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Instant Vintage: “Picong” by Etienne Charles

One track. Trinidadian trumpeter, a band called BadJohn Republic, and a title that names a whole national art form.

Picong: the art of the insult, played on a trumpet

Picong is a Trinidadian word — from the French piquant — for a specific cultural practice: the exchange of witty, cutting, improvised insults, traditionally between calypsonians competing in extempo. It is combat conducted entirely through cleverness, and the rules are strict: you must be funny, you must be quick, and you must not actually cross into cruelty. Getting picong'd well is a compliment.

Naming an instrumental after it is a statement of intent. Etienne Charles is a Trinidadian trumpeter, composer and scholar whose entire career has been about excavating Caribbean musical traditions and placing them inside contemporary jazz — calypso, kaiso, steelpan, folk masquerade traditions, Haitian and Cuban forms. He has built projects around Carnival, around folklore, and around the Gullah communities of the American Southeast.

BadJohn Republic is his band project, and the name is another Trinidadian term — a "badjohn" is a neighbourhood tough, a figure of both fear and folklore.

What to listen for

The thing to attend to is the rhythmic conversation. Calypso rhythm does not sit where jazz swing sits, and the interest in Charles's music comes from the friction between those two feels — horn lines phrased with jazz articulation over a rhythm section playing something distinctly Trinidadian.

Listen for the exchanges between instruments, too. If the piece is named for picong, the improvised trading is the joke and the point: musicians attempting to outdo each other with wit rather than volume.

Charles's tone is worth its own attention — bright, vocal, closer to a calypso horn section than to a bebop trumpeter, with a lot of bend in the notes.

Go deeper

Carnival: The Sound of a People is the major Charles work and the best introduction — an ambitious, large-ensemble project built on the music and masquerade traditions of Trinidad Carnival. Kaiso and Creole Soul are the other essentials, and his Gullah Roots project connects Caribbean and African-American traditions directly.

For the calypso tradition behind it: Lord Kitchener and Mighty Sparrow are the giants, and the extempo tradition is still alive in Trinidad's Carnival competitions.

For Caribbean jazz more widely, Monty Alexander (Jamaica), Roberto Fonseca (Cuba) and David Rudder — Trinidad's greatest living songwriter — are the onward routes.

A closing note on why one track earns a post. Trinidad's musical output is wildly disproportionate to its size — calypso, soca, steelpan and the entire Carnival tradition came from an island of roughly 1.4 million people — and yet it barely registers in most international listening. Etienne Charles has built a career on refusing to let that stand, working as an academic as well as a performer to document and extend these forms. A single instrumental named for a verbal art form is a small thing, but it is a doorway, and it is worth walking through.

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