​Six months before the #MeToo movement went viral in October 2017, women across the Caribbean were united by a feminist anthem celebrating their right to party without being manhandled. During the annual carnivals in Trinidad and Tobago, women danced through the streets in bikinis, singing Calypso Rose’s “Leave Me Alone”: “Boy don’t touch me!/ I there in the party/ Enjoying my body/ With my friends I am happy/ So leave me alone!” 
Their act was political. Local activists said that sexual assaults on women had been tolerated as part of the carnival scene for too long. The previous year Japanese musician Asami Nagakiya was strangled at the Port of Spain carnival. When her bikini-clad body was found in a park the following day, mayor Raymond Tim Kee claimed her clothing had led to her (still unsolved) murder. “The woman has the responsibility to ensure that [she is] not abused.” he told the press. “It’s a matter of, if she was still in her costume – I think that’s what I heard – let your imagination roll.”
Seventy-nine-year old Calypso Rose – delighted to be playing at the Womad festival this week – has no patience with such victim blaming. “Carnival is to be loose! To be free! We have to let everybody know that women should not be walking behind the men any more. Women should be walking in front!” she tells me with a broad smile via a video link from France. “I know it is a scary time. But I am here to tell women: don’t be afraid. Enjoy yourselves!”
Despite a series of heart attacks and one bout of cancer, the calypso queen is still an electrifying performer and engaged interviewee, regularly breaking off an anecdote mid-sentence to lean towards the camera and sing a snatch of one of her 800 songs, big pearls swinging from her ears. 
Calypso Rose was born McCartha Linda Lewis in Tobago in 1940. “We had no electricity and there was no music, no nothing to hear at all,” she tells me. “My dad was a preacher and my mum had 11 living children. I was the fifth. It was a lot for her, and I was adopted at the age of nine by my uncle’s wife and went to live in her big house in Trinidad. Suddenly, I was the only child. My auntie – Miss Robbie – gave me all the love she had. I could sit in peace, suck my fingers and play with my pikkie [short, Afro textured] hair!” Miss Robbie also loved calypso music: a genre descended from the west African “kaiso”, sung by the slaves imported to work on the sugar plantations from the 17th century onwards. Under the guise of jaunty melodies, it was used to mock slave masters and communicate. After the abolition of slavery in 1873, calypso music dominated the annual carnivals celebrated in the days before Lent.
“My auntie, she had all the calypso records,” says Rose. “She would grind up the gramophone and tell me: dance, dance, dance! On Sunday night she’d take me down to the clubs where they would be singing and moving until Monday morning, oh my God it was fantastic! I was on the roof! My auntie would be wearing her shorts and we were all just wiggling the bamsee [bottom] left-right, left-right.”
Rose was just 13 years old when she wrote her first calypso: fighting for justice from the get-go. “In the market one Sunday morning, we saw a guy run up and snatch the glasses from off the eyes of a vendor. We yelled, ‘Thief! Thief Thief!’ Well I went home and wrote ‘Glass Thief’ to warn Tobagonian boys not to be like those naughty Trinidadian boys.” It was the first calypso denouncing sexual inequality. Her second song was inspired by the Can Can dance craze: “I sang about the girls who can can!”
But she was writing and singing against the grain. Women were not welcome on stage in the calypso tents of the 1950s. “When I began entertaining at 15,” she says, “They said: ‘Why are you singing calypso? It does not belong to a woman. Calypso belongs to the men.’ Well, I told them the good Lord has given me the inspiration to create and I will not be like the foolish virgin in the Bible. I will not bury my talent in the soil! I will be jiggy jiving! I fought the battle as a woman and I won.”
Rose came of age as the world began to embrace calypso. In 1956, Harry Belafonte’s album Calypso spent 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, becoming the first album by a solo artist in history to sell more than one million copies. In 1963, Rose became the first woman to win the annual Calypso King competition with a song called “Cooperation”. Four years later, she was on tour in the US with Bob Marley. 
“He was such a spiritual man,” she says. “He never lifted his guitar off the stage without putting his head onto the wall and praying. He loved to dance to my songs.” she says. “We learned a lot from each other… except the smoking. I did not learn that. When he was smoking he would try to reassure me saying: ‘No threaten, no threaten.’ He meant: don’t be afraid. And I am lucky that I have never been afraid. The men have always respected me a great lot.” 
But being barred from the Calypso King contest on gender grounds did cause Rose to quit the scene in the early 1970s. “I went to New York and studied criminology,” she says. “But those steel pans were still playing in my head, they sent me crazy! I kept running from explosives classes to write lyrics in the restroom. And when they changed the title from Calypso King to Calypso Monarch in 1978, I came back for my crown.”
Rose still lives in New York, from where she is proud to support the many waves of female calypsonians to have followed in her wake. “I swung back the door and welcome them in,” she says. “Come in! Come in!” She praises a new generation of young artists such as Nailah Blackman and stresses that they must continue to sing up for the women’s rights that are threatened by the current US administration.
“That Donald Trump does not like nobody, not even himself," she says. "He should shut his mouth up. Put a clip on his tongue. He should listen to my song, ‘Human Race’. Those Mexican children in cages at the border? It is a pain in my heart.”
Featuring no-nonsense lines like “Nobody cannot say this for true/ Who the hell descended from who”, the anti-racist anthem “Human Race” appears, alongside “Leave Me Alone”, on Rose’s 2016 album Far From Home, written with French artist Manu Chao. “Can you believe that I won a French Grammy Award for that record?” she grins. “I’m in Lyon now, on my way to the stage in Barcelona and then your Womad.”
Rose says the thrill of performing has only increased with time: “It’s great to sing, it’s great to see the fans. Especially those young-young boys winding it in front of the stage. Oh my God! I’m still enjoying the music, I’m still enjoying me.”
Source: Independent, July 2019

