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Jason Griffith: Voyage of the Sailor Mas'
Masquerader in Mr. Griffith's headpiece
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Jim Harding, the pioneer
Staff Article
Interview Recorded: April 10, 2005
Posted: April 15, 2005
With the sailor mas, your costume is white. In the headpiece, the nose depicts the mas. Now this long nose you see, Jim Harding brought that into Carnival. So if you make a long nose this year, you could make a bird nose the following year or a macaw or elephant. The nose depicted the mas. So you have your white suit, and if you want to play the following year, you just launder your white suit and you put it away. So you play your long nose this year and the next year it will be a bird nose. If you play black and white this year, the colours might be red white and blue the following year. So all you got to do now if you have to decorate the suit, you decorate it red, white and blue, or you have your suit, and you buy your mas. That was the thing with the sailor. However, with the historical bands, you know you have to do a new thing every year.
With my band, we did a lot of things here by putting a lot of history in the band, which they never saw before. I could remember in 1984, we played a mas' that we called "Extraterrestrial Voyage". It was the first time that they saw a sailor band in space. The following year we did something that we caused people's eyebrows to raise because we did "Oceanic Exploration"; we went under the sea. Then we had a thing there in the Hallows with Mickey Mouse and Safari '85, and we did that in '86. From there we went a little further. In 1987 what we did, we played a band we call "In The Realm Of Nipponese Wonder, Japan, Old Fashioned Sailor". So we were in Japan and all these Japanese people were with us. Mystical and Legendry Voyages, we brought back all those old legends, but in sailor form. "Alkebulan-Reflections of a Sailors Vision", "Arctica", we did all that... a lot of really big sailor mas, from where it came. It was only a little headpiece and you gone and you play your thing, and you finish with that.
With our band, we did a lot, and I am proud to say that I was a bandleader in that band for twenty-nine straight years, and notwithstanding I was in carnival for fifty-two years, then I retired. I came back after Jim Harding, the fellow who invented the thing, the pioneer. I came back in the year 2000 and did a tribute to him. So I would say that somehow or the other, I feel that maybe I was put down here for that.
The type of bands we had in the sailor mas', with all the sailor mas' that they had here in Trinidad and Tobago, you never saw anything like what we had. Up to now, although we have offshoots from our band, but still you know, they did not set that standard. I am very proud to know that I was involved. It wouldn't be Jason alone, you had committees that you sat down with, so I would always say our band not Jason band.
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