Music, Immigration and the City

A Transatlantic Dialogue

Philip Kasinitz, Marco Martiniello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000448962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

This volume brings together the work of social scientists and music scholars examining the role of migrant and migrant descended communities in the production and consumption of popular music in Europe and North America.

The contributions to the collection include studies of language and local identity in hip hop in Liege and Montreal; the politics of Mexican folk music in Los Angeles; the remaking of ethnic boundaries in Naples; the changing meanings of Tango in the Argentine diaspora and of Alevi music among Turks in Germany; the history of Soca in Brooklyn; and the recreation of 'American' culture by the children of immigrants on the Broadway stage. Taken together, these works demonstrate how music affords us a window onto local culture, social relations and community politics in the diverse cities of immigrant receiving societies.

Music is often one of the first arenas in which populations encounter newcomers, a place where ideas about identity can be reformulated and reimagined, and a field in which innovation and hybridity are often highly valued. This book highlights why it is a subject worthy of more attention from students of racial and ethnic relations in diverse societies. It was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

1 Harlem Calypso and Brooklyn Soca

Caribbean Carnival music in the diaspora*

Ray Allen

ABSTRACT
This query examines the history of Harlem calypso in the 1920s and 1930s, and Brooklyn soca music in the 1980s. Unfolding in the context of diasporic Caribbean Carnival celebrations, the evolution of these distinctive music styles provides a window into the dynamic nature of twentieth century cultural globalization. Specifically, the development of Harlem calypso and Brooklyn soca demonstrate how music can serve as an essential connecting thread in the formation of the modern transnation. The validity of the terms “center” and “periphery,” when used in reference to the new, globally connected world, is challenged. The need for more nuanced models that stress the dialogical, cyclical movement of cultural actors and their expressions between the Caribbean homeland(s) and urban diasporic communities is stressed.

New York City has been a crossroads for Caribbean music and culture for more than a century. During this time the city has nurtured and disseminated numerous island styles, from early Trinidadian calypso and Cuban dance music to more recent Jamaican reggae, Dominican merengue and bachata, Haitian kompas, and Nuyorican salsa. This query will focus on the transnational flow of Carnival music between Trinidad and New York in the twentieth century. Trinidad’s pre-War dance orchestras and calypso singers travelled north on steamships to perform at Harlem’s grand ballrooms and to record 78 rpm discs in Midtown studios for local consumption and export back to the Caribbean. In the 1950s New York record companies were at the centre of the so-called “calypso craze” when calypso-styled pop songs momentarily rocketed to the top of American pop music charts. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Brooklyn emerged as the epicentre of soca (soul/calypso) music production. The rich history of Harlem calypso and Brooklyn soca music, unfolding in the context of diasporic Carnival celebrations, provides a window into the dynamic nature of twentieth century cultural globalization.

The theories of diasporic transnationalism and hybridization that inform this investigation have become increasingly central to the study of world musics. Since the launching of the journal Diaspora in 1991, the concept of cultural diaspora has loomed large for scholars of migration and globalization studies (Brubaker 2005). An early volume of the Diaspora (3:3 1994), guest edited by ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin, established music as a key cultural component of the diasporic process. Globalization models developed by anthropologist Appadurai (1990) stressing the disjunctive flows of people, media, commerce, and cultural expressions across national borders, were among the works that inspired Slobin (2003) and other ethnomusicologists to reassess their approach to music and migration (Slobin [1993] 2003). More recent studies of transplanted immigrant music cultures in the United States have built on Slobin’s theorizing, employing the concept of “diasporic transnationalism” to describe the circular flow of musical expressions among multiple sites (Zheng 2010, 27). This approach supplanted outmoded Eurocentric models that envisioned migrants as homogenous folk groups who, finding themselves cut off from their Old-World enclaves, would naturally assimilate to the cultural and musical norms of their New World host societies. By contrast, diasporic transnationalism involves transmigrant musicians who span borders, linking home and host societies through musical expressions that mediate the migration experience. Central to the enterprise is hybridization – the dynamic mixing that takes place during cross cultural contact. As a process hybridization engages artistic expressions such as music to construct and negotiate cultural boundaries, and in doing so creates new expressive forms with the potential to maintain or destabilize established cultural hierarchies (Nederveen Pieterse 2015, 81).

The interplay of diasporic transnationalism and hybridization are particularly complex with regard to Caribbean migration. The Jamaican born, British critical theorist Stuart Hall has characterized Caribbean expatriates such as himself as “twice diasporized” people who have experienced “the stamp of historical violence and rupture” during both forced (from Africa) and free (from the Caribbean) migration (Hall 1995). These conditions, as Caribbean Studies scholars G.T. Ho and Keith Nurse explain, have resulted in a Caribbean that operates as “both a point of arrival and departure in the long-term process of globalization and diasporisation” (Ho and Nurse 2005, ix). Their formulation is particularly useful in approaching Carnival music in New York’s Caribbean communities, where Trinidadian hybrid expressions of African and European ancestries were remixed with elements of Black American music by the descendants of the original island slaves now relocated in urban North America. Transnational migration and musical hybridization accelerated rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s for reasons that will soon be discussed. But for more than a half century prior to the 1970s emergence of soca in Trinidad and Brooklyn, Carnival music had been crossing national and cultural borders as it circulated between the English-speaking Caribbean and New York City.

