David Martins, 1935 - 2024

From 1966 until about 2015, my father, Dave Martins, led a West Indian band named the Tradewinds that was initially based in Toronto, then the Cayman Islands. The band, and my father’s songs, became a significant cultural force throughout much of the Caribbean. The Calypso, Reggae, and Soca music (many examples are on YouTube) championed and occasionally poked fun at the West Indian way of life. The bands’ lasting and uplifting impact is still felt today in much of the region and particularly in my father’s home country of Guyana, where he lived the final years of his life.

To chronicle all of this, I’ve been compiling material for a book about the history of my father’s musical life. The book is far from complete, but the current draft of the introduction, offered here, will tell you most of what you need to know.

_____________

A Guyanese reborn as West Indian

In December of 1955, as my father Dave Martins descended the stairs of a small propeller aircraft at Toronto’s Pearson airport and set foot outside of Guyana for the first time, he felt something strange that he could not place. It was physical and unsettling, something he had never felt before in his life.

He felt cold.

He was, after all, a 19-year-old self-described “country boy” wearing only a thin suit, so it took just a few moments for him to realize that this new and highly unpleasant sensation was in fact the feeling of being cold and my father then did the only sensible thing that came to mind.

He took off running.

Once across the tarmac and inside the terminal, he stood in the corner and hugged himself; it was a couple of minutes before he stopped shaking.

Of course, coping with the frigid winter air is one of the first lessons learned by many newcomers to Canada. My father would learn many more such lessons in acclimatization over the next 25 years while based in Toronto—and not only those lessons pertaining to being Canadian. During that time he would also learn about, write about, and sing about many elemental things of what it means to be West Indian.

. . . . . .  

He was my father, but here let’s call him Dave.

Dave grew up the second-youngest and only boy of five children, all of whom eventually lived most of their lives in Canada. He emigrated solo that winter in 1955 to connect with his eldest sister Theresa and her husband Joe Gonsalves. Their mother Zepherina and sisters Mell, Marie, and Celia would soon arrive as well — all part of a huge wave of West Indian immigration to Canada that had in the mid-1950s only begun to swell.

Although Dave was already devoted to his guitar, had played in bands in Guyana, and had tentatively begun to write songs prior to his arrival, initially he had no clear ambition for a life in music. Yet even as he began writing North American folk and country songs while feeling his way through various types of employment in Canada, West Indian music always remained in his mind and in his heart. It eventually became his life.

Despite a naturally shy disposition, the young Dave soon began performing solo as an amateur in Toronto and his confidence grew. In 1960, he answered an ad in the Toronto Star newspaper and signed on as part of a trio called The Latins (later renamed as The Debonairs). The fledgling group played a mix of Caribbean, Latin, and R&B material.  

And yet within all this musical exploration, Dave the aspiring songwriter had not discovered a stylistic niche that would support a solid career in music. He’d demonstrated an obvious knack for adapting stories and setting them to melodies, but neither that nor the regular Debonairs gigs could comfortably pay the bills.

There were growing responsibilities, you see.

In 1962, Dave married my mother, a beautiful Scottish immigrant named Dorothy Walker. Two years later my sister, Luana, was born. But the moderately successful Debonairs had disbanded, and, after a brief and ill-fated attempt at selling mutual funds, the committed family man with a modest home in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale was still searching for his purpose.

In the end, that purpose found him—and it took hold in large part thanks to ongoing West Indian immigration.

By the early 1960s, Canada’s relaxed immigration laws had seen Caribbean migrants flooding into Toronto, Montreal, and nearby cities. It also meant that demand for West Indian-style entertainment was growing quickly. So when an offer came to form a house band to play regularly at the Bermuda Tavern on Yonge Street, Dave took it. Very quickly, Latin and R&B gave way for the pulsing surge of Calypso and Reggae.

Dave Martins was now, finally, an exclusively West Indian musician, and he wanted to do things his way. Along with Trinidadians Kelvin Ceballo and Glenn Sorzano, Dave formed a trio called the Tradewinds and played regularly to a core West Indian audience in and around Toronto.

Buoyed by the steady gigs, the band added bassist Joe Brown of Trinidad and made a bold move to reconnect with the Caribbean region directly in 1967. They recorded four songs as 45 rpm singles and, without having any “name” or so much as an invitation, flew south in an attempt to make noise at Trinidad’s annual Carnival, the festival that was then, and remains today, the epicentre of West Indian music.

Trinidadians in Toronto called the gambit crazy, and they weren’t wrong. Four-piece bands were unheard of at Carnival. Despite some successful performances on the fringes of the main events, that first Tradewinds trip was initially seen as somewhat of a bust.

Or so it seemed. Once back home, the band learned that one of the four recorded tunes — a cheeky Calypso called “Honeymooning Couple” — had caught fire on Caribbean radio. Just like that, the Toronto-based Tradewinds were a hit in their home region. With this key breakthrough, Dave and his band began riding a wave that would carry them to consistent musical acclaim throughout the islands and beyond for more than 50 years.

