Are you a serious music aficionado, or a casual listener? Ready to test your knowledge of Caribbean musical traditions, old and new? Think you know your kompa from your kadens? Try our trivia quiz, and check your score in the answers below!

1. Bouyon — Kwéyol for “soup” — is a musical genre that emerged in the 1980s in what territory?

Guadeloupe
Dominica
Martinique
Haiti

2. Traditional Barbadian tuk bands include all the following percussion instruments except one — which?

Snare drum
Triangle
Cymbals
Bass drum

3. Calypso Rose become the first woman ever to win T&T’s Calypso Monarch title, in 1978 — who was the second?

Calypso Rose, again
Singing Sandra
Denyse Plummer
Tigress

4. In 1965, Guyanese-British musician Eddy Grant formed one of the UK’s first multiethnic rock bands — called what?

The Pioneers
The Electrics
The Equals
The Pyramids

5. What was the name of the backyard studio built by famed — and eccentric — Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry?

The Starship
The Black Ark
The Pinnacle
The Black Star

6. Dennery Segment, the soca genre that emerged in the 2010s, is named for a community in what island?

St Lucia
Grenada
St Kitts
Anguilla

7. What genre provides the official soundtrack for Curaçao’s annual Carnival?

Tumba
Salsa
Soca
Zumbi

8. Who is the youngest-ever winner of a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album?

Ziggy Marley
Sean Paul
Chronixx
Koffee

9. T&T’s Sundar Popo, considered the founder of chutney music, had his first major hit with what song?

“Nani and Nana”
“Scorpion Gyal”
“Don’t Fall in Love”
“Parbatee”

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Answers:

1 Dominica 
2 Cymbals 
3 Singing Sandra, in 1999 — a whole twenty-one years after Rose 
4 The Equals 
5 The Black Ark 
6 St Lucia 
7 Tumba 
8 Koffee, nineteen years old when she won in 2020 — also the first woman to win the award, founded in 1985 
9 “Nani and Nana”