Word: calypsos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Trinidad has no concert hall and no symphony orchestra, and few visiting artists ever get to Port-of-Spain, its capital, just off the coast of Venezuela. But Trinidadians may well be the world's most musical people. Out of prosaic newspaper headlines they created calypso songs, and out of such unmusical items as oil drums and automobile brake drums they created the world's newest musical combo, the steelband (pronounced steelbon in Trinidad). Both were invented with sure instinct for novelty and self-expression by Trinidad's Negro population...
...sometimes six or eight clasped together in a veering line, sometimes a single marcher so excited by the music that he leaped out into an eccentric solo dance. For two days and nights the marchers and musicians strutted the streets, each band beating out its favorite road march in calypso tempo-Princess Charming, with its sweet, giddy, last phrase, Yankees Gone, with its sudden, catchy pause. Shaver Man, with its obsessive repeated phrase...
...King Calypso. The best band of the mid-40s was The Invaders, who are credited with introducing bouncing massed "riffs" in harmony, and thus paralleling the transition of U.S. jazz from Dixieland counterpoint to the massed effects of swing. Today the steelband has swept the Caribbean islands-there is a severe short age of oil drums and automobile brake drums. The music is also penetrating the U.S. through recordings and tours by stray bands. Last week Record-Maker Emory Cook carried his microphones and tape recorders right into the parade to capture steelbands...
...bands played one kind of marching tune: calypso.* Often calypso was considered vulgar, usually with good reason. But since 1920, when someone improvised a song called Class Legislation, calypso has been a kind of musical journalism, with such topical titles as The Destruction of Hurricane Janet, What's Federation?, The Princess Says...
...sounds are balmy as a West Indian zephyr, satisfyingly in tune, and played with carefree spirit. The rhythms are intricately Afro-Cuban, e.g., meringue, samba, mambo, although they eventually fall into a predictable pattern. High points: a gimp-gaited calypso about a cricket upset ("Who taught you to bowl, Australia?"), and another that laments some aspects of the latest white man's invasion, a number called Brown-Skinned...