Jump Up!
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 urban studies, 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, transformation, and hybridization 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 burgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring for the first time 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.