VA - Soul Jazz Records Presents: Mirror To The Soul: Music Culture And Identity In The Caribbean 1920-72 [2CD Set] (2013)

Mirror to the Soul: Music, Culture and Identity in the Caribbean 1920-72 is a compilation film of Pathé newsreel clips from 1920 to 1972, which captures Britain’s complex relationship with the Caribbean culture of the time. It will be released by Soul Jazz on May 7, 2013. Here is the full review with a link to the original below:

‘It is interesting to know that nine tons of sugar cane produce one ton of sugar, sufficient for a quarter of a million cups of tea, or thereabouts.” The awfully proper tones that impart this particular nugget belong to Bob Danvers-Walker, for years the narrator of Pathé newsreels. Surely also the model for Harry Enfield’s Mr Cholmondley-Warner, he may not be familiar by name, but the voice is instantly evocative: the clipped precision, the jauntiness, the terrible puns. His unique delivery is the unlikely star of a curious and compelling new film, which takes the curatorial art of the compilation album and applies it winningly to the moving image.

With a touch of Danvers-Walker formality to its title, Mirror to the Soul: Music, Culture and Identity in the Caribbean 1920-72 is a two-hour DVD that raids the rich archives of British Pathé to hypnotic effect. Stacking up disparate clips, from the grainy black and white of 1930s Haiti to the saturated colours of late-60s Bermuda, the documentary presents snapshots of past life in the islands of the Caribbean and the countries that border it. Through these 60 little films, produced to entertain and inform cinema audiences before that evening’s main feature, we see in a fresh light Britain’s long and often vexed relations with its former colonies, as they become independent nations and members of the expanding Commonwealth.

A banana plantation: a still from Mirror to the Soul.This is not to say that there is nothing about bananas. And the production techniques of the 1930s coffee industry. Or how they make salt in Puerto Rico. Or the Fighting Dance of Martinique. The range of material is bewildering, as the advent of television slowly squeezes Pathé from being a news service to producing softer, more magaziney material (the company ceased making cinema newsreels in 1970). One minute we are eye-witnesses in Cuba, inspecting bomb damage from the Bay of Pigs invasion, the next we join the basket-weaving ladies of Grand Cayman in what Danvers-Walker calls “a vivid spectacle of unparalleled loveliness”.

Accompanied by a book and two CDs of Caribbean music from the same era, the Pathé project is the work of Stuart Baker, founder of the London record label Soul Jazz. “I thought it was a fascinating idea, to look at the way the British presented these foreign cultures – to see one country’s values in the way it presents another’s,” he says. “It’s a real insight into the whole postcolonial thing, and the attitudes to race and women, in those days. But I also like bananas. And so I am genuinely interested to learn how they were grown, packaged and transported.”

A clip from Music to the Soul.Although he has been tracing and compiling rare music from around the world since Soul Jazz began trading in 1995, films are a fairly new departure for Baker. But with records in his back catalogue including Street Music of Haiti, Afro-Cuban Music from the Roots, as well as classic material from Jamaica’s Studio One, the Caribbean is clearly close to his heart. “Pathé played a big part in defining the way we perceive the Caribbean. These clips are full of the escapism, the exoticism, the tropicalness. The whole Bond-film feeling is there. But I was also really surprised by their incredibly positive and enlightened attitude towards things like immigration.”

It is striking that in all its presentation of the nations that Lloyd George called “the slums of the Empire”, and the exodus of their workers to the mother country, Pathé strikes a tone that encourages a constructive attitude and sense of duty to fellow British citizens. Certainly the lexicon is anachronistic in places: “London’s Basing Street is where the dark folks meet,” announces Danvers-Walker’s home-counties voiceover at one point. But he remains excited about nascent multicultural Britain, enthusing about the “blending of different worlds in Brixton market”, and condemning “a shameful episode in Notting Hill Gate” when white thugs throw stones through black windows: “This violence is evil.”

With so many places featured – from Jamaica to Venezuela, Honduras to Aruba and Curacao to the Florida coast – does a unifying Caribbean culture really emerge? Baker believes it does. “It is a combination of the natural beauty, the spirit of the people, a unique feeling in the music.” Perhaps it is Danvers-Walker who sums it up most succinctly, as the Pathé camera follows workers canning pineapples in a factory in 1940s Puerto Rico: “They eat what they can, and what they can’t eat, they can.”