Music > Articles > Caribbean Music and Carnivals

"Hold please." I groaned inwardly. I was on the phone to a Caribbean travel company, hassled, trying to get myself organised. But a moment later there was Latin music on the line: a shuffling double beat of salsa and sharp blasts of brass, that mesmeric, irresistible rhythm. My mood lightened immediately and the memories surged: a warm tropical night, dancers swaying left and right, a dance frenzy on the way. I felt my legs move involuntarily, as though possessed of times past, and a feverish flush tingled in my limbs. I was tempted just to drop the phone and head straight to the airport.

There is surely nothing to compare with the power of music to enforce a sense of place. The sights of a Caribbean visit - an airburst of palm-fronds etched on a sunset, or a veranda view over distant islands - and the feelings - the relaxing warmth and atmosphere of abandon - become intimately entwined with island rhythms. It could be salsa, or the lilting sound of steel drums or a heavy rumble of reggae. Hear them again when you return home and they transport you.

It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that there is a different rhythm on every Caribbean island, but it's not far wrong. The chain reverberates from end to end with the thundering sounds of soca (Trinidadian soul-calypso) and reggae (from Jamaica); in between there is a harmonic if you like, in zouk, the music of the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Then there are the Latin islands, where you will hear merengue in the Dominincan Republic, and the different versions of salsa from Cuba and Puerto Rico. And this is not to consider all the rhythms now past: ska, the mazurka and the biguine, rumba and cha-cha-cha. Music is certainly an important part of Caribbean life. West Indians love to dance, and of course their sense of rhythm is legendary.

In the Dominican Republic, the relatively large Latin country which shares an island with Haiti, it seems that entertainment is the largest sector of the economy. There are bars and restaurants absolutely everywhere. Each night the main drag, the Malecon in Santo Domingo, buzzes with thousands and thousands of people taking the evening air. On the main shopping street I saw a man summon all his macho verve (a deep intake of breath), stamp his heel and strike a matador's pose, and then lunge at a hapless woman on an afternoon's browsing, carrying her off down the street in time to the music played by one of the stores. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights the Dominicans pack the clubs and bars to bursting. In Samana on the north coast I was out one night and it seemed that most of the town was out dancing.

Caribbean dancing is all lower carriage movement. The waist stays almost still and the hips and legs sway and shuffle. The Dominican merengue, which has a distinct left-right, left-right step, is almost a march with wayward hips. Couples hold each other close in a waltz, moving forward and back and turning, their legs interlocking in a subtle game of advance and retreat, of never quite touching. When it gets going, it can be as arousing as a striptease.

I was really out of my league, though. As the novelty of the evening (a gringo on the dance-floor) I was treated with indulgence, and it is always fun to be carried along in a crowd who dance well. You can fall into the rhythm and forget yourself. But as I became bolder, so I became a liability. There was no sensual quality to my movement; instead I was in sore danger of giving someone a dead leg. I gave up entirely when I saw a six-year old standing on the edge of the dance floor, taking the first steps of no doubt a lifetime's dancing. Her rhythm was perfect. Such grace in tiny, dumpy limbs.

Music has always been fundamental to Caribbean life. For the slaves on the cane plantations it offered an escape from the miserable routine and a way of keeping alive a connection with their African past. Pure West African rhythms can still be heard in the drum-driven ceremonies of voodoo and santeria throughout the Caribbean and South America. Granted, a drum-induced trance and possession might not be quite your scene, but Friday night is usually enough of an excuse for an evening out. Best of all though, go to a carnival, where you will see the explosive joy of Caribbean music and dance given full vent.

The biggest Caribbean carnival is Trinidad's, which starts soon after Christmas and culminates on the weekend before Lent. There can be over 3000 'players' in a Carnival 'band'. Literally hundreds of thousands of people join in the dancing. The national airline, BWIA, has even been known to do a wingtip salute as it flies in over the revellers. The idea of the 'farewell to meat', or any Lenten austerity for that matter, is a bit of a nonsense in a place as fertile as the Caribbean, and true to form, the West Indians have made it yet another excuse for a massive blow-out. You can dance for four days at a stretch if you want, strutting and shuffling at the 'fetes', and then 'chipping' through the streets during the carnival parades.

The main events begin on the Friday night before Lent. The Kings and Queens of the Bands, the centrepieces of the Carnival bands, are displayed (the only stipulation about these huge mannequins, is that they be man- and woman-luggable) and the Calypsonians (national figures with the status of singer, gossip and political commentator rolled into one) compete with one another in song, vying for the coveted title of Calypso Monarch. And then there are the finals of the steel band competition.

West Indians will tune up almost anything to make music - over the years they have used bamboo poles, biscuit tins, bottles, wheel hubs, cheese graters and even garden forks in their parades - but surely their most inventive creation is the steel pan. Steel drums, which were invented in Trinidad, are made from discarded oil barrels (literally 50 gallon oil-drum bashed out, tempered and tuned). Watching a steel band is extraordinary. It is entirely percussive and so there is a visible energy as 50 or 60 people lunge and shift in unison, harnessing a disparate medley of plinks, clangs and bongs into a coherent tune. The sound can be a raucous metallic clangour or it can be as soft as notes on velvet. It can move you to tears.

Nobody goes to bed on Sunday night. They stay up and dance and then at dawn they spill onto the streets for Jouvert (from Jour Ouvert). They cover themselves in mud, paint, axle-grease, even chocolate sauce and they move along in an ecstatic mass, so thick that the ground seems to shake in time. This is the explosive essence of carnival, and it is driven by music from bandwagons, articulated lorries stacked 30 feet high with speakers. The noise is deafening. Standing 20 feet from one, I found the hairs on my legs vibrating to the beat. The lorries blast out the carnival tunes, for 20 minutes at a time, over and over again. They etch themselves onto your mind.

At 10 o'clock the players go home to make a quick change into their costumes for the main carnival parade. They dance in their bands for the rest of the day, in the height of the tropical heat. Some are dressed in elaborate costumes, as centurians, revolutionaries and courtiers, some in nothing more than a body-stocking and boots. Unlike at other carnivals, Trinidadians do not dance in formation. Instead they move as the mood takes them, with maximum room for self-expression--warlike, sometimes humorous, ever-exuberant and often overtly sexual. They perform some remarkable bodily contortions against one another (called wining and grinding, the latter word giving the best clue). It is as forthright and up-front as Latin dancing is subtle. And yet it is remarkably well behaved.

Next day, Mardi Gras, they get up and do it all again, from nine in the morning until dusk, snaking through the town so that the costumes and the bands can be judged. That night, exhausted, dragging the remnants of their costumes, the revellers stagger into a series of parties called Last Lap, where they continue to dance. At midnight on the dot carnival stops (for another year that is).

The volley of impressions remain with in flashes when you are at home: the colour and the costumes, the antics, the rum-fired energy; but they are underpinned by the carnival tunes. Hear them again and you'll immediately be transported back to Caribbean, to the warmth and the explosive joy. If you are hopping from foot to foot in a cold flat, on hold, you might just find your feet shuffling in time, sorely tempted to chuck it in and race off to the airport.

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