have the equipment for end oscillator—the synthesizer’s pre- avoid the polluting sounds of pass- it.” Cultivating his reputation as both cursor, a device that produces tones ing cars and waking life, Cook had an intrepid sound-finder and a great of any desired frequency—to see if dodged the trailing eyes of station tech-y showman, Cook arrived at the he could work out a way to record agents and skulked beneath trestles, 1954 Audio Fair with an LP of mari- tones with frequencies ranging up to hanging far out of train windows time sounds featuring a close-range twenty thousand cycles per second, with his microphone in hand. The capture of the “all aboard” bass-horn and press them on vinyl with a new record was the hit of the 1951 Audio blast of the Queen Mary. Teaming kind of precision-cutting head he Fair. “For three days, the hall outside with his Connecticut neighbor Rudy invented for the job. To most humans’ his exhibit room in the Hotel New Bozak, a famous speaker engineer, ears, tones at 20 kc are inaudible; Yorker was jammed solid with fevered Cook played his Voice of the Sea LP Cook claimed he could hear them. audiomaniacs,” reported High Fidelity over a pair of man-sized Bozak speak- To try out his techniques, he made magazine, “blenching with ecstasy at ers containing eight woofers apiece. sample records of a piano recital held the tremendous whooshes and roars The resulting din so perturbed guests in an echoey stone-walled cathedral. of Cook’s locomotives.” and neighbors of the Hotel New Yorker Bringing these records to the 1949 By the time Cook’s Times mani- that the fair’s hosts threatened to shut Audio Fair in New York, Cook posted festo appeared, Rail Dynamics—which him down. “I suspect that if I were to a sign above his table with a simple ask my readers for a list of their twenty message: 20 kc records. One fair favorite records,” said Conly, “nearly attendee recalled: “It was as if an all of them would include at least five exhibitor at an aviation show were to Cook releases.” hang out a sign reading, ‘3000-Mile- per-Hour Plane’.” Skeptics contended n the years after he hit with Rail that it was only in joining those tones Dynamics, Cook’s catalog grew to lower-frequency ones that people I to include recordings of bull- could hear them. But no matter: frogs around a Connecticut pond, the hundreds crowded Cook’s suite to buzzing of horseflies, summer thun- hear sounds never before pressed on der recorded atop Mount Washington

46 during a raging tempest. His small he followed it up the next year with microphones at ears’ width apart. outfit—run out of a modest tract the top-sellers Music, Martinis and The resulting records—the first ste- home in Stamford, Connecticut, with Memories and Music to Make You reophonic discs sold to consumers— a staff of less than thirty and no re- Misty. The aim of mood music was were imprinted with two parallel cording artists to pay—became one of to forge a particular atmosphere in grooves corresponding to a listener’s the best-selling (and most profitable) people’s parlors—cozy, nostalgic, sexy. two “ears,” and were playable only on record labels in the country. “Train Its close cousin, “exotica,” aimed Cook’s patented Rek-O-Kut turn- whistles, bell buoys, sea waves!” one to bring the world’s remote places table (a $165 gadget in 1953). More industry colleague remarked. “That’s into those same parlors. The great widely embraced was “microfusion,” Emory Cook’s biggest invention—the purveyor of exotica, the Hollywood an innovative method of fabricating royalty-free record!” bandleader Les Baxter, summarized records from powdered rather than Having entered the business his genre’s appeal in the liner notes solid vinyl that was at once cheaper shortly after the advent of the LP, to his 1951 LP Ritual of the Savage. and less given to the “crackle and pop” Cook was ideally placed to shape “Do the mysteries of native rituals surface-corruptions endemic to early how the industry would capitalize intrigue you?” they asked during a LPs. Refusing to hire a publicist for on the new format allowing upward year in which his Voice of the Xtabay, his label, Cook also saved money— of twenty minutes of sound per side. recorded with Yma Sumac’s Incan and indulged his writerly whims— Soon enough, the rock album— orchestra, became the year’s number- by composing all his records’ liner a linked suite of songs organized three seller. “Does the haunting beat copy himself, and communed with around a theme (or not)—would of savage drums fascinate you?