The Frank Clarke Kids - Trinidad's Steelband Prodigies

 

Romance

The Frank Clarke Kids

Trinidad's Steelband Prodigies

Producer: Frank Clarke & Cipriani Boulevard

Cover Design: Kishore Raghoobar - Key Caribbean Productions

Photography: Roy Boyle

Recording Studio: K&H Studios - Port of Spain

Recording Engineer: Gerhard Neckar

Recording Technician: Eric Michaud

Mc1 Records STEREO 179

From the back cover: Even in a land where children begin visiting panyards about the same time as they enter school, the Frank Clarke Kids are an extraordinary group. With an average age of 12, they are not only the youngest steel band in the country but they include Frank's three sons, three stepsons and a girl, sister to all six. In today's liberated world little Lisa might have to be called a "pan-person" and one suspects that her brothers would have no objection to being somewhat "misnomered" as "pan-men". Nor, indeed, would the other four boys from the Cipriani Boulevard neighborhood who comprise this super-extended family. Together they play a scintillating brand of steelband music that has won them coast-to-coast television exposure in Miami, double-billing with the famous Merrymen at Barbado's Caribbean Pepper-Pot, and continued appearances at Trinidad's Penthouse and Holiday Inn Hotel. If explanations are needed for their rapid rise (the band is little more than a year old) then put it down to the spirit of  youth, attempting and surmounting incredible heights, and a precociousness made attractive, balanced as it is by delightful innocence. Adults have helped, of course, notably Frank, himself, who manages the band and has transmitted to his brood a zest for music acquired from years of playing the piano, cuatro, guitar, violin, ukulele and drums, thereby earning for himself the title of "the one man parang band." In addition the kids draw on the talents of Rudolph Charles, leader of the internationally acclaimed WITCO Gay Desperadoes. Incidentally, the mother of Frank's three sons is a member of St. Vincent's famous musical family, the McIntoshes, eight of whom now have their own band appearing across Canada. Come Carnival – as has been happening over these seasons – Frank Clarke's Kids will merge with the WITCO Gay Desperadoes and other competing steel bands will envy "Despers" this edge. You will immediately understand why when you hear this album ranging as it does from Shadow's pulsating "Road March," "Bassman" and Irving Burgie's immortal "Yellow Bird," to George Gershwin's standard "Rhapsody In Blue," Beethoven's "Romance," and Franz Von Supper's challenging overture "Poet And Peasant." Listening to it you'll agree that the album is well-titled. – Keith Smith

Bassman

Yellow Bird

Amalia Rose

Rhapsody In Blue

Romance 

Medley Of Tunes: My Favorite Things/I Love Thee/Strange Music/Sound Of Music/Climb Every Mountain

Poet And Peasant