Professor Ramnarine will participate in a panel discussion and listening session entitled 'Jump In The Line: Calypso in Britain'.
The event will take place at 3pm on Saturday 3rd November, at the London YAA Centre. It is part of Anthony Joseph’s Windrush: A Celebration, a series of events curated by Anthony that explore the Windrush generations’ cultural impact on London and Britain – culminating in the gala concert in the Barbican on 17 November 2018, part of the London Jazz Festival.
In the post war, Windrush period, the Trinidad Calypso emerged as the preeminent ‘immigrant’ music, with artists such as Lord Beginner, The Mighty Terror and Lord Kitchener, whose rendition of London Is the Place for Me onboard the Empire Windrush is seen as both the beginning of multicultural Britain and the start of the Calypso age in the UK. During the mid 1950s, calypso enjoyed its greatest popularity and commercial success in the UK, but this began to change in the early 1960s.
In this informal panel discussion and listening session, calypso archivist Dmitri Subotsky, historian and researcher John Cowley and musician, anthropologist and academic Tina K. Ramnarine discuss the role and impact of calypso on British cultural consciousness, while playing the most influential and popular calypsos of the period.
Full details of the event can be found here.