CRITICAL MAS RELEASES FIRST SINGLE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CRITICAL MAS—MUSICAL GROUP OF FORMERLY INCARCERATED TRINIDADIAN ARTISTS—RELEASES FIRST SINGLE, IN COLLABORATION WITH RENOWNED JAZZ MUSICIAN ETIENNE CHARLES
“BORN A CRIMINAL” WRITTEN BY GROUP MEMBER FRIDAY WHILE INCARCERATED IN TRINIDAD’S YOUTH PRISON
Critical Mas Preps Carnival Season Tour, Using Art to Promote Justice Reform in Trinidad
NYC Listening Party Tonight @ Doux from 5:30pm-11pm
Critical Mas: Friday, Nicholas Khan, Cherese Washington, Marvin Alexander, Romel Lezama PHOTO: COLIN WILLIAMS
It’s part dancehall, part Afrobeats, with an ominous jazz riff and powerful lyrics that decry the way poverty and inequality produce criminals from citizens: “Born a Criminal,” by a Trinidadian collective of formerly incarcerated artists called Critical Mas—in collaboration with renowned jazz musician Etienne Charles—is poised to take airwaves by storm.
To be released on September 20, with a NYC listening session event on September 12 at Doux Nightclub and one in Port of Spain, Trinidad, at The Burg on September 21, the song—produced by Rheon Elbourne, credited as the inventor of “Trinibad” music, akin to Jamaican dancehall—was originally written by group member Friday as a calypso tune back in 2010, when he was incarcerated in Trinidad’s youth detention center. Friday won the People’s Choice Award with “Born a Criminal”—but never thought it would transform years later to become part of something much bigger than music.
Critical Mas represents the first time a group of people impacted by the devastatingly inefficient justice system in Trinidad and Tobago have been given an artistic platform with which to make change. Such change is desperately needed in a country ranked in 2023 as having the sixth-highest homicide rate in the world, with gun violence, drug trafficking and its ripple effects drivers of this abysmal situation. At the same time, the country’s prison population keeps expanding—with no ameliorative effect on crime rates—and the average wait for trial hovers at six years, leaving thousands of legally innocent people behind bars for more than a decade while the wheels of justice churn slowly, if at all.
One of these people was Critical Mas member Nicholas Khan, who waited 11 years for trial and eventually pled guilty out of desperation. Khan, who entered prison in Trinidad at 17 years old with no literacy skills, learned to read in prison; inspired by the work of Tupac Shakur, he found passion for poetry and published two books from behind bars. Khan’s spoken-word brilliance is on display in several upcoming releases by Critical Mas, including “Death Around the Corner.”
Another member of Critical Mas is the multitalented Romel Lezama, also known as Papa Mel. While incarcerated for a decade at Trinidad’s Youth Training and Rehabilitation Centre (YTRC), he was a nine-time prisons calypso monarch who made history by becoming the first incarcerated person to qualify for a National Calypso Monarch semi-final. Freed less than a year ago, Lezama is also a boxer for the TT Amateur Boxing Association and a drummer in the Prime Minister’s Best Village competition. His single “Prison to Palace” will be Critical Mas’s next release.
Critical Mas is housed under the umbrella of Incarceration Nations Network, a global prison reform organization helmed by well-known writer, professor and activist Dr. Baz Dreisinger. It all began when Dr. Baz and Etienne Charles began scheming up justice collaborations in Trinidad on the heels of the publication of her best-selling book Incarceration Nations and the debut of his landmark 2022 production San Juan Hill: A New York Story, which marked the reopening of David Geffen Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. Performed by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Music Director Jaap van Zweden, San Juan Hill is an immersive multimedia work that transports the audience via music, visuals, and original first-person accounts of the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the Indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land on which Lincoln Center resides. Dr. Baz and Etienne began conceiving of a similar musical production about the crisis of prisons in Trinidad and Tobago, using an immersive artistic approach and anchored—like the lauded San Juan Hill—in the theme of exile and invisibility, which defines both incarcerated people and socially disappeared people, globally.
Research for this future production began in January 2024 in the form of a month-long therapeutic arts workshop for a group of currently and formerly incarcerated artists in Trinidad, led by Etienne and Dr. Baz. With each workshop the group kept growing and the incredible talent emerging in full force. The collective of currently and formerly incarcerated artists and survivors of crime in Trinidad began taking on a life of its own, developing a name and an identity: Critical Mas. The name connotes two things: the fact that for the first time in the country’s history, a critical mass of people with lived experience of the justice system have a prominent platform with which to effect change; and the Carnival theme of the collective’s work–the ultimate cultural flagship of Trinidad–makes this mas (masquerade) especially critical to society.
The debut of Critical Mas happened at Etienne’s grand Road March show at Queen’s Hall Performing Arts Center in February, 2024; the troupe performed to another packed house at a Port of Spain venue in April, 2024.
An upcoming Carnival season tour will bring Critical Mas to schools, concerts and community spaces like pan yards, where the group will both perform and engage in dialogue about justice and prisons. When engaging with schools during the tours, Critical Mas will use art and multimedia platforms to promote the discussion with youth, who are the most impacted by community harm, lack of safety and the crisis of prisons in TnT.
As a project, Critical Mas taps into two vital methods used in the United States to move the needle toward more thoughtful justice approaches: the use of art in pushing for culture change and the empowerment of people with lived experience of the justice system, not just as spokespeople but as lead actors in justice reform. This is a strategy that has already proved successful in the US context, where major artistic works about the criminal justice system radically shifted public opinion about mass incarceration, moving it from the margins to the mainstream and thereby also making it a more funding-friendly issue; this, in turn, led to policy change, the growth of organizations doing thoughtful justice work and implementation of more progressive justice practices throughout the US.
