Calypso was originally the music that led the bands through the streets on Carnival days. It dealt with the issues and events, the personalities and the gossip of the day. Today, each Carnival season, 100 singers or more, young and old, male and female, perform nightly in the tents. Out of season, Trinidad and Tobago’s calypsonians can be found entertaining eager crowds everywhere from Toronto to Tokyo. The musical pace is now being set by calypso’s offshoot, soca, a driving, fast, young-generation beat.

Once, masqueraders danced to the beat of the African drums, then to the sound of bamboo in the “tamboo-bamboo” bands. Next, metallic sounds began to creep in — everything from biscuit tins to dustbins, beaten as percussion. During the second world war, while Carnival was banned, inventive musicians turned to the discarded oil drums of Trinidad’s oil industry, and learned how to beat their ends into notes. By 1945 the first steel orchestras had appeared. Today’s steel orchestras, up to a hundred strong, their glittering chrome-plated instruments ranging from the deep bass of the full drums to the high melodic lines of the shallow “tenors”, play everything from calypso and soul to Tchaikovsky overtures and Beethoven symphonies

This is the age of the crossover. Indian music has begun to interact with jazz, with calypso and soca, and has generated a whole new style — chutney, adapted from the ribald pre-nuptial songs sung by Hindu women

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