… his public via a newsletter called the be­come a cultural touchstone for This original and exotic music by Les Audio Bucket that featured dispatches young people everywhere, an acces- Baxter was conceived by blending from his travels and an “agony col- sory to figuring out who they were his creative ideas with the ritualis- umn,” where he commiserated with and how best to piss off their parents. tic melodies and seductive rhythms his followers over sonic atrocities and But at the LP’s birth, common wis- of the natives of distant jungles and crackly grooves. dom and sales reports both agreed tropical ports to capture all the color A suburban lover of machines, that the new LP market was “adult”— and fervor so expressive of the emo- wearing his two Dacron shirts on focused, that is, on the denizens of tions of these people.” Though Cook alternating days, Emory Cook fit the new suburbs seeking musical accom- never released anything approaching audiophile stereotype he came to paniment to their cocktail parties or the purple pastiche of sounds such represent in the press. His relation to cuddly evenings by the fire. prose described, his ideas and records sound was nothing if not obsessive. At first, this market was domi- doubtless influenced exotica’s sonic But Cook was no misanthrope, and nated by Broadway cast recordings palate, and its guiding concept: to wasn’t immune to the charms of a like South Pacific—which remained forge a fully realized aural world over great performer. When he did decide America’s top-selling LP from 1949 the arc of a whole LP. to record people instead of trains to 1951. Soon, cast recordings were With Sounds of Our Times ship- or insects, he had really fine taste. joined by records explicitly aimed at ping upward of three hundred thou- Venturing where few mainstream providing sonic wallpaper for those sand royalty-free LPs a year, Cook had A&R executives were willing to go, plush “dens” materializing across the the necessary funds to continue nur- he traveled to New Orleans to record suburbs. Paul Weston launched an turing his passion for gadgetry and the great jazz singer Lizzie Miles in eponymous genre with his 1953 hit audio research. In 1953, he launched her “natural habitat” (recording her LP Mood Music, and the TV come- his patented “binaural” record series, away from Bourbon Street would dian Jackie Gleason scored that year’s a doomed if inspired experiment to be “like trying to hold a heartwarm- top album with Music for Lovers Only; make stereo records by placing two ing conversation in a dentist’s chair,”

47 Cook wrote). “In this business,” Cook visit England, in 1953. Striking up a Trinidad in 1955 was still a British wrote in his notes to Miles’s Moans correspondence with Procope, Cook colony—albeit a British colony whose and Blues, “after all those years of expressed his hope that he might be long-building movement to win its knockabout and trouble, either you able to record such a “’pan” group freedom was just then reaching its turn bitter and disappear, or you in Port of Spain. Having laid the endgame. This historical drama—and ripen into a remarkable personal- groundwork for a visit during the the providential timing with which ity.” Cook’s love of “presence” wasn’t early months of 1955, he arrived in Cook strode into it, bearing his tape unconnected to his interest in the Trinidad for the first time in May of recorders and hi-fi philosophy— histories and cultures that forged the that year. defined the politics of an island sounds he loved. whose torturous history, and diverse His catalog grew to include a hen Cook arrived in people’s struggles to form themselves number of records—from an old- Trinidad in 1955, the into a nation, was as complex as any style guitarist fingerpicking the blues W great congeries of U.S. in the once-colonized world. to an old codger recounting tales of GIs who’d arrived to build and man After Columbus claimed Trin­ Appalachia’s caves—that would have their naval base at Point Cumana had idad for Spain, in 1498, the island fit right in on Moe Asch’s Folkways, or dwindled from their wartime high spent most of its colonial history as one of the other labels driven, in those of twenty-five thousand to a mere a thinly settled backwater. In order years, by reviving interest in old, weird thousand-odd soldiers. But Trinidad’s to expand the island’s European America. But Cook’s southerly explo- capital was