Etienne Charles brings his ‘Creole Soul’ revolution back to Bay Area

For Trinidadian trumpeter and percussionist Etienne Charles, rhythm doesn’t just organize a tune. It reveals historical origins and tracks sojourns both forced and voluntary.

Returning to the Tenderloin jazz spot Black Cat with his pan-Caribbean band Creole Soul for a three-night run May 18-20 (followed by a May 21 afternoon concert at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society in Half Moon Bay), Charles continues to explore music arising from four centuries of African displacements and subsequent migrations.

The concerts mark the 10th anniversary of his landmark album “Creole Soul,” which introduced a body of music with a radically encompassing Caribbean rhythmic palette. He’s been expanding the conceptual framework ever since, and the Bay Area run is designed “to show the evolution since ‘Creole Soul’ came out,” he said.

“There’s been a significant tilt to Caribbean dance music, rocksteady and reggae, since we’re digging around in the diaspora and looking at the 75th anniversary of Windrush,” Charles said of the post-World War II program that brought workers from Britain’s Caribbean territories to ease the U.K.’s labor shortages. “They left their lives in the Caribbean and came to the shores of what was known as the Mother Country.”

In jazz as in government, personnel is policy, meaning that the musicians a bandleader hires can be as consequential as his or her compositions and arrangements. Creole Soul’s rhythm section features Haitian and Congolese-American drummer Harvel Nakundi and Jamaican-born, Miami-raised bassist Russell Hall, who played his first gig with Charles as a teenager right after taking the SATs in 2011.

Guitarist Alex Wintz, a Charles collaborator since they were both studying at Juilliard in the mid-aughts, is the band’s longest serving member. Jamaican-American singer Shenel Johns, a rising force who introduced herself to Bay Area audiences earlier this year as one of three featured vocalists on Jazz at Lincoln Center’s touring production “Songs We Love,” is the latest addition.

“She has a powerful voice and I love the way she interprets standards,” Charles said. “Also the way she interprets calypsos and Jamaican folk songs. We might have to do a nod to Harry Belafonte as well. I’ve been playing some of the tunes he recorded a long time ago, but more the original versions, the way Lord Melody recorded them.”

Rounding out the sextet is Haitian American alto saxophone star Godwin Louis, who first connected with Charles when they were both performing at the Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival in 2015. They immediately hit it off, and Louis has been an increasingly essential Creole Soul contributor  ever since.

“We both like to refer to ourselves as musicologists,” Louis says. “He’s exploring the sound of his native land, Trinidad and Tobago. I understand that world very well, and that made it very easy to connect in a musical, cultural and intellectual way, connecting the Caribbean with the continent and showing the common ground.”

Even before Charles started a four-year stint with the SFJAZZ Collective in 2018 he had put down roots in the Bay Area with “San Jose Suite,” his ambitious evening-length work connecting the titular cities of California, Costa Rica and Trinidad. The work premiered at the California Theatre as part of San Jose Jazz’s 2015 Summer Fest.

He’s been landing increasingly prestigious commissions since then, culminating with last year’s assignment to mark the rechristening of Avery Fisher Hall as the New York Philharmonic’s newly refurbished David Geffen Hall. Lincoln Center’s first-ever commission for the full orchestra, “San Juan Hill,” delved into the deep history of the neighborhood demolished in the mid-1950s to make way for the complex.

The 75-minute multimedia work featured Creole Soul and the Philharmonic. In researching the people displaced from San Juan Hill by Robert Moses’ “urban renewal,” Charles found he couldn’t depend on the archives.