Jump Up!: Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Blending urban studies, oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Ray Allen examines how members of New York’s diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace, transformation, and hybridization of select Carnival music styles and performances. The book addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York’s diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

Dr. Ray Allen is professor of music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.