A Musical Chronicle           

While I was in the States (Jul 03 – Nov 04)  I “scrimped and saved” and accumulated a bunch of musical instruments and amplifiers to use in Belize.  An electric bass & amplifier.  A little electric guitar. A 500 Watt PA Amp and some big speakers.  This is an account of the way we used these after I got back.

THE LEVITES.   My friend Hugo hardly plays any secular music.  He is very active in a couple of evangelical churches and one of his best friends is Ed, an alto sax player.  So Hugo, and Ed, and a multi-talented musician named “Chach” enlisted me as the fourth player in a little praise band.  We tried to take traditional tunes and play them in a new interesting way.  For example, we might take “Amazing Grace” and do it as a Bossa Nova.   We sang some songs, and accompanied others that sang when we played in various churches in the Corozal area.  We used to practice regularly on Wed. nights – stopping sharply at 9PM so that we didn’t need a special permit to play!  

THE BATTLE OF THE BANDS.  My friend Brad – music teacher at Corozal Community College (actually a high school)  -- needed a fund-raiser and he came up with a “Battle of the Bands” to stimulate his students to get together and play.  It was enormously successful.  We volunteered RIX Place as a rehearsal hall and teenagers showed up in droves to use my PA and the instruments.  (Brad set up his Tama drum set at my house, and we could just leave it set up, so that young drummers could come over and practice any time.)   These rehearsals went on for a couple of months, and culminated  in a big contest at “The Civic” where all the bands competed.  I was one of the judges, and we gave the top price to “Some Dudes” – a band which rode the bus up to Corozal from Orange Walk.  They brought their own team of muscle-bound rooters, who danced out in front of the band and controlled the spontaneous applause.  <grin>

DOWNFALL.  Hugo’s son Viktor is a drummer, and he loves “heavy metal”, so he has rounded up some fellow enthusiasts and they have a band called DOWNFALL.  That band began rehearsing at RIX Place every Saturday afternoon for a couple of hours.  Of course the sound was deafening, and most of the neighbors barely tolerated it – although a couple later told me that they enjoyed it.  (They lived a block away!)  I used to go out in the back yard and work on my wood projects while they rehearsed.  A couple of the players are actually going to school in the States, and were home for a while in the summer, so they came up to Corozal (from Belize City) and rehearsed, and finally the band put on a concert.  It was well attended (about 200 watchers & dancers) but should have had twice that many.  It was AWESOME!!

FREDDY MARTINEZ (and Christina)   Freddy Martinez is an 80-year-old “slack guitar” player who has been playing music in Belize since he was a young man.  He knows thousands of tunes, of course, and he taught a bunch of Spanish tunes to Christina (Brad’s wife) who plays rhythm guitar and sings.  They did a bunch of recording at RIX Place, and then we ( Brad, Freddy, Christina and I) did some concerts – one at the Anglican Church and one at “HelpAge” –- the local senior center—on the occasion of Freddie’s 80^th Birthday. 

UKULELE LESSONS.  My friend Julie Morse found out that my first instrument as a boy was Ukulele, and so she brought me down a ukulele so that I could give her lessons.  (Actually the instrument is a Brazilian Cavaquinho, but I restrung it with nylon strings and used it that way.)  Then, the next time she came down (she lives in Andover, MA, and comes down to their house in Corozal on holidays) she brought FOUR ukuleles and a bunch of rhythm instruments and suggested that I start a class for little ones.  We did this.  We had as many as eight students at once, and they all loved to play the rhythm instruments as much as they loved the ukuleles.  We held classes at the Gilharry Center, and when I left Belize, I put up the hanging rack left the ukes hanging there.  Perhaps they will find another teacher, and perhaps I will go back and teach some more!

CAYE WEST  (This is pronounced “Key West”)  Brad was trying to find some way to get me to stay in Belize, and he sent me a “chick singer” who also played Keyboard.  Her name is Heidi Levy, and she is gorgeous!  And talented!!  Her daddy likes country music and plays a lot of it for her, and he wanted her to learn to sing country music, so with my help, she did!  We formed a duo and started performing (for free) at the Corozal Bay Inn so that she could get some performing experience.  She was improving dramatically with each performance when we ran out of time.  Her folks wanted her to concentrate on school (Heidi is just turning 17 and starting her senior year in High School.)  I agreed that we didn’t want to divert her from her studies at this important time in her life, so we broke up the duo.  (I took this as a sign that I was really supposed to leave.)

THE COROZAL BLUES PROJECT.  One Sunday morning, a couple of guys showed up in front of my house and asked me if I played music.  They explained that they were with “The Gilharry Seven” – arguably the best band in Belize!   I invited them in for a beer, and we talked about music.  They had told Brad that they wanted to learn to play “The Blues”, and Brad told them that I was “the man” when it came to Blues.  It turned out that, while I grew up with the Blues, in the form of Dixieland, Rock & Roll and country blues, these guys really didn’t know anything about it.  So I began playing them a lot of different kinds of music, Rock, Elvis, Big Band, James Brown, etc. and showing them how to play it.  (Very simply, the Blues is based on a Pentatonic Scale, played against a fairly fixed set of chord changes, usually organized as 12 bars.)  The principal players – Evan Gilharry and Ray Jones – are used to playing “retorts” on horns, and it took a little while to get them improvising on the Blues Chords.  Evan came out and sat in with me while I played with Heidi at the Corozal Bay Inn and kinda got the idea, and then we played a couple of Sunday afternoons.  By the time we played our last gig, they had the idea down pat.  (Very talented players – especially Evan, who is probably the best natural Sax player I’ve every played with.)

FINALE.  My good friend Richard “Dickie” Lyall died in early September, and Evan, Brad and I went up to his wake and played Dixieland-Style  hymns while his friends clapped and sang.  Then I came home and went to bed, and two guys broke into my house, stole my laptop and a bunch of other stuff.   They were prepared to put me back to sleep with a ball-peen hammer, but I didn’t wake up until the next morning, when I called the police.   Although we identified the perpetrators on Sunday, the Police were unable to capture them or recover any of my stuff.  I guess they are still working on the case, but they have never told me a thing.

I took this last incident as a sign that I should be leaving, and so I sold everything and left.  The leaving is another story which I will tell at another time! [recounted in Escape from Belize.]

Rick Zahniser  (Oct. 2005)

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