Jit Sukha Samaroo was known for shrinking in the background of over-abundant adulation. Some close to him would conclude that the current period of gushing praise would most likely not have been a very comfortable time for him were he to be here to witness it for himself.
Friend, collaborator and confidant, human resources professional Hollick Rajkumar knows of Samaroo’s “other side”—which often emerged among a tightly-knit circle comprising family members and friends—but suggests that the composer/arranger’s principal personal and musical asset was an ability to sit, listen and interpret musically and emotionally all that was going on around him.
“He was a man of contradictions,” Rajkumar, a former PRO for Renegades Steel Orchestra, told T&T. “He defied his prima facie personality”—that “personality” being his humble, unassuming demeanour.
“He was a genius.”
Renegades captain, Candice Andrews-Brumant, who joined Renegades in 1991 at the pinnacle of public acknowledgement of Samaroo’s phenomenal success agrees.
“He was not a very sociable type. He was very quiet. If he saw a camera he would run from it.”
Short, with a small frame, his trademark moustache greying and thickening with the years, Samaroo’s was no imposing physical presence.
Yet, late at night with tired eyes, legs and hands around the panyard, the firm sound of Samaroo’s stick striking the side of a tenor pan would cause the neighbourhood “badboys” to stand at attention, knowing well that any new instruction could have been matched by the arranger’s own dexterity on the instrument and had the potential to convert the mundane to the brilliant.
It was a skill that was recognised by the late, iconic calypsonian/musician, Lord Kitchener, who occasionally visited the Renegades panyard to listen to what was going on.
Though Kitchener’s successful pan collaborations pre-dated his close relationship with Samaroo and began with Anthony Williams’ arrangement of Mama Dis is Mas in 1964—the Kitchener/Samaroo combination proved an unbeatable alliance for six of the nine times Samaroo led Renegades to victory in the big band category of Panorama.
This makes it the single most successful musical collaboration in the world of pan since the invention of the instrument. Rajkumar remembers the close attention Kitchener paid to Samaroo’s treatment of some of the most memorable melodies and harmonics ever produced by the steelpan.
This, Rajkumar believes, assisted the famed calypsonian in framing his own approach to the music he produced.
Growing up in Surrey Village, Lopinot, which for many is “parang territory,” and listening to Indian classical and film music around the expansive Samaroo household—he was the sixth of 13 children—the arranger’s appreciation and knowledge of different musical genres proved to be an invaluable asset.
Devoted first and foremost to the Samaroo Kids (which later became the acclaimed Samaroo Jets—the accomplished family band that toured the world and firmly established the versatility of the instrument) Samaroo experimented with everything from classical music to Latin/parang, Indian music and calypso, which won him the most national acclaim.
His son and lifelong protégé, Amrit, says though the first word he could use to describe Jit would be “father”, he could also use the word “mentor.” The influence is not easily dismissed. Amrit is no musical slouch.
Himself an accomplished composer/arranger and leader of Supernovas Steel Orchestra, the younger Samaroo said he had been asked whether the death of his father would affect his participation in the upcoming competition—which Supernovas has entered as a Big Band for the first time in its short history.