Juliet Robin is a singer, composer, arranger, producer and teacher who is proficient on a number of instruments. She was unique in being the only female musician in iconic band Roy Cape Kaiso All Stars, and continues to tread a thin line between sustenance and frustration in the local music industry.
Robin has been performing for over 30 years, a fact belied by her youthful look, and has an upcoming show at the new Kaiso Blues Café in Newtown on July 18 with her band. At the show, she will launch her post-Carnival release Strange Things on the August Riddim produced by Neil Alexander and Curtis Bling. She wrote the lyrics and melody.
That song, a reggae groover, is a political commentary asking for divine intervention in the country where “them politicians seem to be unstable and their behaviour seems to be disgraceful,” acts which Robin sees as “strange.” In light of her renewed significance, T&T Guardian spoke to Robin to get a clearer perspective on her career and role in the industry.
The daughter of a former director of culture, Robin was classically trained in string, woodwind and keyboard instruments and specialises in the violin, clarinet and piano. She recently added the bass to her arsenal of sound. She started her career in the mid 1980s playing in all the popular bands of the day and subsequently working the restaurant circuit as a solo singer keyboardist.
“I worked with Roy Cape, Mano Marcellin, Andre Tanker, Shandileer, Charlie’s Roots both as a keyboardist and a background vocalist.”
Notably, the Roy Cape gig was a pioneering one for her. Roy Cape speaking to Jocelyne Guilbault said, “In all these years, I only had one female musician in the band from 1989 to 1992: Juliet Robin, a keyboard player.” Cape also remarked on the nature of the music business here: “Music was always regarded in Trinidad as a man's game.
The music business is rough and tumble. So you did not have many females.” She remarked that her attempts at joining bands earlier were rebuffed with the excuse that there were no “facilities for changing” available! This debut on the “soca stage” would take her abroad up the islands, into North America and across to Europe at the various Carnivals and festivals there.
After leaving the Kaiso All Stars, she worked the band circuit and also cut the Leston Paul track Weakness for Sweetness as a cover on the compilation for the global market—Caribbean Carnival Soca Party 4—in 1996. By this time, having tired of the band routine, Robin ventured on the restaurant circuit playing at Hilton brunches and New Years Eve parties, Kapok Hotel and Bel Air Hotel restaurants, and former popular eating places like Solimar, The Parrot, and Babas on the Bay.
When asked if this was a lucrative sector, her reply was that at the time, there was work for the working musician, but times changed. Restaurants have cut their performance budgets and opted for piped recorded music.
By the turn of the century, Robin was playing in the all-female jazz band, The Jazz Tripple. A fortuitous encounter with Dutch jazz trumpeter Jarmo Hoogendijk, who was here for one of the early jazz festivals led to an invitation to visit the Netherlands to check out the music scene there. Luck for some may not be fortune for other. Robin surveyed the rich entertainment scene but opted to return to Trinidad because of what she describes as the “drug scene” there.
The simple reality is that in the bars, clubs and performance spaces there, cigarette smoking was rampant at the time. (A ban on the smoking of tobacco was introduced in 2008—cannabis is still popular in coffee houses—but widely flouted, temporarily lifted due to economic hardship by bar owners in 2010, and now the Dutch parliament agreed on a total ban in the hospitality sector.)