Please use your best sounding playback equipment and make a point to, as much as possible, just listen to the music and not simply let it be background music to other activities.

Listening Tip: Mardi Gras, meaning "Fat Tuesday," and Carnival, meaning "Without Meat," are names for the festival before the Christian fasting season of Lent. In the Americas, Africans and their descendants used Mardi Gras/ Carnival as an opportunity to express their own culture within the colonial power structure of slavery. Check out the videos below while thinking of New Orleans not as a southern port city of the U.S.A. but as the northern most port city of a common Afro-Caribbean and South American culture.