Impresario, musician and composer Charles Bascome remembers a time when all Bermuda’s hotels were alive with the sound of music, particularly with the sound of jazz. As a child he had piano lessons with Mrs Rhoda Bascome although he admits that at the time he didn’t really take the music seriously. It was after leaving school he developed a love for popular music, thanks to Al Butterfield, a drummer who was a member of Ghandi Burgess’s band. He introduced Charles to the bebop or progressive jazz of players such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.
Hooked, Charles started taking lessons from Mr Butterfield and would continue to do so for five to six years. An auto electrician during the day at Lucas House, at night he began to play professionally in many of Bermuda’s bands – Al Harris’s and Al Davis’s, as well as eventually Ghandi Burgess’s. The night club he played for the most was the Forty Thieves on Front Street. “The Forty Thieves was one of the first clubs to bring in top notch entertainers,” he remembers. “We were the house band to back them. And so he met, and learned from, stars such as Chuck Jackson, Dionne Warwick, and Nancy Wilson. But Harmony Hall also had a lively scene and later so did the Southampton Princess when it opened in 1972. Sarah Vaughan performed there three or four times.
In addition, Charles benefitted from the cruise ships’ entertainers because he would go down to their ships to meet them and they would give him lessons. In the meantime he would teach percussion from his home to local students. Eddie Ming, who now has the Drum Academy in St. George’s, was one such student.
Charles’ exposure to international performers made him realise how much more he had to learn so in 1969 he took the momentous and courageous decision to
uproot his family – his wife, Merle and their six-year-old daughter Shelley and baby son Darren– to study jazz music at the Berklee College of Music. Charles stayed at Berklee for the next four years, meeting fellow students from many different countries and enjoying his studies. “I took one of the hardest courses there,” he explains, “and that was composition.” At this point he became far more interested in the piano than he had been when he was a child. “In musical theory you learn all the scales and the different chords,” he says, “so everyone studies piano. It is the whole orchestra in front of you.” He enjoyed his Composition class so much he decided to major in composition and arranging.
After graduating from Berklee with his Diploma in Composition (designed for professional musicians) Charles expected to continue his musical career at the Southampton Princess by bringing in musicians from abroad to perform. He brought in his first trio but then found the music scene in Bermuda had changed and that the Princess had changed its policy of requiring qualified musicians in its bands. “Jazz was no longer as popular,” he points out. He went back to his trade at Lucas House but never gave up on his passion for jazz or on his commitment to sharing it. In the early 1970s he went to the Caribbean Feste because he had been asked to arrange a song written by a Bermudian guitarist, Deighton Warden, for a 25-piece band. The singer who performed it was Darlene White. He remembers feeling very emotional when his arrangement was performed. “I cried.”
Charles’s love of composition has never left him though his means of doing so has. Once he used paper and pencil, now he uses the Sibelius computer software to create his own music. A recent piece dedicated to his family and entitled “For Us” is also for a 25 piece band.
Charles became concerned that Bermudians were not being exposed to jazz and that live, good music no longer had the prominence in hotels that it once had. He decided to organize jazz concerts and to bring in players from abroad. Local groups would open the shows. His concerts meant that locals interested in good music could be given the opportunity to listen to the latest jazz. And so for nearly 20 years Charles would make sure audiences could enjoy his annual Evening of Jazz concerts, featuring such musicians as tenor saxophonist and clarinettist, John
La Porta, pianist Bob Winter, guitarist Russell Malone and his Quartet, and Christian Howes and his Quartet. In addition, he would organise sunset jazz dinner cruises featuring local players such as Ghandi Burgess, Clarence Burrows, Dennis Fox and Jack Kripl.
With the money generated by the concerts, Charles generously set up a scholarship fund so that he could give scholarships to Bermudian students who had been accepted into music schools abroad. He wants Bermudians to have the exposure to good music and composition he enjoyed while at Berklee and it is through Charles’ generosity of spirit many have done so.