Harlem Calypso and early Carnival in New York City

Calypso song dates back to the African rhythms and call and response chanting of nineteenth century Trinidadian Carnival processions. Street chants eventually blended with French and English melodies and verse/chorus forms to hybridize into calypso song which became a mainstay of twentieth century Carnival. In 1927 Trinidad expatriate Wilmoth Houdini made his pioneering calypso recordings for the New York-based Victor Company, and over the next decade more than a dozen of Trinidad’s top calypsonians arrived to record for Victor, Decca, and the American Record Company. Many of the recordings were distributed back to Trinidad and the Caribbean, but New York’s bourgeoning Caribbean community – by some estimates making up one-quarter of Harlem’s black population by 1930 – provided new audiences eager to purchase the latest calypso recordings and to hire instrumental bands and singers to perform in their Harlem dance halls (Hill 1993, 114–144).

The music recorded in New York remained anchored in Trinidadian vocal and instrumental styles, but absorbed the syncopated rhythms, bluesy tonalities, and improvisey techniques associated with American jazz and Tin Pan Alley songs. Exemplary are the instrumental accompaniments for Houdini’s 1931 Brunswick recordings by Trinidad expatriate guitarist Gerald Clark and his Night Owls. Clark’s arrangements featured clarinet and trumpet trading jazzy solos in between the calypsonian’s verses, and a final polyphonic refrain over a chunking rhythm section of banjo, guitar, and string bass reminiscent of a 1920s New Orleans jazz band.¹ The calypso recordings made in New York in the 1930s represented early forms of twice-hybridized musical expressions forged by Caribbean artists in the diaspora.

In New York, as in Trinidad, calypso song and instrumental dance music were tied to the pre-Lent Carnival season. By the mid-1930s Clark was organizing Carnival dances in Harlem’s posh ballrooms, billing them as “Gala Dame Lorraine” gatherings – a reference to an early nineteenth century female Carnival character who was famous for parodying Trinidad’s aristocratic French planters. Audiences were treated to Clark’s dance orchestra fronted by several calypso singers and a midnight masquerade contest featuring traditional Carnival costumes. Along with Houdini, popular calypsonians the Duke of Iron, Macbeth the Great, and Sir Lancelot – all of whom had relocated to New York to record and perform – were among the cadre of singers who joined Clark and his orchestra (Hill 1993, 159–169).

On Labor Day of 1947 Harlem witnessed its first outdoor Caribbean Carnival parade. Besides the conventional marching bands and contingencies of Caribbean civic leaders and students, the procession included colourfully costumed masqueraders, steelbands, and calypso singers perched on floats and trucks. The parade wound its way up 7^th Avenue and ended near the Golden Gate Ballroom where a Carnival dance featuring Clark’s orchestra took place until midnight. Harlem’s annual Carnival festivities drew crowds of over 100,000 spectators throughout the 1950s, finally coming to an end in the early 1960s when the parade permit was denied amidst the turmoil of the Civil Rights protests.²

Harlem Carnival parades, along with the Clark’s Dame Lorraine dances, were the earliest demonstrations of culture performance creating focal points for Caribbean community and identity in the diaspora. Dancing, singing, and masquerading brought migrants together in public spaces where they could celebrate and share their culture. Serving as a temporary anecdote for the distress of cultural and geographic dislocation, the performance of these expressions satisfied nostalgic yearnings for home by transporting the singing, dancing Carnival throng back to the islands, at least for an afternoon or an evening. As an Amsterdam News observer opined, the crowds of costumed dancers were “home again – for a few hours – for a few days – home in Trinidad at Carnival time when the island rocks under the rhythm of dancing feet.”³

Clark’s large dance orchestra, aptly named the Caribbean Serenades – not the Trinidad Serenades – maintained a broad repertoire of East Caribbean and Latin material, occasionally sharing the stage with Latin and African American big bands. Harlem’s dance halls were spaces where native and foreign-born Blacks and Latinos periodically met and mingled, trading dance steps and sharing each other’s musics. But the calypso songs and dance music that made up the bulk of Clark’s repertoire occupied a relatively insular cultural niche – it was music performed primarily by Trinidadians for Trinidadians migrants and their Caribbean Anglophile neighbours. In doing so their music drew cultural and aesthetic boundaries between them and their African American and Latino neighbours in Harlem. Clark’s orchestra could play a Latin rumba or American dance standard, but their calypso repertoire was what set them apart, marking them and their followers as East Caribbean Islanders.

