“Music was my refuge,” the renowned author and poet Maya Angelou once said. “I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” While her powerful speaking voice was ...

It’s as Caribbean as rice and beans and sunshine. Calypso music has been popular along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast since the late 1800s. More than a century later, the government of Costa Rica has ...

This recent Soul Jazz comp explores calypso's roots as party music that doubled as a delivery system for current events, street wisdom, social humor, and reflections on daily life. Save this story ...

The advancement of Calypso and Jazz as a Caribbean music artform was the goal as the Creative Caribbean Project funded the Dominant Seventh Calypso Jazz Band led by trumpeter, composer and arranger ...

But it didn’t pan out. In May 1957, a banner headline in Variety screamed that “Calypso is Stone Dead”. By the year’s end, the calypso fad went the way of all fads. The Trinidad-born music did not go ...

Trinidad, British island off the northeast coast of South America, is a hot mixture of bloods, French, Spanish, Negro, Carib, Hindu, Chinese. Once a year, on the two days before Lent, Trinidad goes ...

The names Aldwyn Roberts and Slinger Francisco might not ring a bell in jazz circles, but trumpeter Etienne Charles' Kaiso helps to rectify that issue. Charles pays tribute to these two giants of ...

"On the subject of calypso singers of Trinidad he was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The culture they sang about was tough, breezy, unsentimental. Vidia had written…'It is only in the calypso ...

Trinidad and Tobago is one of the few countries to boast a national instrument—the steelpan. Looking to create music with few resources, the people of Trinidad and Tobago began creating makeshift ...