Frankie McIntosh

Franklyn McIntosh (born 1946) is a St Vincent-born pianist and arranger of calypso and soca music. He is recognized as one of the pioneer music arrangers who helped usher in the soca style of West Indian popular music in the 1970s and 1980s.

Early life and musical training Frankie McIntosh was born and reared in Kingstown, the capital city of the Caribbean nation St Vincent and the Grenadines. As a youngster he received musical instruction from his father, saxophonist and band leader Arthur McIntosh, and later classical piano lessons. At the age of ten he began playing in his father's calypso dance orchestra, the Melotones. He established his own band at the age of fourteen. After graduating from high school and a year's teaching English literature in a local intermediate secondary school, he relocated to Antigua in 1967 where he played piano for the popular Laviscount Combo. In 1968 McIntosh joined the wave of Caribbean immigrants who landed in Brooklyn, where he studied and earned a BA degree in classical piano from Brooklyn College (1978) and an MA in Jazz Studies from NYU (1988).

Performing and arranging career in Brooklyn While studying at Brooklyn College McIntosh made a living by playing with Brooklyn calypso dance orchestras led by Lio Smith and Syd Joe, and small jazz ensembles led by Jimmy Tyler, Snug Mosley, and Donald Maynard.

In 1977 he began his serious arranging career with calypsonian Alston “Becket” Cyrus. Their album, Disco Calypso, included one of Becket's biggest hits, “Coming High." Amsterdam News cultural critic Dawad Philip praised the song and McIntosh for his forward thinking "talent and musical Wizardy." A second song on the album, “Calypso Disco” made it onto the sound track of the 1977 Hollywood film The Deep.

Over the next two decades McIntosh arranged for nearly every leading calypso/soca singer from the West Indies who came to New York to record and perform. Among his most notable collaborators from Trinidad were Mighty Sparrow, Lord Kitchener, Calypso Rose, Shadow, Chalk Dust, Duke, and Explainer. He also arranged for a number of so-called "small island" singers including Becket and Winston Soso from St Vincent and Short Shirt and Swallow from Antigua. Regarding Frankie's impact on the music, Nelson King, culture critic for the Vincentian and Caribbean Life, noted: "As the music moved into the 1980s, McIntosh emerged in the forefront of the new soca style, with arrangements famous for their innovative horn lines, catchy synthesizer figures, and sophisticated harmonic settings,"

During his Honorary Doctorate award ceremony, an official from the University of the West Indies summed up Frankie's accomplishments, proclaiming he had "an indestructible mark on authentic Caribbean music and ipso facto, bona fide Caribbean Culture. He was not constrained by nationality of other parochial interests in the deployment of his talent. With a totally Pan-Caribbean and Diasporic sensibility, he found time for teaching and assisting younger performers, arrangers, and musicians, not just the big popular names."

Noteworthy Soca/Calypso arrangements

Source:

"Push" by Short Shirt (1982, A& B Records) - Won Antigua Road March Sunshine Award Hall of Fame, 2015 Trinidad and Tobago Folk Arts Institute Certificate of Appreciation, 1993 Everybody's Magazine Calypso Arranger Award, 1992 Arts and Culture Award from the Video Center of Arts Performances in Theaters, Brooklyn, NY, 1991