still a town whose culture population, Madrid adopted a policy rations didn’t stop at New Orleans. and mores were shaped by American of offering land grants to French “Alta Fidelidad is becoming very sailors who sought their pleasure in Catholic planters. As a result, by the popular in some Central and South its brothels and bars. “Rum and Coca- late eighteenth century, Trinidad American countries,” ran a portent- Cola,” a calypso by local songsmith had become a Spanish territory filled 1955 notice in Audio Bucket, Lord Invader, which was hugely pop- whose population and culture were “presaging a new level of interchange ular during the war, described the re- mostly French. Trinidad was seized with the Spanish culture.” Soon sulting dynamic: “They buy rum and by England in 1797, but the French enough, Cook’s “Road Recordings” Coca-Cola, / go down Point Cumana. / planters remained, establishing the catalog grew to include an LP of Both mother and daughter / working tradition of a Mardi Gras–style car- that marimba ensemble in Oaxaca; for the Yankee dollar.” The comedian nival on the island. After slavery’s another of the famed Haitian percus- Morey Amsterdam brought the song abolition, in 1838, the island’s cul- sionist Tiroro, playing his drums in home to the U.S. after he visited Trini- tural history was further compli- Port-au-Prince; and then, most fate- dad on a U.S.O. trip in 1944, and it cated by the arrival of thousands of fully, an acoustical tour of sounds became a huge hit for the Andrews indentured workers from Bombay captured on a song-collecting cruise Sisters the following year. The Sisters’ and Uttar Pradesh, imported by the from Haiti to Jamaica, Trinidad, and chirpy version of the song, released English to replace their African slaves Mexico, that Cook dubbed Caribeana. just as millions of American service- in the canefields. Cook began looking for a con- people were returning to the States Slaves and their children were tact to help him record steel bands, from overseas, sold an estimated five banned by their masters from play- first among his West Indian acquain- million copies worldwide. The cul- ing stretched-skin drums, so they tances in New York, and then in the tural borrowing went in the other di- made a music called “tamboo bam- islands themselves. He eventually rection, too: zoot suits and jazz, in the boo” by thunking large-bore lengths found Bruce Procope, a Trinidadian war’s wake, became hugely popular of bamboo against the ground. lawyer who’d helped arrange for the in Port of Spain. Whatever the Yan- During a spate of labor unrest in the first touring steel-band ensemble to kee influence on its culture, though, 1930s, colonial police decided that

48 groups of working-class men wield- elsewhere. Bruce Procope, who at the islands that looked to cosmopolitan ing bamboo rods signified a threat time was trying to clear up some of Trinidad for their musical cues—and to order, and so tamboo bamboo the chaos by founding a Performing often hosted Trinidadian musicians was banned, too. Carnival musicians, Artists Union, counseled Cook that on tour—local players had taken to forced to change up again, turned to his best bet, this first trip, might be to ’pan with gusto. Griffith told Cook garbage cans and biscuit tins—and record a steel band on another island that three top-class groups, the Brute then, after the U.S. navy began turn- instead. Small-island groups who’d Force, the Big Shell group, and Hell’s ing Trinidad’s northwest corner into adopted the form would be a sim- Gate ensembles, played regularly. The a major base of Caribbean opera- pler proposition, business-wise; with Brute Force group was summoned tions, in 1942, to the fifty-five-gallon their ensembles’ size—groups con- with dispatch. On the veranda of drums in which they stored their tained a dozen-odd members, com- the harbormaster’s home, Cook set fuel. When an inspired coterie of pared to Trinidad’s battalion-sized up the Telefunken omnidirectional locals discovered that those empty bands of one hundred or more—they microphones that had played a key drums’ bottoms could be pounded would offer a simpler recording job. role, from the early ’50s, in his mis- into shape and made to emit a full Cook took his new friend’s advice. He sion to realistically reproduce the range of pleasing tones, the only boarded a small plane at Trinidad’s distance to and among the sounds his acoustic instrument invented in the Piarco Airport, with