Carnival Comes to Brooklyn

Chapter 4 recounts the mass in-migration of English-speaking Caribbean people to Brooklyn in the wake of the new 1965 immigration laws. The closing down of Harlem Carnival in 1961 did not lead to the cessation of Carnival activity in New York. In 1971 the West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA) launched a Labor Day Carnival parade down Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, establishing Brooklyn as the new center of New York’s Carnival. There would also be stage shows at the Brooklyn Museum and other nearby venues, as well as an annual Panorama contest and Dimanche Gras dance and stage show as part of the Labor Day festivities. Brooklyn’s Labor Day Carnival would eventually expand into the borough’s premiere cultural event, attracting millions of viewers and providing a nurturing environment for the growth of steelband and calypso, as well as the emerging soca style. Carnival music lay at the heart of the celebration.

The Brooklyn Soca Connection

Chapter 6 focuses on the rise of Brooklyn soca (soul/calypso), beginning with the story of the early Bronx-based independent record company Camille Records, before shifting to the three most important Brooklyn-based labels: Straker’s Records, Charlie’s Records, and B’s Records. These Caribbean-owned businesses, along with a cadre of influential calypso/soca singers and the music arrangers with whom they collaborated, played a crucial role in the evolution of modern calypso and soca music during the 1970s and 1980s. Brooklyn’s Labor Day celebration had been dominated by calypso from its inception. Indeed, calypso and the new variant soca (soul/calypso) were essential hallmarks of the festivities. Equally important, and concurrent with the rise of Brooklyn Carnival in the 1970s, was the borough’s emergence as a vital transnational center for the recording and production of calypso and soca music.

Carnival Music in Trinidad and into the Diaspora

The first chapter offers a brief history of Carnival music in Trinidad and the emergence of diasporic Carnival celebrations in New York, London, and Toronto. The tangled transnational origins of calypso, steelband, and soca along with their development as expressions of cultural identity and resistance for Afro-Trinidadians together set the stage for the music’s migration to North America and Europe. Calypso and steelband are recognized today as Trinidad’s most distinctive contributions to the world’s musics. The traditions associated with the twentieth-century Carnival are best understood as products of musical hybridity. That is, both calypso and steelband evolved through a similar process of hybridization. This chapter provides the necessary background for understanding this music’s migration and life outside the Caribbean in Harlem and Brooklyn.

J’Ouvert in Brooklyn

Chapter 8 describes the emergence of Brooklyn’s J’Ouvert celebration in the 1990s. With its steelband and percussion-only policy, which strictly forbade deejays and amplified bands, J’Ouvert reflected a conscious attempt to preserve and revitalize older Carnival musical practices as forms of cultural heritage in response to their near disappearance from the more commercial Eastern Parkway parade. This chapter will flesh out the emergence of Brooklyn J’Ouvert, focusing on how a group of Trinidadian migrants revived a century-old celebration to create an event that appeared to some to actually be “more authentic” than what was going on back in Trinidad at the time. It is an extraordinary story of cultural revitalization within Brooklyn’s Caribbean community. Brooklyn J’Ouvert was derived from its parent Trinidad celebration, but like many diasporic expressions, it took on a life of its own.

Brooklyn Soca as Transnational Expression

Building upon the history of the Brooklyn-based record companies outlined in the previous section, chapter 7 interprets soca music as transnational expression, anchored in Trinidadian tradition but indelibly shaped by musical and production practices in the diaspora. The style, structure, and themes of Brooklyn-produced songs are examined and positioned within the broader context of Caribbean and world music recordings of the period. An alternative history of soca is proposed, one emphasizing transnational roots resulting from the confluence of Trinidadian and American musical influences. Various patterns of musical style, international marketing, and diasporic song content are useful in assessing the dynamics of cultural globalization. This chapter looks at issues of stylistic transformation, lyrical content, soca’s location vis-à-vis other popular diasporic world musics, and the interplay of musical hybridity and cultural identity.

