Media Watch: Machel Montano + Trinidad Carnival on NPR

Words by Jesse Serwer

Sundays in the Serwer household rarely start before 1 PM. It’s immaterial whether Saturday night involved late-night partying or re-runs on the couch: This is when I catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get during the work-week, often with public radio playing unobtrusively in the background (Late-night BBC news broadcasts are a great alternative to counting sheep). Around 9:30 a.m. yesterday morning, however, I was startled from my standard Sunday morning stupor by the manic sounds of Machel Montano’s “Advantage,” followed by what my half-alert brain registered as a Trini accent. Turned out that soca, Trinidad carnival and Machel himself were the subjects of a segment on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. You can listen to the piece, which contains interviews with Montano, Fay-Ann Lyons, Bunji Garlin and Kes the Band’s Kees Dieffenthaller and was produced by Caribbean music critic Baz Dreisinger, below, or read the transcript over at NPR’s website. Also on their site is a companion piece running down the hottest tracks of this Carnival season. Of course, we already hipped you to most of these in our own Carnival 2011 preview, two weeks ago, though.