Procope in tow, records’ listeners heard. Arranging twentieth century (as Trinidadians and directed their pilot to fly north, his mics around the Brute Force’s like to brag) was born. Steel drums’ up the Antilles toward Antigua. members, the group played and sang great coming-out party was the Their contact in the island’s a selection from their typically pan- impromptu carnival that hailed V.E. sleepy capital, St. John’s, was its Caribbean repertoire—meringues Day on Port of Spain’s streets. Over retired harbor master. F. V. D. Griffith from Hispaniola; mentos and work- the next decade, leading groups like was a longtime leader of the Antigua songs from Jamaica (including Invaders and Desperadoes evolved police band and now the presiding “Hold ’em Joe”—a show-stopping “’pan” by introducing bouncing poo-bah of the thriving steel-band number for Harry Belafonte during harmonic riffs, forging a new sym- scene on an island where, Cook later his Broadway debut the previous phonic idiom whose sophistication recalled, “the only local entertain- year); and, of course, calypsos from and drive echoed the massed effects ment is a single cinema, and the Trinidad. Moving down the beach of Ellingtonian swing. incentive to create music is strong, to capture a few numbers from the Arriving in a city where, by 1955, since there is more leisure time, Big Shell Steel Band, Cook, ever well over one hundred steel bands and less to do with it than in Port of lustful for “presence,” turned up the were honing their craft in “panyards” Spain.” On Antigua as on other small microphone after the group’s lilting around the city, Cook thrilled to what rendition of a tender Cuban bolero; he heard. He also found that record- the tune concludes, on the LP Cook ing those panyards’ denizens wasn’t made from his Antigua sojourn, a simple job. Musical theft, includ- with several seconds of rhythmic ing the Andrews Sisters’ cover of surf crashing gently on the island’s Lord Invader, stayed fresh in locals’ sandy shore. minds. A Yankee music executive, That is one plain highlight of wielding dollars or no, wasn’t a wel- Brute Force Steel Bands. Another, as come visitor in Port of Spain music Cook would opine in his typically circles. One group and then another piquant liner notes, was the Brute rebuffed Cook’s advances, claiming Force’s rendering of a Trinidadian to have signed exclusive contracts classic, penned by the calypsonian

49 King Radio in 1946; its lyrics, after keen to record for him. As Trinidad Procope is in his eighties now, the manner of “Rum and Coca-Cola,” moved toward independence from and gets around in a wheelchair, but offered a wry commentary on the England, the People’s National when I found him, one April day a sexual politics of the U.S. presence Movement party was eager to sup- few years ago, he was still going into in Trinidad, and its human lega- port any celebration of local culture. his downtown office several times cies. With the ringing tones of their In 1956, just as Trinidad gained full a week. Surrounded by velo-bound steelpan evincing all the “attack” and self-rule, the new government pro- books and ancient files, nattily attired overtones Cook could have desired, mulgated the Pioneer Investment Act in a gray suit despite the heat, Procope members of the Brute Force rang the to encourage native enterprise. Cook lit up when I told him why I’d come charges: “Now the Americans made Caribbean Records, chartered that to see him. “Emory was a taciturn fel- an invasion. / We thought it was a year, would enjoy a five-year holiday low,” he said with a smile. “You never help to the island, / until they left on paying any tax against earnings. really knew what he was thinking. the girls on vacation / [and] left the Cook Caribbean set up a shop in a He didn’t say much—except when he native boy to mind they children!” small warehouse in downtown Port talked about sound. Sound! That was Released in the U.S. in the fall of of Spain, just a few blocks from the his passion.” 