Discover Trinidad & Tobago Travel Guide 2019 (issue #30)

Arts & Culture
Roundtable
Nigel
music journalist & businessman
This country’s ability to assimilate every-
foodie favourites
thing and everybody that lived and still live here
has allowed for evolution of music that drives
island festivals, parties, and allows for a new direction
in some popular music.
Calypso (or kaiso) is the musical response
of African-Caribbean people to slavery, emancipation
and colonialism. Once it was recorded for
consumer uptake (1912, five years before jazz),
it signalled the growth of the sound of the Caribbean,
and ultimately of Trinidad-styled carnivals
worldwide. Soca (a mash-up of Indian- and African-Caribbean
musical impulses, named by one
originator, Lord Shorty, as sokah) has for the
Elon Trotman
at JAOTG
Music
Tell us a bit about the island’s musical
heritage and landscape.
last 50 years been the driving force of Carnival.
The steelpan, born during the WWII
years, transformed “found” metal dustbins and
discarded oil drums into polyphonic musical instruments.
That sound drives fervent fans into a
frenzy when performed at its orchestral best at
carnivals and music festivals.
Today, fusion with Latin beats and Indian
rhythms has enhanced the pool of musical forms
unique in the Caribbean. That soca beat is now
invading electronic dance music (EDM) and pop
music being produced by the children of diaspora
in cities in Canada and the USA, and there
are independent souls making island folk, rock,
calypso jazz, tropical pop, and CDM (Caribbean
dance music).
courtesy jazz artists on the greens (JAOTG)
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