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...
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
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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,...
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,...