1955, the album appeared in Port of “University of Woodford Square,” Spain’s shops a short time later. Cook where Eric Williams, the Oxford- n February of 1956, the Trini- was already smitten with recording educated author of Capitalism and dad Guardian wrote that “Cook Trinidad’s music; now he became Slavery who became Trinidad’s first I has done more to popularize enamored with nurturing an incho- prime minister, addressed his fol- the music of the Caribbean than ate record-buying public on the lowers from a park bench outside any other record-maker in the U.S.” island. Deciding that Port of Spain the government Red House, over Within months, that judgment would should be the base of his Caribbean which he’d soon preside. The building have to be amended: Harry Belafon- operations, Cook set to work, with had an office upstairs for Cook and te’s Calypso, released that spring and Bruce Procope, to launch a new com- the firm’s accountant. On the floor climbing the U.S. charts with hits pany and pressing plant there. below—as Bruce Procope described like “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell,” Their timing was propitious. to me, when I tracked him down in became the first LP to sell a million With Cook’s Brute Force LP fly- the law office he still maintains near copies. But if Cook’s work was crucial ing from shelves in Port of Spain’s Cook’s old HQ—was Cook’s record- to helping grow interest in Caribbean music shops, local musos began to ing equipment, along with his pat- music stateside (or, in any case, pro- trust Cook’s skills, and with Bruce ented cutting heads and microfusion viding a more “authentic” alternative Procope on hand to look after their machines for pressing discs from the to the Americanized borrowings of royalties and rights, they were soon recordings he made. Belafonte), his records’ more crucial­

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above, from left: Cook releases Jump Up Carnival (1956), Brute Force Steel Bands of Antigua (1955), Calypso Kings and Pink Gin (1957), and R. Buckminster Fuller Speaks His Mind impact lay in their assistance in the fans. (The song “Mama Look a Boo The Yankees were on their way creation of a new record-buying Boo”—a ditty about an ugly boy out; a new calypso king, standing in public in Trinidad. The year it was that played on the famously homely for Trinidad itself, was taking over. released, the Brute Force LP sold a Lord Melody’s looks—was soon cov- Mighty Sparrow, over ensuing years record-breaking one thousand copies ered, to rather different effect, by the and decades, became Trinidad’s in Trinidad in a single week—a huge famously gorgeous Belafonte.) He was calypso king of kings (and he’s still number for such a little island. also present, with one of those rolls of performing, writing topical songs like Another key music of Trinidad’s tape, for the ascent of Melody’s great “Barack the Magnificent”). Recorded carnival tradition was also coming successor. In February 1956, Slinger by Cook, “Jean and Dinah” began it into its own. Calypso, whose craft- Francisco, born twenty years earlier all: like a historical sequel to “Brown- ers sang witty, ribald, topical songs on the nearby island of Grenada, was a Skinned Gal,” the song figured addressing matters of keen public relative unknown. Not, however, after Trinidad’s birth as a nation against interest—sexual, political, or oth- the performance Cook captured that the presence, on its national soil, erwise—had been around since the month. That was when young Slinger, of American empire and its agents. nineteenth century. But in 1956, bearing the sobriquet “the Mighty During the half decade following calypso was coming to play a new, Sparrow,” took the Calypso Monarch the first public rendition of “Jean and central role in Trinidadian culture, as stage before fifteen thousand revel- Dinah,” its implicit demand that the the island’s rising political class came lers. “Sparrow,” as he would become Yankees not merely recall most of to view supporting its art as a key known to generations of fans from their troops but relinquish full con- part of “nation building,” and calyp- across the Caribbean, won the crown trol of their base to the new nation’s sonians began proffering their latest with a tune that endures as the sig- government emerged as perhaps the tunes from stages in calypso tents nature calypso of Trinidad’s indepen- central political issue in Trinidadian and during the Calypso Monarch dence era. “Jean and Dinah,” he sang, politics (and resulted in the Yankees competition held on the Queen’s “Rosita and Clementina! Round the indeed turning the base over to Park Savannah in Port of Spain. corner posin’, / bet your life is some- Trinidadian control, in 1963). Emory Cook arrived in the city car- thing dey sellin.’” Praising Trinidad’s Cook, tape rolling at the cre- rying twenty reels of magnetic tape lovelies, and hailing the truth that ation of calypso’s greatest modern with which to record that year’s car- their charms were now once again career, had also already succeeded, nival celebrations. He recorded Lord in reach of a young islander like with his Brute Force LP, in capturing Melody, the reigning calypso king, him, the young singer concluded his the hard-to-record steel-band sound delivering his latest number in a tent first signature tune with a flourish: with unprecedented clarity and verve. filled with the guffaws, and clinking “De Yankees gone, Sparrow take over For the man obsessed by “presence,” gin-and-bitters-filled glasses, of his now!” however, the gold standard of carnival