. . . . . .

You could say that with that initial hit record a band was born, but so was a West Indian.

When touring extensively through the region in the years to come, Dave would habitually observe and write songs about the commonalities and differences in life and culture across the Caribbean islands. Indeed, this became his métier as a songwriter. While obtaining this West Indian education, Dave would also blossom into arguably one of the greatest musical creators that the region has ever produced.

The Tradewinds were among the first bands to become a household name in the Caribbean using the small-band format common in North America. They were also one of a very few invited overseas bands to play the endurance-challenging Trinidad Carnival fete circuit over multiple years, from 1968 all the way until 1981.

Still, it was ultimately the songs that made the band memorable. In Guyana, Dave’s stirring patriotic ballad “Not a Blade of Grass” from 1979 remains cherished as the country’s unofficial second national anthem. In 1982, Guyana awarded him its highest civilian honour, the Golden Arrow of Achievement, for distinguished service as a musician and a composer.

In more recent years, regional observers who talk about Dave have begun to regularly use the word “icon.”

“To describe Dave Martins as iconic is not a difficult thing to do within the context of the Caribbean,” insists Vic Fernandes, a Guyanese-born music industry stalwart who is known as the godfather of Barbados radio.

“Certainly from Trinidad all the way up, the name Dave Martins is synonymous with the best in Caribbean culture, the best in Caribbean music. People like Sparrow, Bob Marley, Kitchener, and for me Boo Hinkson stand out in that way. It is a select group and Dave Martins sits very comfortably in that select group.”

. . . . . .

What kind of book is this? Although Dave is certainly the central figure throughout, these pages do not function as a biography. Instead they offer an exploration of personal and cultural histories blending together, almost like music.

The seeds of it all were planted almost 35 years ago during another cultural exchange when I was a Canadian who’d landed in the Caribbean. Fresh out of grad school, I’d joined my father in Grand Cayman from 1992 to 1994 and was cutting my teeth as a newspaper journalist.

While writing for a weekly tabloid called The New Caymanian, I quickly learned how much I enjoyed interviewing artists and crafting stories about them. As I began to think more like a journalistic storyteller, I recognized that my father’s and the Tradewinds’ histories were not only deep and multi-faceted, but also simply needed to be told.

As the book initiative evolved, I learned that I wanted to do more than simply map out the milestones and achievements. I wanted to write insightfully about how the Tradewinds had accomplished so much; to analyze and theorize about the band’s deeply ingrained impact and remarkable longevity.

One key element that I’ll explore in that way is how Dave’s approach to leading the band was mostly an intuitive, feel-your-way methodology rooted in healthy optimism and an ability to confidently measure risk.

With no management team or record company executives calling the shots, the Tradewinds were a do-it-yourself outfit long before do-it-yourself became commonplace in the age of the digital home recording studio. From beginning to end, there were no lucrative recording contracts nor any platinum-selling albums. Although they were based in Toronto for the first 16 years, the Tradewinds’ following and ways of operating were always exclusively West Indian.

Springsteen, Downie, and Dave

Although he much preferred to avoid sounding bookish or intellectual, Dave always understood the Tradewinds’ music to be sociological in nature. His primary interest as a Caribbean storyteller was to broadly celebrate and contrast how people behave collectively. Along the way, he forged a powerful bond with his listeners.

In his 1998 book Tramps Like Us, Daniel Cavicchi made sense of another such bond, that between American songwriter Bruce Springsteen and his legion of fans. Cavicchi describes how such a relationship arrives fundamentally through a special kind of trust — one that is both continually tested and steadily fortified through exclusiveness and the perception of singular devotion — creating an almost unbreakable connection.

I’ll explore in this book how Dave developed an iconic status with his audience just like Springsteen in the U.S.A. as well as the late Gord Downie in Canada, frontman for the Tragically Hip.

On a more romantic front, another thing readers will encounter in this book is the cyclical notion of departure and return.

This theme naturally arises in the Tradewinds’ history and is reflected in any migratory narrative that involves the quest for a new life, transnational exchange, evolving identity, and, most poignantly, the phenomenon whereby we often understand our roots more deeply when looking back at them from afar.

Of course, the departure-and-return theme is also right there in the Tradewinds’ very name. For better or for worse, those famous easterly airstreams that helped enable a slave trade and colonial expansion also played a key role in transforming the Caribbean into a global hub of sugar production and a region of geopolitical concern.

During their half-century of comings and goings, Dave and the Tradewinds recorded 22 albums, staged more than 5,000 live performances, and were honoured with an assortment of achievement awards in Canada, Grand Cayman, the U.S., and Guyana. Few would have predicted that what began in the mid-‘60s as an unassuming trio of West Indian immigrants playing Toronto bars would become one of the biggest musical concerns ever to emerge from, and return to, the Caribbean.

To get started, let’s consider how by sheer historical coincidence the Tradewinds band, the fully independent nation of Guyana, and yours truly, were all born in the very same year: 1966.