Lionel Belasco

Lionel Belasco (Maracaibo (Venezuela) 1881 – c. 24 June 1967) was from Trinidad and Tobago and was a pianist, composer and bandleader, best known for his calypso recordings.

Biography

According to various sources, Belasco was born in Maracaibo (Venezuela), the son of an Afro-Caribbean mother and a Sephardic Jewish father. He spent his early childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and grew up in Trinidad. He traveled widely in the Caribbean and South America in his youth, absorbing a wide variety of musical influences. He was leading his own band by 1902, and made his first phonograph recordings in Trinidad in 1914.

Between 1914 and 1945, he made at least 278 recordings under his own name, more than any other West Indian bandleader did. He was one of the artists responsible for the hybrid of styles taken from different sources including European classical music, waltzes, jazz, pop, African and Caribbean folk music that became known as calypso. Soon after his recording debut, Belasco moved to New York after a rumored affair with the daughter (who was his piano student) of Trinidad's governor. In addition to recording and writing songs, he made piano rolls, ran a piano store, and regularly returned to Trinidad for Carnival, in part to pick up new tunes.

The majority of the calypsos of the World War I era were instrumentals due to the constraints of the wartime economy, no recordings of note were produced until the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the "golden era" of calypso would cement the style, form, and phrasing of the music.

Perhaps the thems of Belasco were not as earthy as some of the other early calypso greats, but they usually boasted a high level of musicianship, rhythmic bounce, and accomplished arrangements. As a composer, his chief virtue was an ability to adapt material from Trinidadian and Venezuelan sources for recording purposes and a larger audience. Indeed, some songs that are credited to him were adapted from such sources and copyrighted by Belasco, a common practice among many musicians and publishers during that era. He claimed that Rum and Coca Cola, a big hit in the '40s, was based on a calypso called L'Annee Passee that he had published in a song folio in 1943. L'Annee Passee in turn was actually based on a Martinquean folk song, although Belasco claimed to have written it in the early 1900s.

Belasco collaborated with numerous artists, including vaudevillian Phil Madison, calypso singer Wilmoth Houdini, concert singer Massie Patterson, and vocalist Gracita Faulkner. He continued to record, in the United States and England, until the '60s before dying in 1967.

See also

• Calipso

External links

• Lionel Belasco recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings.
• https://web.archive.org/web/20110616102802/http://www.nalis.gov.tt/Biography/bio_Lionel_Belasco1.html