“The fake engineers of the music industry, who direct public opinion, drive the good sides of calypso into the ground. I shudder to think what these greedy men will end up doing with this true art form. » For Harry Belafonte, in an interview with the “New Musical Express” in May 1957, it was obvious: the music he played would one day be consecrated. He was right: his death, Tuesday, April 25, at the age of 96, reminds us cruelly.
Harry Belafonte: “America was built on racism, cruelty, selfishness and ambition”
As a child of Harlem, on March 1, 1927, he discovered this two-step dance originating in Jamaica, when he returned to this island for school holidays. To become, from his first album “Mark Twain” in 1954, the ambassador of this syncretic music, with West African influences born in the carnivals of Trinidad and Tobago. The exoticism of these melodies and its swaying rhythm will conquer the American public and propel Harry Belafonte into the mouthpiece of this Jamaican music, which is one of the ancestors of reggae.
From “Matilda” to “Day-O”, via “Island in the Sun”, “Jamaica Farewell” or even “La Bamba”, rediscover in our video montage above, the best of his music played in concert.
