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All-Star Band: the Dominican band almost nothing documents

Published October 20, 2026

All-Star Band is a name that circulates on bouyon artist lists, and that is why this profile exists. It must be said in the first line: the verified documentation on this band fits in a single independent source, a Le Figaro travel guide published in June 2026, which meets the band on the Waitukubuli Trail in Dominica through its singer, Kalinago guide Derrick Joseph. No record, no recording and no official account could be verified for All-Star Band. This profile therefore gathers, inventing nothing, everything that is established: a man, a band, an island, and a stage dream stated to a journalist, to play one day aboard the cruise ships that call at Roseau.

Who All-Star Band is: a bouyon name from Dominica known through one article

Start with the raw fact, because it is the only solid ground on this page. In June 2026, Le Figaro published a long travel guide to hiking the Waitukubuli Trail, the 185 kilometre trail that crosses Dominica. In the part of the story devoted to the land of the Kalinago, the journalist introduces his guide: Derrick Joseph, a Kalinago, one of the last descendants of the island Carib Indians. Then, in one sentence, he gives everything the outside world currently knows about this band: when he is not hunting agouti with his dog Otis, Derrick sings with his music group, modestly named “All Star band”.

That sentence deserves a slow reading, because every word counts and none should be inflated. Le Figaro says a music group: it says neither bouyon, nor cadence, nor any other genre. It says Derrick sings in the group: it does not state whether he is its lead singer, its founder or one member among others. It gives no list of musicians, no home base for the band, no concert date and no song title. Anything a less careful profile wrote beyond that would be invention, and this site refuses to do it.

Why, then, a whole page for a band documented by one sentence? Because the name All-Star Band circulates on the bouyon artist lists this site follows to cover the scene, alongside dozens of Dominican and Guadeloupean names. A reader who meets this name will look for an answer: who is this band, what did it record, where can it be heard? The honest answer today is that almost nothing is published about it. A page that says so plainly, with the only available source named and dated, is worth more than a silence that suggests an oversight, and infinitely more than a fabricated biography.

This profile therefore follows the thin record rule of this site, the same one used for emerging artists known by two or three records: every fact tied to its source, every blank named as a blank, and the page kept ready to be completed the day the band publishes a recording, a poster or a verifiable official account. In the meantime, the portrait that follows is as much about a context as about a band: the Dominica of Derrick Joseph, the Kalinago Territory, the port of Roseau and its cruise ships, and the bouyon scene in which the name of the band circulates without yet leaving a sound trace there.

Derrick Joseph: Kalinago guide, hunter, singer

The only documented face of All-Star Band is Derrick Joseph. Le Figaro presents him as a guide on the Waitukubuli Trail, the national trail opened in 2012 that links the two ends of Dominica in fourteen segments. It is in that working setting, among the tree ferns and rivers of the island interior, that the journalist meets him: Derrick guides, explains, names the plants and the sounds of the forest, like the clicking of tree frogs that the story compares to a spoon tapping a cup.

Derrick Joseph is Kalinago. Le Figaro recalls that the Kalinago resisted European colonisation for more than two hundred years, to the point where the French and the English signed a treaty in 1686 recognising Dominica as a neutral state under their control, before diseases such as whooping cough and smallpox decimated them. Today, the paper writes, they are fewer than 3,000, holding out in a small reserve in the north east of the island. Derrick laments heavy mixing over the last fifteen years and notes, in the words reported by the article, that the language disappeared with the elders.

Alongside the guide and the agouti hunter, the article draws a third Derrick: the singer. The French formula it uses suggests light, everyday music making, far from studios and platforms. It fits what the rest of the portrait implies: a local band, rooted in the life of the island, playing for its own circle before playing for distant audiences. This site will not turn that formula into a career: no concert, no tour and no specific stage is documented for All-Star Band to date.

One point of method matters here, because it protects the reader as much as the band. Le Figaro does not say where Derrick Joseph lives, where the band rehearses, or how long it has existed. The story unfolds on the central segments of the trail, behind the village of Laudat and the Morne Trois Pitons National Park, but those are the places of the hike, not an address assigned to the band. This profile therefore assigns it none: the only verified geography of All-Star Band is Dominica itself, and the only place named in its story is Roseau, for a reason the next section explains.

