Keeping away from the limelight, he has been one of the Caribbean's best-kept musical secrets. But now, with a hugely successful CD, is he threatened with serious international fame? Judy Raymond meets musician André Tanker

After three decades as one of Trinidad and Tobago's leading musicians, André Tanker is still among the country's best-kept secrets. But he's always made his music for the world. And now he's released his first CD, Children of the Big Bang, on the local Rituals label, Trinidad may find it harder to keep André Tanker to itself.

At home
Mark Lydersay
Since the 1970s, Tanker has been composing and performing what he would sum up, reluctantly, as "contemporary Caribbean music". It draws on the traditions not only of the modern Caribbean -- calypso, reggae -- but on the jazz, blues and soul of North America, the drums and chants of Africa, the tabla and sitar of India.

Nowadays that rich mixture is part of what's called "world music" -- and the rest of the world is finally catching up with Tanker.

Children of the Big Bang has been selling well locally. And with world music making the charts internationally, Tanker may find himself reluctantly in the limelight.

Among those in the know, Tanker is much in demand. He and his One World Contraband were enticed into taking part in the 1996 edition of Trinidad's annual Pan Jazz Festival last November, and appeared for two years at the St Lucia Jazz Festival. Those live performances, like the CD, included new high-energy versions of many old Tanker favourites that have become local classics.

On guitar
Mark Lydersay
On Children of the Big Bang, a jazzy sax introduces Calypso Soul Food, a praise-song in honour of local cuisine, which rhapsodises on the flavours of Trinidad's cow heel soup, Guyanese pepperpot and Tobago's curry crab with dumplings. There's Carnival music (Wild Indian Band) which wouldn't sound out of place coming from a music truck on the road on Carnival day; Forward Home, the anthem of the returning migrant (I went away, I leave and I forward home . . .), uptempo chants in Call of the Water Dancer and Meeting at the Crossroads. And the CD had to include -- in a gently hip-hop version -- Sayamanda, one of the best-loved Tanker songs of all.

Sayamanda was a nonsense word that he improvised while he was composing the tune, planning to replace it with more meaningful lyrics later. But it sounded right, and later he interpreted it to mean "Is I a man there". It meant, he explains, "We're all human. We all have a common kind of feeling, we can identify with what's happening in another place."

That theme runs through all Tanker's work. And this music celebrates life. In Thanks for the Music, Tanker sings:
    Life-giving waters fall from the clouds,
    . . .