The Brooklyn Steelband Movement

Chapter 5 chronicles the rise of steelbands on Eastern Parkway and the establishment of WIADCA’s Brooklyn Panorama steelband competition during the 1970s and 1980s. These bands were extensions of Trinidad’s steelband movement that afforded Brooklyn’s migrants, now far from home, the opportunity to re-experience their native culture. The uptick in post-1965 Caribbean migration to Brooklyn led to the influx of skilled steelband players, arrangers, and tuners with years of experience with the Trinidad bands. The transnational flow of steel pan players and musical practices was relatively unidirectional in the early years of Brooklyn Carnival, as Trinidadian musicians, arrangers, and tuners regularly visited Brooklyn and helped shape the emerging steelband scene. New York’s complex multiethnic political landscape served as a backdrop for WIADCA’s struggle to deploy various Carnival expressions, particularly steelband and calypso music, in hopes of uniting Brooklyn’s diverse island populations under a single pan-Caribbean banner, while also encouraging greater social integration of Caribbean culture into mainstream urban society.

Harlem Carnival

Chapter 3 turns to the establishment of Harlem’s Dame Lorraine Carnival dances in the mid-1930s and the founding of an outdoor Carnival parade on Seventh Avenue in 1947. The importance of calypso music and the early steelbands in the parade is examined, and the music’s role in maintaining connections to Trinidad and uniting Harlem’s Caribbean migrants is considered. The first large-scale Carnival dances were those produced by the bandleader Gerald Clark, who called his events “Gala Dame Lorraine,” a reference to an early nineteenth-century female Carnival character who was always elegantly dressed. At these dances, bands came clad in themed costumes to compete for prize money. These events showed that New York’s Caribbean migrant communities were eager to support annual Carnival celebrations that combined three essential components of Trinidadian Carnival: dance orchestras, calypso song battles, and masquerade contests. Their success led to an outdoor Carnival parade up Harlem’s Seventh Avenue.

“We Jammin’ Still”

Chapter 9 offers a brief survey of recent developments in Brooklyn Carnival and the current status of its steelband and calypso/soca scenes. A description of Labor Day Carnival 2017, marking the 50th anniversary of the celebration, serves as a final coda. Carnival had survived in the face of a multitude of financial, political, and organizational obstacles for five decades, and New York’s Caribbean community was still jamming to soca and steelband music on Labor Day weekend. Over the previous decades, the press continued to portray the event as the city’s largest outdoor celebration, cementing Brooklyn Caribbean Carnival’s stature as an iconic New York cultural attraction. But what was once participatory ritual has increasingly taken on the aura of presentational spectacle. And while the Monday-morning pre-dawn J’Ouvert celebration, continued to operate, violence had marred the occasion in recent years. Nonetheless, Carnival music in Brooklyn has managed to survive, and in some corners flourished, despite a plethora of ongoing financial and logistical challenges.

Harlem’s Caribbean Dance Orchestras and Early Calypsonians

Chapter 2 focuses on Harlem Carnival activities from the late 1920s through the 1940s. The stories of the early dance orchestras led by the Trinidad expatriate Gerald Clark, and those of New York-based calypsonians Wilmoth Houdini, Cecil “Duke of Iron” Anderson, Sir Lancelot Pinard, and Patrick “MacBeth the Great” MacDonald, are recounted. Their recording careers and performances in Harlem dance halls and downtown Village clubs are explored. The rise of Harlem’s Carnival parade coincided with an upsurge in interest in calypso music by non-Caribbean white and black Americans that culminated in the “calypso craze” of the 1950s. The dance orchestras, calypsonians, and steelband players who provided the music were constantly seeking to broaden their audiences by crossing over into new cultural arenas. This chapter looks at the host of Caribbean-themed dances and calypso performances that were popular in Harlem’s clubs and dance halls from the mid-1930s through the 1950s, and to the calypso shows that proliferated in midtown concert halls and downtown clubs during this period.

Carnival Music and Diasporic Transnationalism

The Introduction lays out the organization and the research methodology of the book Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City. It outlines the history of calypso, soca, and steelband music in the diaspora, including the globalization of Trinidad Carnival, which was transplanted to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s. The concept of diaspora looms large here, of course, given the historical circumstances of New York’s Afro-Caribbean migrants. The Introduction also looks at the concept of hybridity, including hybridization between African and European musical practices in the Caribbean, which is central to diasporic transnationalism in this context. Also discussed is the concept of “heritage music,” or music that is important and needs to be preserved and protected. In addition, relevant writings on Caribbean music are reviewed and the study is positioned within the broader field of transnational diasporic music scholarship. And finally, a chapter outline is offered.