Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City
Reviewed by Gage Averill
It is fitting that it was two New Yorkers in the early 1930s, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, who composed the showtune “I Love a Parade,” because for all the diversity and excess of its public processions, there is likely no city anywhere that has exceeded New York. The home of the renowned ticker-tape parades, the Macy’s Day Parade, the St Patrick’s Day Parade, NYC Pride the Village Halloween Parade, and numerous ethnic celebrations (modeled on St. Patrick’s), New York City’s streetscapes have conferred both prestige and visibility on those who have been able to muster the necessary funding and authorizations and crowds. It is not without a powerful sense of the current moment, the COVID-19 pandemic, that I’ve taken on the otherwise enviable, and the now more somber, task of reviewing a book about some of the most raucous, colorful, noisy and crowded events in New York: Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival celebrations.
Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York
By Ray Allen
Oxford University Press, 2019
304 pages
Caribbean migrants, especially Trinidadians, began organizing Carnival events in the 1930s, taking them outdoors in 1947 (the original dances were in Harlem, but the public parade moved to 7th Avenue). In 1971 the Carnival was transported to Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, where it has continued into the present period as a parade on Labor Day alongside a range of related activities over the Labor Day weekend. Ray Allen’s masterful history, Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first book-length exploration of the twinned histories of Caribbean Carnival and of West Indian music in New York City, and it will be the authoritative word on the subject for decades to come.
For readers like myself — fascinated by the role of New York City in attracting migrants from all over the world and in providing a context for the emergence of vibrant ethnic communities with new forms of representation — this book will provide a steady diet of rich examples. Allen delights not just in the “front stage” performative aspects of Caribbean culture: the costuming, calypso recordings, steelband competitions, and parades, but also the “back-stage” dynamics of recording studios, power struggles over Carnival committees, conflicts with neighborhood residents, and charges or cronyism and corruption. The historical depth of these narratives should impress even those relatively familiar with Caribbean culture in New York.
Consider the foresight and the tenacity and the sheer chutzpah of performers like Gerald Clark and his Caribbean Serenaders who mounted Carnival-season dances in Harlem clubs in the 1930s; bandleaders like Lionel Belasco and calypsonians such as Wilmouth Houdini who settled in New York and recorded calypsos and paseos in the late 1920s; or Jessie Waddell Crompton, who struggled for a decade to be able to take Carnival masquerades from the dancehalls to the streets of Harlem. Allen chronicles not only these early calypso and Carnival proponents, but the recording engineers and producers who used New York to launch the leading calypso and soca labels of the 1960s-through the 1980s, including Camille’s, Straker’s, Charlie’s, B’s or J&W Records. If you have bought a late 20th century recording of calypso or soca, it is highly likely that it was produced by one of these dominant recording studios based in New York.
Allen’s nine chapters document the history of Trinidadian Carnival, the early Harlem transplants of calypso and masquerade, dance parties and parades in Harlem and Seventh Avenue, the move of Carnival to Brooklyn, the rise of a Brooklyn-based steelband movement, the growth of a soca industry in Brooklyn and its global outreach (chapters six and seven), the emergence of Jouvay (an informal late night/early morning parade before the the main road march) in the Labor Day Carnival, and, in a chapter called “‘We Jammin’ Still’: Brooklyn Carnival in the New Millennium,” he carries the reader into recent decades. Given the challenges of capturing the histories of different musical genres (calypso, soca, steelband) as well as the Carnival parade itself, Allen has made the appropriate choice to disrupt a purely chronological account in order to allow these separate but intertwined phenomena to have their own expansive narratives.
The historical research that informs this book is of such depth and quality that I have almost nothing critical to say about it — rare for me, I should say. But having served as a judge for the Brooklyn Pamorama Steelband Competition at Brooklyn Carnival, having played in both Jouvay steelbands and in Haitian rara ensembles on the streets of Brooklyn for the event, and having participated in musical ensembles and masquerade bands in Haiti and Trinidad, I would only note that the narrative isn’t especially “immersive” — most of the account is third person, narrative, and somewhat traditional. This is just an issue of personal preference, but I would have loved to have felt a bit more of the “jump up” spirit in the writing and more reflexivity in the voice of the book. But what Allen does do, i.e. provide a detailed social history of an extraordinary event and its music, he does with insight, sensitivity, and analytic prowess. The book touches on a dizzying range of important issues of transnational migrant communities and their cultural and symbolic representations, only a few of which I can do justice to in this review.
One of the most prescient issues for organizers of any diasporic Carnival, and certainly for the one in New York, is the multi-national nature of the Caribbean population, in contrast with the primarily Trinidadian nature of Carnival. The term “Caribbean” casts possibly the widest net, and includes the peoples of all the islands making up the Caribbean archipelago: Cubans, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Dominicans, Trinbagonians (as residents of the two island nation of Trinidad and Tobago are sometimes called) and the populations of the smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean. The term West Indies is used much more often by the English-speaking peoples of the Eastern Caribbean (and so tends to be narrower in coverage). In an effort at “Caribbean” inclusivity, Brooklyn Carnival includes a reggae performance and incorporates mas’ (or masquerade) bands from anywhere in the Caribbean, but the main components of the event: a road march, mas’ bands, a King & Queen and Soca Monarch competition (part of the Dimanche Gras show), a Panorama competition for steelbands, and the Jouvay parade are all originally Trinidadian, as are most of the participants in the organizing bodies. The event has never fully integrated even the remaining English (and English Patois)-speaking Caribbean, and it largely excludes the Spanish-speaking (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic) and the Creole-speaking (Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Dominica) Caribbean. Ray Allen shows how this tension has never been fully overcome and continues to be negotiated.
