Extempo Trinidad

Extempo is a form of improvised song or oral poetry rooted in Calypso and performed primarily in Trinidad, Tobago, and Grenada as well as in their diaspora communities. It is most often performed as part of a contest with other poets for an audience and occasionally more informally among friends to tease. Humor and wit are highly prized. Performers are often given a subject or theme and need to improvise on the spot. Picong is an older term that refers to lighthearted banter and exchange of insults.

Extempo verses consist of four or eight-line stanzas. “In terms of the improvised words for extempo,” performer Black Sage (Philip Murray) explains, “you have a topic sentence, you have supplementary sentences, you have a clincher sentence. The clincher couplet, we call it, the last two lines, must be powerful enough to illicit a response from your audience. You have to make them respond either by being humorous or by being perceptive. It must be a truth that is well told. It could be rib tickling; it could elicit a tauntful response, it may be such a truthful and powerful statement that it might evoke spontaneous applause from the audience.”

Extempo verses are usually performed to existing Calypso melodies. The most widely used is “Sans Humanite”. Others include “Bed Bug”, “Matilda”, “Miss Mary Ann”, and “Big Bamboo”. According to Black Sage “A good extempo artist can extempo on any melody,” continues, “but some melodies lend themselves to extempo better than others. “Sans Humanite” is regarded as the best melody for extempo because it is an octave – eight lines – and a measured refrain. It’s classic type of composition – like a Shakespearean sonnet.”

Extempo dueling poets exchange insults and barbs in song, but their aggression is most often carefully controlled. The dignified Trinidadian extempo master Black Sage describes it this way. “Whenever I extempo with someone it has to be in good taste. There is a point I do not go beyond. I’ll will go to your clothes, I might go to your love life. I will not sing on your wife. I will sing on your girlfriend but I may not sing on your wife. You must not offend good taste. You can tell a man he’s gay or something like that, that’s par for the course – he’ll tell you the same thing – and it’s fun, it’s in good taste, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

History

Extempo, sometimes called picong, grew out of Calypso music, a style of Afro-Caribbean music that originated in Trinidad around the turn of the 20th century. Calypso has its roots in the call the response singing traditions in Africa, carnival traditions brought by the French Catholics in the 18th century along with those fleeing the Haitian revolution in 1804.

Hollis Liverpool (Chalkdust), a leading Calypso performer and winner of multiple Calypso Monarch competitions, holds a Ph.D. in history and ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan. In his memoir/tribute to his Calypsonian comrades, From the Horse’s Mouth, he writes, “… the alert mind and qickness of speech… characterized the calypsonians of the late 1920s and ‘30s. I was privileged to hear the singer [named] Unknown sing extempo on many occasions as we and other calypsonians “bust a grog” on George Street. Of this I am sure; few could have taken him on in the field of extempo. Fewer still could have beaten him in that dying art. In 1969, at the Naparima Bowl backstage, whilst the semi-finalists were waiting to sing, Young Creole, Smiley, Psycho, Allrounder, Gibraltar, Tiny Terror, Killer and Yours Truly were all engaged in extempo singing. The “contest’ went on and on until someone threw a picong at Unknown. He retaliated by composing right there and then in perfect timing, metre, rhyme and melody a ditty in which he called the names of every calypsonian present. The roar that emanated fromm the crowd caused the session to break up. Unknown’s ditty went somewhat like this:

Today at Naparima Bowl it’s a pleasure
To be liming with Creole, Smiley and Young Killer (repeat),
Al Capacity, Black Hat and Allrounder, Psycho, Chalkie and Gibraltar.
So gentlemen, please leave me alone,
I ain’t invite all yuh so leave the Unknown. (p. 7)

Some improvised verses are memorable – and still recalled. Chalkdust remembers that on one occasion at the Riband Bleu Club in New York, the crowd was calling topics and Executor and Lion were responding to them in song. The duo was part of a team of four who had gone to New York to make recordings for the Decca Gramophone recording Company in 1937. That night, Executor was telling the crowd that he could extempo on any topic on earth. Suddenly, a patron asked them to sing on a “circle”. Executor in perfect metre and rhyme responded in song:

I’m just a simple kaisonian;
I am no geometrician.
What is a circle? I for one don’t care
But of one thing I’m sure; it isn’t a square.

Around 1985, as Black Sage remembers, the old time carnival tent funded by the Trinidadian government revived the improvisatory duels known as picong – and currently called extempo. As Les Slater, a steel pan player and Director of the Folk Arts Institute of Trinidad and Tobago put it, the improvised extempo is one of the “lesser angels” in the pantheon of Calypso.

As Black Sage, Three time Extempo King Philip Murray, put it, “you couldn’t as people are doing today just jump in the party and call yourself a Calypsonian – you had to be appointed and named. Kitchener will tell you that he was appointed and named by the Growlin Tiger, Lord Valentino will tell you he was appointed and named by Kitchener. I myself was named and appointed by an old Calypsonian named Tobago Crusso. . . He took me and carried me to Sparrow’s audition – he discovered me and appointed me in Calypso. That was how it was, you had to be appointed a calypsonian, you couldn’t just jump in and sing calypso just so.”

According to Calypsonian the Might Sparrow, “In the old days they tried to emulate British royalty. There was Lord Kitchener, Lord Nelson. . .” As Gordon Rohlehr notes in The Development of Calypso, 1900-1940 (Jan. and May, 1972, p. 13) “many of the early calypsonians lacked formal education. They were still the dispossessed of the streets, and, as such they showed their vocabulary power by trying to appropriate and master the language of the schoolmaster and the traditional English bards. Their vocabulary is taken from war, astronomy, the courts of law, the schools. They assumed the roles of all who wielded power over the word: the priest, the lawyer, the judge in particular and the pedantic (and often brutal) schoolmaster castigating pupils. Calypsonians never saw themselves as merchants or planters, the people who are really wielding power in the society. It was the rhetoric of the time which fascinated them more than any other things: powerful sounding words, rather than real power.”