Case Studies
274
The Swedish Caribbeans 275
We
select tracks from records. We do different stuff, like Crazy, Baron and
Kitchener,
and
also a little from Barbados, Crossfire, so it's a bit mixed.
How do you get hold of the records?
It
varies. I've sometimes picked up some when I've been down there. Sometimes
we've contacted Crosby who has sent records to us. Crosby is a record
dealer in
Trinidad. Most recently we've ordered over the Internet. Crosby has a
website and
the person who runs it sent the records from the US.
(M.KM970325)
Artists and bands visit Sweden from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados
several
times a year. They play at special events or at festivals. These
visits are important
for Swedish contact with new repertoires and developments in the music
style.
Another example of direct contact with Trinidad is that members in
Hot
Pans and Cool Pans have been to Trinidad and played with
domestic steelbands
during the carnival season in, among other things, the national
steelband com-
petition Panorama, which is one of the carnival's most important
features.
These Swedish steel pan-players must be competent musicians otherwise
they
would never be accepted as members of a steelband in Trinidad in such
an im-
portant competition. The members of Stockholm Carnival Club
regularly visit
Trinidad and participate in the carnival. In Stockholm they also make
large
complex carnival costumes in the Trinidad style in which they have
appeared
at
the Water Festival and on other occasions.
A
special but important form of direct contact has arisen through the
re-
search that has taken place in Sweden around music and instruments
from
Jamaica and the Lesser Antilles. Krister Malm worked between 1969 and
1972
at
Trinidad's folklore archive and has published articles, books, teaching
mate-
rials, phonograms and radio and TV programmes on music from Jamaica
and
the Lesser Antilles. One member of Hot Pans, Ulf Kronman, began
to study
the construction and acoustic properties of steel pans at the end of
the 1980s.
The result was the book Steel Pan Tuning from 1992, which is an
important
standard work on the manufacture of steel pans.
When the book was completed, it was published in Trinidad. Kronman
relates:
A
whole gang of us went down to Trinidad and released the book down there. We
were a bit worried about the cultural... what might happen down there
when they
saw that a white guy suddenly documented all this so that Americans
and Japanese
could get their hands on the entire technique. But it was well
received. Some mum-
bled: "Why haven't we done this?" the answer is probably that because
you haven't
done it, we have done it and you're welcome to do it yourselves. They
were kind of
inspired to do something themselves. As it is, researching the steel
pan is not some-
thing that exactly pays. The problem for Trinidadians is that they
need to do stuff
that is directly profitable. They don't have the same opportunities to
do non-profit-
able research as we have in Sweden.
(M.KM970316)