51 above, from left: Cook releases Cook’s Tour of High Fidelity (1965), King Sparrow in High Fidelity (1959), Mexican Firecrackers (1951), and Rail Dynamics (1950) recording would be to capture the pressed thousands of copies of the would be put to shame by their verbal steelpans playing the role they were LP in Cook Caribbean’s shop, and cut-and-thrust), and a wry response invented to play, in the context where Jump Up Carnival was an even bigger to the fact that Belafonte, who’d they mattered most. In the predawn seller than Brute Force. The album never even visited Trinidad, had hours of Fat Tuesday, in February was a “must-have for any Trini with been dubbed the “King of Calypso”­ 1956, Cook hit Port of Spain’s streets a record player” and a love for their by the U.S. press. “Harry Belafonte!” with his trusty Magnecorder tape country, Procope told me. During sang a calypsonian called King Solo- recorder and omnidirectional mics. those years, when state support for mon into Cook’s microphones. “Hear The LP Cook produced from the carnival was an official policy, and what the critics say! They say that resulting tapes—captured on foot and when dancing in the street became they are positive, you know, / that from cast-iron balconies above the tantamount, for many, to participat- Trinidad is the mother of calypso!” capital’s jangling streets—begins with ing in the nation itself, the steelpan With Belafonte’s rise to fame, not murmuring voices, a rooster’s crow, a gained its official designation, still a few U.S. culture mavens had pre- bell tower chiming six. Then come the in place today, not only as Trinidad’s dicted that an ersatz “calypso craze” sounds, first faint and then growing national instrument but as a bona might soon displace rock and roll in louder, of a steel band approaching— fide “national treasure.” winning teenagers’ hearts (warn- bell-like soprano pings first, then the ing: calypso next new beat; tenor and bass tones coming clear, n the years following his historic r.i.p. for r’n’r? trumpeted Variety now a bandleader blowing his whistle recordings of Trinidad’s era- in December 1957). The trouble with and yelling commands. Some two I making 1956 carnival, Cook this thesis, for both impresarios like minutes into the record’s first track, remained deeply involved in the is- Cook and Trinidadian “chant-wells” the listener has the sensation of being land’s music scene and his business hoping to make it abroad, was that right in the thick of it, the sounds of there. Visiting frequently to record this rivalry was more wishful than voices and ringing steel all around; its leading steel bands’ latest innova- real: U.S. fans of faux calypsos like then, the shuffling of feet plainly audi- tions, Cook grew his calypso catalog “Jamaica Farewell” had little appetite ble, the band moves on, fading slowly to include dozens of essential LPs. for the real thing. Cook’s calypso LPs into the ambient din—until another, On one of these, Calypso Kings and never moved big units stateside. They soon enough, arrives to take its place. Pink Gin, a collection of exemplary did gain a huge resonance, though, in Day’s end finds Cook atop a quiet hill tunes from the 1957 carnival season, the years surrounding the joyous day, over the city, the nighttime sounds of Cook recorded a historic verbal duel August 31, 1962, when the Union Jack crickets and birds joined to the chimes between Lord Melody and Mighty was lowered over the Red House in of the same bell tower we’ve heard Sparrow (most battle-rapping MCs central Port of Spain and the new red before, now chiming twelve, marking and black standard of Trinidad and carnival’s end and Lent’s beginning. Tobago went up in its place. At parties The record’s aim, admirably met, was celebrating that happy event, Trinida- to convey a sense of Fat Tuesday’s dians everywhere danced to Mighty complete arc, sunrise to sunset. Sparrow’s “Jean and Dinah,” as their For Cook’s hi-fi enthusiasts up West Indian émigré cousins and north, Jump Up Carnival represented brothers did the same from Brooklyn an invitation to an exotic, tropical to Brixton, snapping up Cook Carib- party. In Trinidad, it was the first bean LPs like King Sparrow’s Calypso quality recording of steel band in the Carnival. “[The Mighty Sparrow] is context that had birthed the music in every way a genuinely West Indian and for which it was made. They artist,” C. L. R. James, Trinidad’s great