The cruise ship dream in Roseau: the only documented ambition of the band

The Le Figaro article gives the band something precious, which many acts documented by dozens of records have never stated so clearly: a dream. The dream of Derrick Joseph, as reported by the paper, is to perform aboard the huge cruise ships that, from November to April, unload their loads of tourists every week in the port of Roseau. It is the only known public ambition of All-Star Band, and it structures its whole verified portrait.

That dream says a lot about the music economy of a small island. WCK created bouyon in Roseau in 1988, and the capital has held the country big stages ever since, from Mas Domnik carnival to the World Creole Music Festival. But for a local band with no known recording, the most regular and best paid stage on the island is not necessarily the festival: it is the tourist flow, those ships returning every week for six months, whose passengers look, for the length of a stop, for the music of the place where they have set foot. Aiming at the cruise ships, for a Dominican band, means aiming at the audience that is already there, at the port, a few streets from the stages of Roseau.

What this dream is not must be measured too. It is not an announcement: no contract, no audition and no date aboard is reported by the article. Nor is it a declaration of genre: playing for cruise passengers can mean a wide repertoire of covers and island music, and Le Figaro describes neither the repertoire nor the sound of All-Star Band. This profile therefore reports the dream for what it is, one sentence from a guide and singer to a passing journalist, and refuses to draw from it a programme the band never published.

Still, that sentence places All-Star Band in the real landscape of Dominican music, the one this site documents page after page: an island where music lives first in fetes, villages, ports and seasons, before it lives on platforms. Founding bands like WCK, carnival bands like TK International and Signal Band, and heritage groups like Midnight Groovers hold the big stages. All-Star Band, for now, belongs to the other layer of the island musical life, that of neighbourhood bands whose name leaves the island only by accident, in the luggage of a travel article.

What the record does not hold: no song, no recording, no named member

This section is the most important in the profile, because it fixes the exact limit of knowledge. For All-Star Band, our 2026 research found no song title attributable to the band of Derrick Joseph. No recording, no video, no album, no single. Nothing in the sources consulted therefore allows the section readers usually open first to be filled: the list of records to hear. The structured data of this page reflects that emptiness: it contains no recording at all, rather than a list borrowed from a namesake.

No other member is named either. Le Figaro names only Derrick Joseph, and names him as guide and singer, without describing the line-up: we do not know how many musicians make up All-Star Band, which instruments they play, or whether the band includes other singers. We also do not know when the band was formed, whether it still plays regularly, or under which exact spelling it presents itself, the article writing “All Star band” without a hyphen where artist lists write All-Star Band. Both spellings are reported here exactly as found, without deciding in the place of the band.

No verified official account was found: no confirmed artist page on the platforms, no social account tied with certainty to the band of Derrick Joseph. The official links section of this page is therefore empty, deliberately. With a name this generic, the risk of pointing to the wrong band is at its highest, and a wrong link would be worse than no link. If the band or its circle publishes an official channel, it will be added here, with its verification date, as on the other pages of this site.

Finally, the genre of the band is not documented. Le Figaro does not label it, and no source consulted ties it explicitly to bouyon, cadence or any other precise Dominican style. Its presence on bouyon artist lists explains this page, but a list is not proof of a style: it says a name circulates in the orbit of the genre, not how it sounds. The day a recording lets All-Star Band be heard, this page will finally be able to speak about its music. Until then, it speaks about its context, and it says so.

Do not confuse them: the other All Star Bands of the world

The name All-Star Band is one of the most crowded in world music, and part of the work of this profile is to set aside, one by one, the namesakes that have nothing to do with the Dominican band. First namesake, and the most famous: the All-Starr Band of Ringo Starr, formed in 1989, with which the former Beatles drummer tours by gathering renowned musicians from several generations. Despite the similar names and spelling, that Anglo-American supergroup has no link with Dominica or with Derrick Joseph.

Second namesake: the All Star Band of Mario Ortiz, the Puerto Rican salsa orchestra that the trumpeter led in the 1960s, with recordings on the Ramso and Remo labels. Platform artist pages tell that story in detail, including the extreme youth of the orchestra. It is a fine page of Latin music history, but it is Puerto Rico, salsa and another era: nothing to do with the band from Dominica, and none of its records should be credited to All-Star Band on this page.

