Alexander Plays His Songs of Freedom

Harry Belafonte typically gets the credit for introducing Americans to calypso, the West Indian style of music that swept the continent in the late 1950s and later morphed into reggae. But the first North American to champion the irresistible rhythms of Jamaica and Trinidad was the rhythm and blues star Louis Jordan in such numbers as “Run Joe” and “Stone Cold Dead in the Market.” Jordan took the sound a step further in his 1949 “Push-Ka-Pee She Pie (The Saga of Saga Boy),” in which he proclaimed to the world that he had invented a music he called “the new calypso bebop.” Not to be outdone, the Trinidadian star Lord Kitchener, then living in England, quickly recorded an homage to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker called “Kitch’s Bebop Calypso.”