52 radical writer, wrote at the time. “His been inconceivable without Cook’s find Cook’s old headquarters. A few talents were shaped by a West Indian influence. The recording of Belafonte days before, during carnival, the city’s medium; through this medium he at Carnegie Hall—with its “aural sun-baked streets had resounded expanded his capacities and the me- presence of Belafonte moving about with soca music booming from great dium itself. He is financially main- the stage, the palpable placement of stacks of speakers loaded onto flatbed tained by the West Indian people who instruments, and the aura of being in trucks and drowning out anything so buy his records… He is a living proof the audience, at a distance from the subtly “present” as the shuffling of that there is a West Indian nation.” stage, immersed in the noises of the feet. Port of Spain’s downtown has As with many erstwhile colonies crowd”—was supervised by Cook’s changed a lot over the years; where reborn as independent countries longtime lieutenant, Bob Bollard, and colonial-era buildings with cast-iron in those years, the euphoria of sov- is still cherished by audiophiles as an balconies once stood, glass-walled ereignty gave way to the workaday unexcelled example of “concert hall office buildings house the bank- realities of being a little nation, and realism.”) Throughout the 1970s and ers and businessmen who oversee the more idealistic hopes of left- into the ’80s, Cook Labs built high-end the island’s petro-economy. Some of ists like James—including the long- amplifiers and dubbing equipment, the old buildings still stand, among cherished aim of seeing all the Anglo and maintained a pressing plant for them the Red House by Woodbrook West Indies form a single federated fabricating others’ records as well. In Square, overseen, as of a couple years’ nation—crashed under the staid lead- the ’80s, that side of Cook’s business ago, by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the ership of Eric Williams. By the early enjoyed something of a resurgence Indian woman whose historic ascen- ’60s, Emory Cook’s ears, in any case, when hip-hop impresarios from just sion to prime minister pushed the had begun to lead him elsewhere. down I-95 in New York began send- corrupted PNM from power. A few Back in the U.S., Cook ceased record- ing him tapes they needed pressed blocks away, at 26 Sackville Street, ing for profit, choosing instead to on 12-inch discs; Cook eventually wedged between a car park and con- focus on the engineering side of his sold his plant to a group of these new crete office building, I was glad to find business. Recording fashions were clients. He died of emphysema, after a the small warehouse where Emory also changing. Studio-centric record- long hospitalization, in 2002. Cook once pressed the records that ing ideas like Phil Spector’s “wall Last spring, in Port of Spain, I helped forge the nation’s sense of of sound” were in the ascendancy. wandered downtown to see if I could itself in sound. Today, the building The Edisonian ideal of “pure,” sterile houses a yoga center. recordings was on its way to making I stopped in to see Bruce Pro­ a grand return, along with the rise of cope, whose office was a few blocks overdubbing and producer-driven away. I was glad to find that he was pop, with the “isolation rooms” of the still there. He told me about how, 1970s. The legacies of the high-fidel- after Belafonte had made a hit with ity craze Cook had done so much to “Mama Look a Boo Boo,” he’d helped shape, though, were plainly audible Melody recoup his rightful royal- in the established dominance of ste- ties. I asked Procope about the end reo recording, in the omnipresence of Cook Caribbean’s run. He told of “sound” and “acoustics” in the way me that the expiry of the Pioneer music mavens appraised the records Industry Act, in 1961, had doomed they loved, and in the emergent pop- the firm’s prospects as a going con- ularity of “live” LPs. (The first such cern. Procope kept things going for record to become a big hit—Belafonte a few years, but with Cook spend- at Carnegie Hall [1959]—would have ing less and less time in Trinidad,

