Crucial Mas: Friday, Nicholas Khan, Cherese Washington, Marvin Alexander and Romel Lezama.
Picture by Colin Williams
It’s half dancehall, half Afrobeats, with an ominous jazz riff and highly effective lyrics that decry the best way poverty and inequality produce criminals from residents, “Born a Prison” by a Trinidadian collective of previously incarcerated artists known as Crucial Mas — in collaboration with famend jazz musician Etienne Charles — is poised to take airwaves by storm.
To be launched at The Burg on Saturday, the track —produced by Rheon Elbourne, credited because the inventor of “Trinibad” music, akin to Jamaican dancehall — was initially written by group member Friday as a calypso tune again in 2010, when he was incarcerated in Trinidad’s youth detention middle.
Friday gained the Individuals’s Selection Award with “Born a Prison”—however by no means thought it could remodel years later to develop into a part of one thing a lot larger than music.
Crucial Mas is housed beneath the umbrella of Incarceration Nations Community, a world jail reform group helmed by well-known author, professor and activist Dr. Baz Dreisinger.
All of it started when Dr. Baz, a professor at John Jay School of Prison Justice and founding father of John Jay’s groundbreaking Jail-to-School Pipeline program, and Etienne Charles started scheming up justice collaborations in Trinidad on the heels of the publication of her best-selling guide Incarceration Nations and the debut of his landmark 2022 manufacturing “San Juan Hill: A New York Story”, which marked the reopening of David Geffen Corridor at New York’s Lincoln Middle.
Carried out by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul and the New York Philharmonic, performed by Music Director Jaap van Zweden, San Juan Hill is an immersive multimedia work that transports the viewers through music, visuals, and unique first-person accounts of the historical past of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the Indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land on which Lincoln Middle resides.
Dr. Baz and Etienne started conceiving of an identical musical manufacturing concerning the disaster of prisons in Trinidad and Tobago, utilizing an immersive inventive strategy and anchored—just like the lauded San Juan Hill—within the theme of exile and invisibility, which defines each incarcerated folks and socially disappeared folks, globally.
Analysis for this future manufacturing started in January 2024 within the type of a month-long therapeutic arts workshop for a bunch of at present and previously incarcerated artists in Trinidad, led by Etienne and Dr. Baz.
With every workshop the group saved rising and the unbelievable expertise rising in full power. The collective of at present and previously incarcerated artists and survivors of crime in Trinidad started taking over a lifetime of its personal, growing a reputation and an identification: Crucial Mas.
Crucial Mas stated the identify connotes two issues: “The truth that for the primary time within the nation’s historical past, a essential mass of individuals with lived expertise of the justice system have a distinguished platform with which to impact change; and the Carnival theme of the collective’s work – the last word cultural flagship of Trinidad – makes this mas (masquerade) particularly essential to society.”
The debut of Crucial Mas occurred at Etienne’s grand Highway March present at Queen’s Corridor Performing Arts Middle in February, 2024; the troupe carried out to a different packed home at a Port of Spain venue in April, 2024.
An upcoming Carnival season tour will convey Crucial Mas to varsities, concert events and group areas like pan yards, the place the group will each carry out and interact in dialogue about justice and prisons.
When participating with colleges throughout the excursions, Crucial Mas stated it’s going to use artwork and multimedia platforms to advertise the dialogue with youth, who’re probably the most impacted by group hurt, lack of security and the disaster of prisons in TnT.
As a venture, Crucial Mas stated it faucets into two very important strategies utilized in the USA to maneuver the needle towards extra considerate justice approaches: the usage of artwork in pushing for tradition change and the empowerment of individuals with lived expertise of the justice system, not simply as spokespeople however as lead actors in justice reform.
“It is a technique that has already proved profitable within the US context, the place main inventive works concerning the legal justice system radically shifted public opinion about mass incarceration, transferring it from the margins to the mainstream and thereby additionally making it a extra funding-friendly situation; this, in flip, led to coverage change, the expansion of organizations doing considerate justice work and implementation of extra progressive justice practices all through the US,” Crucial Mas stated.