Harlem’s Carnival music did not unfold in a global vacuum, for New York’s migrants were by no means culturally isolated from their Caribbean homelands. Houdini, Clark, and many of their patrons occasionally journeyed home for Trinidad Carnival, although in the 1930s and 1940s this involved expensive and time-consuming travel by steamship. Connections were more often maintained through recordings and live performances by Trinidadian calypsonians who frequently visited New York to record. Indeed, it was their 78 rpm recordings that allowed Harlem’s migrant singers, musicians, and fans to stay current with the latest Trinidad Carnival music, as easy-to-circulate commercial recordings became the lifeblood of transitional Carnival music from the late 1920s well into the1950s. In terms of the global flow of culture, Trinidad functioned as the creative reservoir, with New York’s record companies, studios, and performance opportunities drawing Caribbean singers and musicians into the diaspora where their local cultural practices could be commodified, transformed, and further distributed. New York-based companies Victor and Decca produced calypso recordings that were sold in Harlem and Brooklyn and exported back to the Caribbean. Those same companies ran field operations in Trinidad that resulted in records marketed locally as well as to adjacent Islands and back to Caribbean communities in North American cities, primarily New York (Hill 1993, 129–139; 141). Music served to weave together an emerging cultural transnation that defied international boundaries.

The early globalization of calypso music raises critical issues of cultural politics. Between the two World Wars North American recording companies were, predictably, the primary finical beneficiaries of the calypso’s commodification due to their control of production and distribution. But the small group of musicians, singers, arrangers, and bandleaders who did receive marginal compensation from record sales were all of Afro-Caribbean background, with most hailing form Trinidad. They were generally given artistic freedom in the studio thus assuring that their music remained stylistically grounded in their own Caribbean tradition. Exercising agency, they chose to incorporate select musical idioms of American jazz and popular music into their arrangements with an ear toward the aesthetic sensibilities of their Caribbean audiences.

The 1950s Calypso Craze

The dynamics of artistic ownership and financial gain would change dramatically when a broader American interest in calypso was ignited by the 1945 hit “Rum and Coco-Cola,” a calypso penned by Trinidadian singer Lord Invader (Rupert Grant), and recorded by the popular American vocal group the Andrews Sisters. The Andrews’ vocals, complete with interjections of faux Caribbean dialect, bore no resemblance to traditional calypso style, and Invader had to sue for copyright to his lyrics that American entertainer Morey Amsterdam had wrongfully claimed ownership of (Invader eventually won). Interest in calypso reached its zenith with the release of Harry Belafonte’s 1956 Calypso LP on RCA, and quickly subsided with advent of the commercial folk music revival in the late 1950s and the rejuvenation of rock and roll in the early 1960s (Funk and Hill 2003). Not surprisingly, RCA, Columbia, Capitol, MGM, Dot, Mercury, and other North American record companies continued to control production and distribution during this so-called “calypso craze” of the 1950s. This time, however, few of the performers were Trinidadian calypsonians or Caribbean musicians. The best-known singer, Harry Belafonte, was born in New York of Jamaican parentage and had little direct contact with Trinidadian calypso. His bland versions of traditional calypsos were disparaged by Trinidadian choreographer critic Geoffrey Holder as “slicked up, prettied up … and not spontaneous” (Holder 1957). More disturbing for some were the host of American folk and pop singers ranging from the Tarriers and the Kingston Trio to the Mills Brothers, Rosemary Clooney, and Nat King Cole who scored minor hits with their own watered-down popular arrangements of calypsos. “Once again Tin Pan alley has raided Harlem,” warned Alvin White of the Baltimore Afro-American. “Calypso evenings at Carnegie Hall are lining the pockets of promoters while the performers get peanuts. Coloured singers not only have to compete with each other, now they are threatened with the wholesale invasion of calypso by white singers and orchestras” (23 February 1957). At the height of its crossover success in the 1950s, calypso had clearly suffered blatant appropriation by North American record companies and artists w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Music, migration and the city
• 1 Harlem Calypso and Brooklyn Soca: Caribbean Carnival music in the diaspora
• 2 “Immigrants! We get the Job Done!”: newcomers remaking America on Broadway
• 3 Think global, act Argentine! tango émigrés and the search for artistic authenticity
• 4 Music and migration among the Alevi immigrants from Turkey in Germany
• 5 Cultural, ethnic and political dimensions of Mediterraneaness in Neapolitan contemporary music: rom a discursive transformation in sounds and lyrics to mobilization against Salvini’s Lega
• 6 Franglais in a post-rap world
• 7 How did son jarocho become a music for the immigrant rights movement?
• 8 Music and the political expression and mobilization of second and third-generation immigrants in urban Europe
• Index