53 they’d folded the company for good I found Junior Telfer on his cool one before or after has captured, on in 1964. By the end of their associa- verandah, high above the city in the record, what it feels like to be out with tion together, Cook was spending a lush hills that surround Port of Spain. a steel band on the street—where the lot of time in Brazil, and working on Telfer, a slim man with copper brown music was born, where we belong.” some hazy Pentagon project—“very skin and eighty-something carnival His grin was beatific. “Listen!”O hush-hush, you understand”—called seasons under his belt, was quietly “white sounds.” recovering from the festivities. Last When Cook sold what remained year, as for most of the last several, he specific cars of his U.S. business, in the 1980s, he’d stepped out as the literal flag-waver in the songs of called Procope to say he wanted to send for a mighty steel band known as bruce springsteen all his Trinidad records and masters Phase II (his oblique explanation of to the island where he’d made them. their name: “We’re way beyond Phase O A brand-new used car Procope told him it was a bad idea. I, of course”). It was past noon, but O Your daddy’s Cadillac Cook was insistent that Trinidad was Telfer had just begun his day; he’d O A Dodge where they belonged. “Well, I’ll do my been up till the wee hours, he said, O A beat-up old Buick damndest to dissuade you,” Procope “watching the cricket.” He was still O A ’69 Chevy with a 396 told him. “We don’t have the facilities dressed impeccably, in the uniform O A ’32 Ford here; the material will be ruined— he’s worn each day for decades: a red O A long, dark, shiny, black Cadillac send it someplace that can preserve turban, along with a white cotton O A Buick with Ohio plates it properly.” Cook eventually relented, tunic and tailored black pants. The O A Chevy stock super 8 which is why his greatest legacies, ensemble combines to make him a O Burned-out Chevrolets whatever the results and aims of that walking Trinidadian flag, but also O An old parked car “white sounds” project locked away conveys, as he reminded me, a piquant O Volkswagen vans at the Pentagon, now reside across personal symbology: red “for living O A Harley the Potomac at the Smithsonian. The with passion,” white “for a pure heart,” O Billy’s Cadillac Emory and Martha Cook Collection and black because “from here down, O A Camaro includes Cook’s papers and the mas- it’s… pure niggerdom.” Leaning back O A Hong Kong special ters to all his records, along with some in his chair, Telfer opened a holster- O James Dean’s Mercury ’49 cutting-head parts, even a plastic bag like metal case he keeps affixed to his O Burt Reynolds’s black Trans-Am of powdered vinyl. As a condition of belt, and pulled from it a thin white O A Batmobile Cook’s gift, Smithsonian Folkways spliff. I thought of Derek Walcott’s O The Coast City bus promised to remaster and make avail- poem about this place and its people’s O A state trooper’s Ford able in digital form all his out-of-print theatric ways: “All of Port of Spain O A big old Buick records. These recently reissued record- is a 12:30 show.” Telfer lit his spliff. O A long black limousine ings are essential listening for students I pulled out the Smithsonian’s new O An old Ford of the American record industry, and reissue of Cook Caribbean’s Jump Up O Highway patrol choppers of the “world of the ear” everywhere. Carnival, and slipped it into his ste- O Hot cars But nowhere do they retain such reso- reo. The clock struck six; the rooster O Broncos nance as they do among Trinidadians, crowed; the sound of an approaching O Bobby’s Jeep as I was reminded the weekend after I steel band filled the air. “It’s Invaders!” O A silver Palomino saw Procope, by a man who stepped Telfer exclaimed. “Playing ‘Back Bay O A flatbed Ford out in Port of Spain on V.E. Day in Shuffle.’ I’ll never forget it.” His veran- O A Challenger 1945, and who stands as a living icon dah became the street on the record- O A taxi cab of Trinidad’s steel-band movement. ing. “Listen! The shuffling of feet! No —list compiled by Nate Rogers

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