A musical role model

How one Trinidadian musician gave purpose and hope to a group of juvenile delinquents

By David Mangurian, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Guitarist and soca band star Joey Rivers practices what his church preaches: there’s good in everybody if you just emphasize the positive. "Too often we harp so much on what a person has done wrong that we don’t see what good they have in them," he says.

So two years ago, when Rivers heard that the IDB’s Partnership for Promoting Youth Development and Participation was financing social initiatives in Trinidad and three other countries, he decided to test his beliefs on a tough group–juvenile delinquents locked up in Trinidad’s juvenile correctional facility, the Youth Training Center. He proposed teaching music to the youths as a way to show them that they could accomplish something good if they worked at it. He won a $4,800 grant to finance the purchase of 15 guitars, 10 cuatros (a small guitar-like instrument with four strings popular in Caribbean countries), strings and sheet music.

In July 1999, Rivers began teaching his first class of about 25 young men, not knowing what to expect. "One of the guys raised his hand and asked me: ‘Mr. Joey, how does it feel to be among us juvenile delinquents?’," recalls Rivers. "He really caught me off guard, but that’s what they do, a lot of testing. I said ‘If anybody on the outside can’t see that you’re making moves to rehabilitate yourselves, then that person has a problem.’ He was cool with that."

Rivers, then 27, had a lot going for him. The son of a guitar maker, at age 13 Rivers helped found Xtatik, a band that played an electrified and highly danceable form of calypso music known as "soca." Xtatik became one of the most popular bands in Trinidad, made good money and regularly toured the Caribbean, North America and Europe.

Learning to play.

"I was the perfect person to show them that life is not just about a good time and fun, but that you need to be serious, focused and disciplined. I’m a proven success, and I teach them how I was able to accomplish this. When I say you have to practice x hours a day, they don’t question it."

The classes went well. Rivers taught his students basic chords and rhythm, and parang, Trinidad’s traditional Christmas music, which is sung in Spanish with Venezuelan rhythms. He found that many of the youths had talent and arranged for them to perform for the other inmates. One of the guards even attended classes and ended up buying himself a cuatro.

But the youths continued to test Rivers. "They would try to see how far they could go with me," he says. "So I played psychological warfare. There was one guy in particular. Anything he has to do, he wants to know what is the incentive. I had a pen he liked, so I put it on the blackboard where he could see it. And every time he fell out of line, like talking while I was talking, or playing while I was counting, I would point at the pen and say ‘incentive!’ and he would come back in line."

Carlo Arze, the IDB operational specialist handling the IDB youth grant program in Trinidad, attended graduation ceremonies at the Youth Training Center in December 1999 at which Rivers’ students performed. "It was amazing how much the kids had learned," he recalls. "The crowd loved them."

Unfortunately, funding for Rivers’ program ran out at the end of the year 2000, and new officials at theYouth Training Center showed little interest in continuing the music classes.

But the story didn’t end there. Several of Rivers’s former students who have since been released from the center sought his help and are now pursuing music careers. Rivers makes demo tapes for them in his own music recording studio and counsels them on performance skills, the music business and how to market themselves, acting as their manager in return for a cut of future earnings.

"It’s the most rewarding and fulfilling feeling in the world," he says, "because you are actually affecting lives in a positive way."

Rivers says that the IDB-funded youth project changed his own life too. "I never thought the project was going to affect me," he says, "but it forced me to realize the power I had. In our band meetings, we’d plan what we were going to wear, what image we were going to project in the coming year. And in two weeks it was a fad. It made me aware of how much popular music can affect people. But many entertainers in Trinidad and around the world promote negative stuff. There’s a lot of music that glorifies arms and ammunition, drugs, infidelity and promiscuity," he says.

Rivers performs at a Christmas concert.

Last May, Rivers became critical of the image and some of the lyrics that his own band, Xtatik, was performing, and he decided to quit the group. "It is impossible to separate who you are from what you are presenting," he says. He has since formed a six-piece band, Rhythms and Moods, which plays what he calls cabaret music "of a more decent nature." He has started a music education program in six cities for Trinidad’s Ministry of Community Development and has published teacher and student manuals for both guitar and cuatro which are widely used in schools and endorsed by the Ministry of Education. And he devotes more time to religious activities, teaching sacred music at Roman Catholic churches throughout the island.

"I just thought the youth project would be a nice project," he says. "I had no idea it was going to go this far."

Date posted: July 2001