The Willard White Way
The life of an opera singer is not all glamour. The bass baritone Willard White is sitting in a blank hotel room in Liverpool, looking out...
The Sugar of Spice
The stadium was packed beyond capacity, the stands and the grounds a dense patchwork of revellers. It was the largest crowd ever gathered...
Redemption Songs
How can you be so ungrateful/After all that God has done for you . . . Unlikely lyrics for a contemporary Jamaican smash hit? Only a year...
The Chutney Phenomenon
To a visitor in the 1920s, Debe, in south-west Trinidad, was “almost wholly a Hindu town”. Seventy years later it’s still...
New Music from the Caribbean
CALYPSO A Tribute To The Mighty Spoiler, Vol. 1 Various artists The Mighty Spoiler was one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most beloved...
Machel Montano: Winer Man
On the Trinidad Carnival stage, he is notorious for every kind of “wine.” Legs apart, he “throws waist” to the wild...
Upbeat (July/August 1997)
Tears of Gold Baron (JW Records) Here are eight sumptuous tracks by Timothy Watkins Jr., the Baron, one of the mellowest voices in the...
Byron Lee: Soca Dragon
There’s a body on the bare wooden stage. The open-air “dancehall” is by the sea on the north-western peninsula of Trinidad. It is...