Third family of namesakes: the steel orchestras and Caribbean formations with close names, led by Trinidad All Stars, the historic steel orchestra of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, active since the 1930s and 1940s according to its historians. The Caribbean counts many All Stars, since the formula means, in sound system and orchestra culture, a gathering of strong players. That is probably the sense of the name chosen in Dominica too: a band presenting itself, with an irony Le Figaro notes by calling it modestly named, as a selection of local stars.

The rule applied here is the same as for every generic name on this site: only facts tied to the band of Derrick Joseph, in Dominica, are kept, and every fact from a namesake is set aside, even when it is attractive, even when it would conveniently fill a date or a discography. That discipline is what makes the page useful despite its thinness: a reader looking for the Dominican All-Star Band finds here the right band, the one established fact about it, and the clear list of what must not be credited to it.

All-Star Band in the bouyon landscape: a list presence, a listening still to build

To understand the place of All-Star Band, recall the landscape in which its name circulates. Bouyon was born in Roseau, Dominica, in 1988, when WCK fused cadence-lypso and jing ping with electronic keyboards and drum machines. The genre then produced whole branches, including bouyon soca, started by Dada in Dominica in 2003 according to the first-hand testimony of Sean “Smokiller” Francis and popularized by Triple Kay, and Wrecketeng, the style of the sampled melody and the rap voice. That whole story is told in our history of bouyon.

In that landscape, names sit in concentric circles. At the centre, the bands and artists documented by decades of records and stages, from Midnight Groovers to Asa Bantan. Around them, the platform generation, followed record by record on this site, from Reo to Smokiller. And at the edge, a layer of names that circulate on lists, local posters and island word of mouth, with no catalogue reachable from outside. All-Star Band belongs to that edge today: present on bouyon lists, absent from platforms, and known to the whole world through a single sentence in a French newspaper.

That edge position is not a value judgement. Dominica counts about 70,000 inhabitants, and its real musical life far exceeds what platforms show of it: village bands, church formations, hotel and port orchestras, musicians of the tourist season. A band can play for years in front of its audience without leaving a single indexed trace. The case of All-Star Band is a useful reminder of that, at a time when the existence of an artist is often confused with their digital footprint. Derrick Joseph sings in a band, in front of people, in Dominica: that is enough for his name to deserve a page, provided the page says exactly what it knows.

While waiting for a first verifiable recording, the listening advice of this page is therefore indirect but sincere. To hear the sound world in which the name of All-Star Band circulates, start with this site bouyon playlist, then with the stage bands of Dominica, Signal Band and TK International. And if you ever hike the Waitukubuli Trail with a guide who sings, ask him the name of his band: that is exactly how this dossier began, and it may be how it gets completed.

Frequently asked questions

Who is All-Star Band?

All-Star Band is a music group from Dominica, known to the outside public through a single verified source: a Le Figaro travel guide published in June 2026, which presents its singer, Kalinago guide Derrick Joseph. The band name circulates on bouyon artist lists, but no song or recording by the band is documented to date.

Who is Derrick Joseph, the singer of All-Star Band?

Derrick Joseph is a Kalinago guide on the Waitukubuli Trail in Dominica, presented by Le Figaro in June 2026. The paper describes him hunting agouti with his dog Otis and singing, the rest of the time, with his music group named All Star band. No other published biography of him was found in our research.

Has All-Star Band released any songs that can be heard online?

No, not to our verified knowledge. Our research found no song, recording or video attributable with certainty to the Dominican band of Derrick Joseph. The platform records signed All Star Band belong to namesakes, including the Puerto Rican salsa orchestra of Mario Ortiz.

What is the All-Star Band dream Le Figaro talks about?

According to Le Figaro in June 2026, the dream of Derrick Joseph is to perform aboard the huge cruise ships that, from November to April, unload their loads of tourists every week in the port of Roseau, Dominica. No contract or date aboard is reported: it is a stated dream, not a booking.

Is All-Star Band a bouyon band?

That is not established. The name circulates on the bouyon artist lists followed by this site, but the only independent source, Le Figaro, speaks of a music group without naming a genre. This profile therefore credits it with neither bouyon nor any other style, while waiting for a recording that lets it be heard.

Is All-Star Band linked to the All-Starr Band of Ringo Starr?

No. The All-Starr Band of Ringo Starr, formed in 1989, is an Anglo-American touring supergroup. All-Star Band, in Dominica, is the local band of Kalinago guide Derrick Joseph. The resemblance of the names is a coincidence, and this site mixes no fact from the two formations.

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