Joshua is an island boy, bread and brought up by his mom, his aunt and his grandma. Who knows where the dad was? Joshua didn’t and he never questioned it since most of his friends were in similar situations. Growing up with the women was all he knew and they were kind and caring, full of laughter and discipline. School was mostly Jesus religion and memorizing, not much free thinking or improvisation. It’s the way it still is around here. 

            The rest of the world was a long way across the turquoise waters and Joshua had only been to the mainland once. The mainland being the big island, not a different country or a long way away from home. It was just a two-hour ferry trip and Joshua loved it even though his aunt spent most of the journey barfing into a paper bag. 

            Joshua spent a lot of time by himself. Naturally shy and small in stature he didn’t much care for sports or fishing but he liked music. Reggae was his favorite and he knew every Bob Marley song. There was an old dusty guitar without strings in his aunt Lizzy’s house. ‘Been here for ever,’ she said. ‘Belonged to old man Tanto who moved away a long time ago. Lives in Brooklyn now. It’s yours.’ Since there were no strings on it and nobody pointed that out for a long time, Joshua used the guitar as a drum. It sounded pretty good and when Gina, a Canadian-Italian woman, heard him beating out a reggae rhythm on the old guitar body she introduced Joshua to Zola, an accomplished drummer on the big traditional island drum. 

Zola has his own island story which is quite amazing. He was an obsessed diver and harpoon fisherman until one day he stayed down too long and came up too fast. He got the bends badly and he almost died and it left his legs paralysed. ‘He’ll never walk again,’ was the dire prognosis but the doctors didn’t know the determination of Zola who slowly over time got out of his wheel chair and first on crutches and then on a single walking stick forced himself to walk again. He also didn’t give up diving since in the water he was floated free of gravity’s restrictions. The story goes that he went down and his partner in the small boat waited and waited but when Zola who was long overdue to surface didn’t come up, his partner took off and returned home convinced that Zola had finally gone to Davie Jones’s locker. Zola meanwhile had drifted far from the boat and when he eventually surfaced after running out of oxygen the boat and his partner were gone. It took Zola two days to make it back home, swimming to a nearby island, then the next day all the way back to shore. That was his last dive and instead he took up drumming and became just as obsessed with drumming as he was with diving and underwater fishing. He had an exceptional teacher in Winston Fleary. There was no money in drumming but Zola was so good that he was invited to all the island music events and to this day can always be heard and seen playing with everybody. 

So, Zola took on Joshua as his understudy and Joshua took to drumming like a fish to water. Gina helped with a Go-fund campaign which raised enough dollars amongst her Toronto friends to have built two more island big drums, one of which became Joshua’s. There was enough money left over to give both of them a small stipend because drumming was not really an income producing occupation.

Another perennial tourist, Markus, a German sound technician, took a shine to the two drummers and especially the young Joshua. He saw his stringless guitar which Joshua sometimes used as a percussion instrument and offered to have it strung. Markus thought it was a salvageable old Spanish guitar. When he showed Joshua the refurbished instrument and played a few licks for him, Joshua had an epiphany and couldn’t wait for Markus to teach him the fundamentals of guitar playing. Again, the young island lad displayed a natural talent for the instrument and he soon spent all his time strumming instead of drumming. Zola was not too happy about it but he had to support his protégé’s passion and before too long the two of them became a duo who played gigs all over the small island, making a bit of money and many free drinks in return. Of course, the two always played a mesmerizing drum solo halfway through their set of reggae and calypso music. There was only one more thing missing in this constellation. 

Shandelle’s mother was a soprano in the church choir and taught her daughter early on how to sing along with her. Shandelle knew all the gospel songs and hymns by the time she was a teenager. When she heard Zola and Joshua play at the local church picnic on a spring Sunday afternoon, she was smitten not just with the young man but by the rhythmic music of the duo. ‘I know many songs,’ she said shyly to Joshua during a break when she saw him getting some food at one of the stands. ‘

‘Oh yeah, and you can sing too?’ Joshua said with a grin.

‘I can sing with you if you like. I know reggae music.’

‘Ok, you’re on. You know Redemption song?’

‘Everybody know that song, mon.’

‘Let’s do it.’

When Shandelle sang a slow burning version of the iconic song, with Zola and Joshua accompanying her, the crowd gathered around and stopped what they were doing, caught up in the magic of the moment. That afternoon the three musicians formed the trio and called themselves. ‘Dreamcatchers’. Gina and Markus decided that this was the time to present the trio to the outside world. Markus recorded two songs with a mic and his computer and went to the mainland, i.e. the big island and played the two songs along with some photos of the trio to several resorts and clubs. In no time he had a few gigs in his back pocket and that’s how the ‘Dreamcatchers’ started their meteoric rise to the top, making the jump from the small Caribbean Island to Brooklyn, where they played in front of the vast diaspora of islanders.  

We had a chance to see ‘Dreamcatcher’ last week, for a Valentine’s dance at the Mermaid, the island’s best hotel right on the beach. It was a surprise appearance, not scheduled or advertised but because all three were home for Carnival and some of the island’s other musicians played backup for the open mic. The guests arrived late, most of them jcb’s (just come back’s referring to locals who live and work off island, mostly in the US, Canada and England) They were all dressed in their fineries:  sequins, jewelry and sculpted hair and glitzy long nails for the women and the men wore long pants, flowing shirts and shiny shoes. It felt like New Year’s Eve and the party went on until 3AM. 

Gina and Markus were there as well, proud as peacocks of their progeny. When Zola, Joshua and Shandelle dedicated their ‘Island song’ to them, everybody rose and clapped and hollered, celebrating not just the two of them or the band but the fact that this symbiosis of locals and visitors, this fusion of local talent and foreign entrepreneurship brought about this very special achievement and success. We left shortly after we saw Gina dance with Joshua while Shandelle twirled a terrified Markus across the dance floor.