Author: Kim Johnson

Culture, Arts, Trinidad and Tobago

Saving the picture history of pan

It began with a single photograph. Five years ago I was invited to write a book commemorating the bicentennial of Chinese arrival in...

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Culture, Music, People, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago

Nearlin Taitt: the secret Trinidadian hero of Jamaican ska & rocksteady music

Nearlin Taitt, a Trinidadian, started in steelband, then invented rocksteady in Jamaica. Kim Johnson turns the spotlight on one of the mysteries of Caribbean music

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Culture, Music, History, Trinidad and Tobago

Flashes of the pan

From the beginning a year ago my aim was impossible. A coffee-table book requires at least five times more photographs to choose from than...

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Culture, Festivals and Events, People, Trinidad and Tobago

Russell “Russ” Henderson: taking it to the streets

It was in 1965, when I was living in Bassett Road, Notting Hill, just off Ladbroke Grove. A woman called Rhaune Laslett, a social worker,...

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Culture, Music, Arts, Trinidad and Tobago

West Indian Rhythm: “The real native music”

West Indian Rhythm: Trinidad Calypsos on world and local events featuring the censored recordings 1938-1940 Various Artists (Bear Family...

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Culture, Arts, History, Caribbean Diaspora

When steelband took London by storm

On July 26, 1951, some black men unloaded a pile of rusty steel drums in Southbank, London. It looked like junk. Garbage cans. The...

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Culture, Festivals and Events, Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad All Stars: Fleet’s In

The Fleet’s In sailor mas might seem just a grown-up way of enjoying Carnival with a great steelband, Trinidad All Stars. Actually,...

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Culture, Music, Trinidad and Tobago

The beat of a different chutney soca drum

The coupling of chutney and soca is a movement, drifting now in the soca direction, now in the chutney direction, like dancing partners,...

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