Critical Mas members (left to right) Nicholas Khan, Cherese Washington, Marvin Alexander and Romel Lezame with Producer Rheon Elbourne (center) CREDIT: COLIN WILLIAMS
ABOUT ETIENNE CHARLES
Scion of an illustrious musical clan, born in 1983 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Etienne Charles is the fourth generation of his family to advance Caribbean music. He earned a Master of Jazz Studies degree from Juilliard and has won numerous awards for his trumpet prowess, including being selected as a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. His recent release, Creole Orchestra, is his tenth album as a leader; San Juan Hill: A New York Story, his 2022 assignment for the rechristening of Avery Fisher Hall as the New York Philharmonic’s newly opened David Geffen Hall drew extensive—and ecstatic—media coverage. The same year Charles also received a Creative Capital grant to develop Earth Tones, a multimedia jazz production featuring original compositions developed with peoples and regions severely affected by climate change. It’s a topic that directly hits home, as Trinidad and Tobago are already contending with sea level rise and extreme weather systems. Finally, Charles is currently working on his own production about the justice crisis in Trinidad & Tobago, Invisible, Man.
Web Site: https://www.etiennecharles.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/etiennejazz/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/etiennejazz/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/etchala
ABOUT DR. BAZ
Dr. Baz Dreisinger is the Founding Executive Director of Incarceration Nations Network, a global network that promotes prison reform and justice reimagining worldwide; a Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York; the founder of John Jay’s groundbreaking Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which provides university-level education and reentry assistance to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people throughout New York State; the author of the critically acclaimed book Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, named a notable book for 2016 by the Washington Post; and the director of Incarceration Nations: A Global Docuseries, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival 2021. A 2018 Global Fulbright Scholar and current Fulbright Scholar Specialist, Dr. Baz speaks regularly about justice issues on international media and in myriad settings around the world, and is also a journalist who writes and produces for such outlets as The New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR).
Web Site: https://www.IncarcerationNationsNetwork.org
Instagram: @incarcerationnations & @bazdreisinger
ABOUT CRITICAL MAS:
NICHOLAS KHAN At the tender age of 17, Nicholas Khan was sent to prison for multiple charges. It was there, with the help of a fellow incarcerated person serving a life sentence, that he learned to read. After being introduced to the book “The Rose That Grew From Concrete,” by the late Tupac Shakur, he found a passion for poetry. Using an illegal phone inside the prison, he began to share his stories and words, gaining recognition for his work. Through this he met his book publisher and published two books of poetry. Nicholas’s success caught the eye of the Commissioner of Prisons at the time, who, instead of getting Nicholas into trouble, provided him with the opportunity to mentor youth in schools and promote his books on local television and radio stations. Finding a passion for spoken word performance, Nicholas became the first incarcerated person in Trinidad to have a public book launch and perform in a spoken word slam. He also started a T-shirt printing business with his younger brother, Dreamstar Branding, to prevent him from ending up on the wrong path. Shortly after his release in 2023, Nicholas was offered a job as the Ambassador for the Link Up program, a Prison-to-College Pipeline initiative through the College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts; he was also awarded a full scholarship to earn his degree at COSTAATT, where he has already founded the school’s first spoken-word poetry club. Home from prison just a year and a half, he has already traveled to South Africa as a Global Freedom Fellow, to Brazil as a member of the Global Freedom Scholars Network and toured Trinidad as one of 40 Under 40 young leaders with the Ministry of Youth and Development.
FRIDAY Sydney “FRIDAY” Friday is a southern Trinbago artist and author. “Born a Criminal’ was the first song he sang on a stage and also the first time he won a prize, for anything, while on remand at the Youth Training Center. The performance landed him in the daily paper, caught the eye of the magistrate and prompted the now-over 18 Friday to request a three-year sentence. 16 years later he is excited to see CRITICAL MAS formed, aiming to change the course of justice, increase self-awareness and take on a system of corruption.
ROMEL LEZAMA The multitalented Romel Lezama, also known as Papa Mel, was—while incarcerated for a decade at Trinidad’s Youth Training and Rehabilitation Centre (YTRC)—a nine-time prisons calypso monarch who made history by becoming the first incarcerated person to qualify for a National Calypso Monarch semi-final. Granted his freedom 8 months ago, Lezama is also a boxer for the TT Amateur Boxing Association and a drummer in the Prime Minister’s Best Village competition.
CHERESE WASHINGTON A lifelong resident of Morvant/Laventille, Cherese has been directly impacted by gun violence in Trinidad thanks to the murder of her only brother. This changed the trajectory of her career, inspiring her to earn her a criminology degree and pursue work in the justice space, as she believes that prisons do not make us safer and that justice delayed is justice denied.
MARVIN ALEXANDER, 30, has changed his world for the better thanks to his strong bond with music. Following his experience with incarceration, he turned to music as a source of comfort and inspiration. His exceptional accomplishment of graduating with distinction in Grade 5 music, which represents his commitment to personal growth and transformation, is the result of his dedication and passion for this art form. In addition to his own musical studies while incarcerated, he devoted his time to helping young men who were as eager for change as he was, giving them a creative outlet and a feeling of purpose and hope by teaching them to read and play music. His efforts have made a significant difference, guiding others on their paths to improvement.
Single Artwork:
