We join the Art, the Mu­sic, the Fam­i­ly and all oth­er com­mu­ni­ties of our coun­try and the world in mourn­ing the loss of Den­nis Hall, aka Spran­galang. Some­times called, Sprang or Draxi, the hall­mark of his style con­tributed to Trinidad and To­ba­go mu­sic im­mense­ly, in sev­er­al com­po­nents—singing, act­ing, per­form­ing, di­rect­ing, fol­lk­lor­ing. He did this with the use of satir­ic hu­mour and de­vel­oped an in­tel­lec­tu­al pi­cong. Sprang’s ob­jec­tive cri­tique reached the “bel­ly” of our iden­ti­ty and helped us to con­nect some­times with his­to­ry and/or our­selves. Many would have got it on­ly af­ter they had reached home. The his­to­ri­an in him may have caused his air­ing this con­cern, on­ly a year ago:

“You can’t paint the re­al pic­ture of ca­lyp­so or Car­ni­val be­cause there is no prop­er doc­u­men­ta­tion of the ear­ly days of the cul­ture and the art form. I can’t even find record­ings of Trinidad folk songs like those from the Mau­si­ca singers and Olive Walke. We run out of in­for­ma­tion. Most of the ca­lyp­soes Roar­ing Li­on sang are melodies of Mart­ni­quan folk songs, and when you lis­ten to Ed­mun­do Ros slow songs, you hear Kitch­en­er’s mu­sic. In Mas Camp we use to meet peo­ple talk­ing those things!” Spran­galang, Sep­tem­ber, 2019 (News­day tt)

Sprang was pas­sion­ate­ly call­ing out for us to take se­ri­ous re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the preser­va­tion of our mu­si­cal cul­tur­al her­itage and the in­sti­tu­tion­al­i­sa­tion of it in a way that all parts of his con­tri­bu­tion and more could be ac­count­ed for with prin­ci­pled con­nec­tiv­i­ty.

We ur­gent­ly need to has­ten plans for col­lab­o­ra­tion in twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry mu­se­u­mis­ing, which are grass­roots ini­ti­at­ed, open and par­tic­i­pa­to­ry, be­cause we are los­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty of gen­e­sis, cur­ren­cy and fu­ture of our her­itage. The time has come to re­move stereo­typ­i­cal views of our iden­ti­ty to make strongest pub­lic im­pact.

The fail­ure to sig­nif­i­cant­ly pro­nounce an in­sti­tu­tion which pre­vails for our mu­si­cal cul­tur­al her­itage im­pedes the ur­gency to ac­knowl­edge our Cre­ative (Mu­si­cal) Arts as a provider of Soul. If spirts still linger we have Spran­galang’s bless­ings on this one.

We owe it to Sprang! Rest in Com­e­dy.