From Vodou to Zouk: A Bibliographic Guide to Music of the French-Speaking Caribbean and Its Diaspora
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From Vodou to Zonk: A Bibliographic Guide to of the French-Speaking Caribbean and its Diaspora. By John Gray, foreword by Julian Gerstein. Nyack, NY: African Diaspora Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9844134-0-9. 237 pp. $79.95 cloth. This book provides an annotated bibliography on musical traditions of the French and Creole speaking Caribbean islands and of some of their diasporic connections with musical traditions of other Caribbean islands and immigrant communities in the United States, France, and Canada. It contains around 1,140 citations on works dating from 1698 to 2008, with the majority of them published from 1930 to 2008. Most of the works cited are in English, French, and Spanish, but there are also some in Creole. There are citations of books, anthology chapters, PhD dissertations, periodical and newspapers articles, films, videos, field recordings, and digital resources. The material is organized in four sections: Cultural History and the Arts, Festivals and Carnival, Music of the Frenchspeaking Caribbean and its Diaspora, and Biographical and Critical Studies. The third section is further divided into two subsections, the first of which deals with general works and the second with regional studies. The book also contains annotated lists of the sources consulted by the author, and of libraries and archives where the cited material can be found, including webpage addresses when available. These bring the total entries to 1,294, the majority of them with annotations that are both precise and informative. Two appendixes list individuals and ensembles by idiom (e.g. musical genre), occupation (e.g. instrument played), and by country. In addition, there are indexes by author and by subject. Most of the important musical genres and traditions of the area under study are represented in the entries covering both folkloric and musical idioms. In addition to works on the islands traditionally considered as forming the French-speaking Caribbean (Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana), the book also covers Dominica and St. Lucia, which are islands with mixed French and English heritage. Musical traditions from Spanish speaking islands of Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba that have been greatly influenced by the French and Creole-speaking Caribbean, especially from Haiti, are also covered. This includes, for example, works on bomba from Puerto Rico, vodou music, changui, and tumba francesa from Cuba, and gaga from Dominican Republic. The author has done a monumental job organizing a wide range oi' materials that include writings from both scholarly sources and the popular press. Personally, I find this very helpful, since I have found, in my own experience as a researcher on African and Caribbean music, that it pays to keep track of articles by journalists and popular press music critics if one wants to assess the multiple meanings that musical productions have for both musicians and their public. Another good idea the author, John Gray, had was to include in the biographical works some important music producers like George Debs, Henri Debs, and Fred Paul, among others. In fact, the role of the music producer is often overlooked in the scholarly literature on music of the Caribbean, and of the African diaspora for that matter. I am of the opinion that the role of the producer warrants more study, since they are usually the middle person between musicians, the music companies, and the general public, and their work considerably impacts the conception and distribution of musical productions.1 In addition to the wide range of materials examined, this book has many important features that make it a very useful reference: the entries are very well cross-referenced, several journals are indexed here for the first time, and the book itself has a clear organization that makes it very easy to find entries. There is, however, one small aspect of the book that could be stronger. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".