Today, the San Fernando City Corporation recognized Pan extraordinaire, Lennox Bobby Mohamed, by renaming Harris Promenade East after him.
This gesture was done in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the steel-band art form.
Bobby was a game changer and trailblazer, producing a style of music in the 1960s that was unheard of, but no doubt infectious. He brought victory to the southland in 1965 and 1967 as he became the youngest arranger in the history of the competition to win a Panorama title, which he did with his arrangement for the San Fernando-based band Guinness Cavaliers

​Awesome Nature! The Scarlet Ibis, one of T&T's three national birds, sports the color that is often associated with courage, passion and happiness

​Efforts are currently being taken to have Port-of-Spain declared a Unesco City of Music.
Port-of-Spain Mayor Joel Martinez revealed this on Friday night as he spoke at Phase II Panyard for the reveal of their 2019 song selection for Panorama.
Martinez said while efforts were made years ago, he has decided to push it again.
He said he met Carla Foderingham, former Chief Executive Officer of the Film Company of Trinidad and Tobago, who told him that the process was started some time ago but stalled.
"She said Trinidad has not had a designation from Unesco as a City of Music. Jamaica got it for reggae and I went to a function in Jamaica, the Mayor of Kingston invited me and they were so proud of their designation and they were spouting it so I felt when Carla brought it up to me I said let's get it done," he said. 
Martinez said we have lost out on so many things because we have not pushed it and having that designation would be an acknowledgment of our contribution to the world. 
"We are a talented nation, full of music, full of culture. We have invented the steelband, we have invented soca, we have invented calypso, we have invented chutney, so what are we waiting on?" he asked.
He said the process for the application has begun with Foderingham spearheading the project and he is hopeful it will be completed in time for the designation to be applied before the end of 2019.
To be approved as a City of Music, the following criteria need to be met according to Wikipedia: 

• A city must be  a recognised centre of musical creation and activity
• Experienced in hosting musical festivals and events at a national or international level
• Engage in promotion of the music industry in all its forms;
• Contain music schools, conservatories, academies and higher education institutions specialised in music
• Have informal structures for music education, including amateur choirs and orchestras;
• Have domestic or international platforms dedicated to particular genres of music and/or music from other countries;
• Have cultural spaces suited for practicing and listening to music, e.g. open-air auditoriums

Souce: The Loop, January 2019

​One week before her 79th birthday, Calypso Rose will perform at Coachella, one of the world's biggest music and arts festivals. 
Rose, real name  Linda McArtha Sandy-Lewis, was among the star-studded cast announced for the 2019 festival to be held in California.
She was announced for the April 12 and 19 shows which will be headlined by Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae and Diplo, among others

Other shows will see the likes of Ariana Grande, Khalid, Solange, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Wiz Khalifa and a slew of acts from across the world.
Commenting on her selection for Coachella on Instagram, Rose said she is so excited."
I can’t wait to sing, dance and enjoy this time with all of you," she wrote.
Calypso Rose, who was recently awarded the Grand Prize for World Music award at the Sacem Grand Prix in France, has seen a resurgence in her career since she released her album Far From Home in 2016.
She has toured throughout Europe and in 2017 won the World Album of the Year at the Victoire de la Musique, considered the French equivalent of the Grammy Awards.
In May last year, Rose released her follow up album So Calypso. 
Source:  The Loop Jan 2019