ISBN : 9780190656850
Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York's diasporic communities and the Caribbean.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Carnival Music in Trinidad and into the Diaspora
Chapter 2- Harlem's Caribbean Dance Orchestras and Early Calypsonians words
Chapter 3 - Harlem Carnival: Dame Lorraine Dances and the Seventh Avenue Street Parade
Chapter 4 - Carnival Comes to Brooklyn
Chapter 5 - The Brooklyn Steelband Movement
Chapter 6 - The Brooklyn Soca Connection - The Record Companies
Chapter 7 - Brooklyn Soca as Transnational Expression
Chapter 8 - J'ouvert in Brooklyn J'Ouvert: Revitalizing Carnival Tradition words
Chapter 9 - We Jammin' Still- Brooklyn Carnival in the New Millennium words
Notes
References
Interviews