Caribbean Carnival, steelpan, calypso and soca were all born in Trinidad.   Carnival has become Trinidad and Tobago's most celebrated export; its style is copied in over 45 cities across the world, and its artists, designers and arrangers are in constant global demand.  It is the wildest street party on the planet, one that keeps getting bigger and bigger.  It is the biggest and the most famous Caribbean Carnival and takes place before Lent each year in Port of Spain, Trinidad..

Carnival was brought to Trinidad by French settlers in the 18th century, and was a high-society affair of masked balls and house-to-house visiting in carriages.  The African slave community quickly developed satirical versions of these swaggering revellers and their masquerades.  It was the emancipation of the slavery in the 1830s that made Carnival into an African street festival of liberation, soon deplored by white colonial society.  During the years, the Trinidad Carnival developed its own music, its own masquerades, and its own instruments.

Soon after Christmas, the air in Trinidad starts buzzing with the new season's calypso and soca, the steel orchestra start serious nightly practice in the panyards around the city and the calypso tents get into a nightly routine and the season of fetes (anything from casual house parties to gigantic public parties) begins.  During January, the calypso tents open with nightly calypso presentations and people start to move around the panyards to see what the steelband are playing.  Masqueraders sign up to join one of the costumed bands and "play mas" - detailed designs are on display in the mas camps where hordes of workers are busy stitching and gluing, bending wire and moulding headpieces.  The Panorama competition begins, with the steel orchestras, each producing up to a hundred players, battling each other for places in the finals.  The early rounds of the contest for Calypso Monarch, King and Queen of Carnival, Soca Monarch and other titles get under way. 

Carnival's Parade of the Bands, the "Mas" starts on Monday with the great J'Ouvert procession of the big masquerade bands and on Tuesday when they reappear again at full strength, up to 4,000 strong in full costume.  The bands compete for the Band of the Year title. Each band is organized into sections.  In a large band there may be up to 20 sections with anything from 250 to 400 masqueraders in each.  Each section depicts part of the overall theme in different colors or costumes, creating kaleidoscopic, panoramic effects.  Leading the bands are the Kings and Queens.  Fueled by rum and driven on by the relentless pounding of the year's hottest calypso and soca sounds, masqueraders dance through the baking streets, past various judging points, until they reach the Savannah Grandstand.   Beer and rum flow as thousands of revellers leap and dance and daub each other with mud, grease or blue paint.  At midnight on Tuesday, Carnival is over and on Wednesday morning the revelers stagger back to work, the tourists go home and those left behind start preparing for next year's Carnival!

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