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Celebrating Caribbean music in all its glory

All Around This World Caribbean "Everywhere Map"

For the last three months we’ve had so much fun celebrating Caribbean music in all its multicultural glory. As we hopped from island to island we dug deep into the region’s complicated past, one that has struggle and sadness at its core, but which was always aware that the story need not end there. The resilience of Caribbean peoples resonates in every cha cha cha, kompas and clever calypso, in reggae’s hope for justice and change, in soca’s celebratory soul. We emerge from the Caribbean with a love of life, sung with eyes open by those who have survived. Looking forward to next season!

Musical Martinique

All Around This World -- The Caribbean featuring Martinique

This week in our online class for kids we travel to Martinique, which we’ll find in the “Lesser Antilles.” (Don’t let the islands hear you call them that. They may get a complex.) Martinique is an “insular region” of France, meaning it is officially one of the eighteen regions of France. Martinicans are French through and through..but Martinique is also Caribbean in all the usual, complicated ways — Carib ancestry, a history of being at the mercy of seafaring and plantation-owning British and the French, and an on-again, off-again relationship with slavery that puts African culture at its core.

Sweet St. Lucia

All Around This World map of the Caribbean featuring St. Lucia

This week in our online class we go LOW — down deep into the so-called “Lesser Antilles,” a stretch of delightful islands in the southern Caribbean. We start today with a visit to St. Lucia, where the first inhabitants of the island, the Arawak who lived there for hundreds of years before the Caribs came in the 800s and pushed them out. Europeans settled until in the 1550s when a feared pirate known as Wooden Leg used it as a base from which to attack Spanish ships. For 150 years the British and French fought over the island; it changed hands between them fourteen times before the British finally pushed the French out in 1814. The island became an independent nation in 1979 but is still part of the British Commonwealth.

And so we go to the Islands

All Around This World Caribbean "Everywhere Map"

This week in our online class we began our a grand adventure — a three month tour of the magnificent musical Caribbean islands! All Around This World’s Caribbean season of songs celebrates global music in all its joyful, rhythmic and multi-cultural glory, featuring songs about love and rum-running and goats, a Haitian tune about a frog one-upping a horse, a beautiful Bhojpuri lullaby and dance grooves from Puerto Rican plena to Jamaican ska. Come to class with me! See the current livecast class schedule here.

We visit Jamaica and SING!

Enjoy this week’s live class! If you want to join the fun, check out the livecast class schedule and contact me to be “in the room” on Zoom. If you can’t make it to Zoom, watch live classes, or watch anytime, on All Around This World’s facebook page. This week in class we sang “We Are Happy,” “Mento Star,” “Ay Zuzuma,” “Jane and Louisa” and “Nyabinghi,” and danced to three generations of SKA.

We visit Haiti and SING


Enjoy this week’s live class! If you want to join the fun, check out the livecast class schedule and contact me to be “in the room” on Zoom. If you can’t make it to Zoom, watch live classes, or watch anytime, on All Around This World’s facebook page. This week in class we sang “We Are Happy,” “Petit Oiseau,” “Krapo Tingele,” “Angelique O” and “M’sieu Michel,” and elected our kids president of Haiti with Haitian rara.