Kobo Town

Kobo Town is a JUNO-winning Canadian Caribbean music group led by Trinidad-born, Toronto-based singer and songwriter Drew Gonsalves. Based in Toronto, Ontario, the band blends calypso music with a diverse mix of Caribbean and other musical influences, including ska, reggae, dub, rapso, zouk, and hip hop. Kobo Town is named after the historic neighborhood in Port-of-Spain where calypso was born amid the boastful, humorous, and militant chants of roaming stick-fighters. Gonsalves was born and raised in Diego Martin, Trinidad and Tobago to a Trinidadian father and a Québécois mother. When he was 13, his parents' marriage ended and his mother left and returned to Canada with her children, settling in Ottawa, Ontario. As a teenager, Gonsalves turned to music and poetry as a way to deal with his sense of dislocation and exile. Going back with older eyes at eighteen, his father took him to Lord Kitchener's Calypso Revue tent, and he was blown away by the cleverness and wit of the calypsonians. In 2004, he put together Kobo Town with fellow Trini expats in Toronto and musicians from his first band, Outcry. They play the music in the live, swinging, pre-soca style. Gonsalves collaborated on the writing and production of Calypso Rose's platinum-selling album "Far From Home," which won a Victoire de la Musique award in France in 2017. Kobo Town's third release "Where the Galleon Sank" was released in Canada in February 2017 and won a Canadian Folk Music Award for World Group of the Year.

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