New York is one of three cities outside the Caribbean in which Carnivals based on the Trinidadian model have become enormous celebrations in their own rights; the others are the Notting Hill Carnival in London and Toronto’s Caribana. The formation of a diasporic network of Carnivals has proven a boon to Trinidad’s cultural industry and talent, because the three months leading up to the pre-Lenten Carnival in Trinidad provide most of the annual local income for musicians, composers, arrangers, costume designers, and deejays. The transnational carnivals thus provide a much-needed chance to market the cultural productions (calypsos, road marches, soca recordings, costuming and pan arrangements) to diasporic audiences at other times of the year. Some of this creativity filters back to Trinidad’s carnival, so it is by no means a one-way flow. The intricacies of these flows go a bit beyond the current book, and may require their own study, but Jump Up! provides no shortage of windows into the complexities of cultural flows in transnational communities and among global audiences, and contributes to the literature on cultural globalization.
The first part of the title of the book, Jump Up! invokes a Trinidadian ethos of enthusiastic Carnival participation in which the fans of a masquerade (mas’) band, steelband, soca singer or deejay/sound system are encouraged to join in and “jump up” with that band. But with this term he raises a persistent tension or conflict in Carnival (whether in its Trinidad and Tobago homeland or in the transnational spaces of New York, London and Toronto): Carnival is continuously subject to internal and external forces that seek to constrain it, render it an orderly parade with a clear delineation of participants and spectators, not an unruly jump up. Carnival committees and local authorities erect barricades and deploy police and private security expressly to safeguard the bands, protect the masqueraders, and to highlight the artistry of costumes and music, but their actions have reshaped Carnival as a display, a performance, or a simple parade, to the detriment of its unruly and disorderly jump up ethos. In his introductory chapter, Allen prepares the reader to anticipate this tension between ritual and participatory forms and more presentational/performative versions of Carnival.
It’s important to note the timing of this book in relation to the history of Brooklyn Carnival. Often, narratives of global popular music or cultural phenomena appear during an upward trajectory, and the accounts partake in the celebratory ethos of the object of study. In this case, the recent history (let alone the current moment) is more precarious. Allen recounts the difficulties for pan ensembles in finding empty lots or abandoned buildings in which to practice in an increasingly gentrified Brooklyn; the eruptions of violence in the parade and conflicts with authorities; the internecine struggles for control of Carnival; the precarious nature of funding and the fragility of the Carnival organizations; and finally the most potentially destructive trend, which is the decline in attendees as the Caribbean community fragments and moves out of the Crown Heights/Flatbush area, and as a younger generation grows up without the sense of immigrant identity and nostalgia that motivated earlier generations. So, while much of the book follows an arc of growth and of artistic, social, cultural and economic success, its final chapter appropriately raises questions about the future viability of a transnational Carnival in its present site in Brooklyn. Allen is honest, but not entirely pessimistic about these trends; still, readers interested in the cultural vitality and transnational connectivity that Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival brings to the city, may understandably find themselves disheartened.
As I noted at the start, this review is being written during the year of COVID-19 sheltering-at-home, a year that has brought, and will continue to bring, enormous change to the public cultural life of the city. Many members of my family went back to Trinidad from North America in 2020 for Carnival, and although they all returned healthy, some early cases in North America were linked to Carnival attendees. It is impossible to imagine that Brooklyn’s Carnival will take its public form in the streets this year — possibly not in the following year either — and so it is reasonable to speculate about what will come of this crowded, winin’ (close grinding dancing), jump up bacchanal of an event as New York City and the rest of the world dig their way out of a pandemic, reimagining physical presence and contact through the lens of post pandemic consciousness.
All of my most powerful memories of Carnival, whether in Trinidad, Haiti, New Orleans, New York, or Toronto, are memories of bodies pressed tightly, of sweaty enthusiasm, of exhaustion, of bottles passed back and forth, of kicking up clouds of dust, and of being carried away with the spirit of the event, or as Trinidadians might say, “getting on bad.” It has been impossible to write this review of a book called Jump Up! without feeling a powerfully emotional nostalgia for the intimacy, intensity, and camaraderie of Carnival and an apprehension about the possibilities for that excess of public intimacy anytime in my future. Will New Yorkers continue to love a parade?
Gage Averill serves as Dean of Arts at the University of British Columbia. An ethnomusicologist, he has authored A Day for the Hunter: A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 1997), Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony (Oxford, 2003) and a boxed set of 10 CDs and a book called Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936-37. He directed a steelband for seven years in Connecticut, has co-written a steelband tutor, and has a textbook chapter on steelbands in Brooklyn.