Shel­don Os­borne

The Jazz seg­ment of the an­nu­al We­Beat St James Fes­ti­val took place on June 9 be­fore a small but en­thu­si­as­tic crowd of Jazz lovers at the St James Am­phithe­atre, on the West­ern Main Road, St James. JazzBeat has be­come a key el­e­ment of the Fes­ti­val, and is the re­al high point of We­Beat for some pa­trons, but T&T Guardian learned that JazzBeat 2010 was in dan­ger of be­ing can­celled be­cause of poor fund­ing.

Wear­ing a wor­ried coun­te­nance, Fes­ti­val co­or­di­na­tor Earl Cros­by be­moaned the woe­ful lack of sup­port, es­pe­cial­ly fi­nan­cial­ly from the in­nu­mer­able cor­po­rate cit­i­zens that make "the City that nev­er sleeps" their home. Cros­by and his St James Im­prove­ment Com­mit­tee, chaired by Judy Arthur, with con­tin­ued pa­tron­age from Port-of-Spain May­or Murchi­son Brown, and the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion, have borne the brunt of the fund­ing for this event these past ten years. How­ev­er, thanks to the ex­tra ef­fort of some of the or­gan­is­ers, and the help of the Fes­ti­val's spon­sors, par­tic­u­lar­ly WMJX 100.5FM–a lo­cal Jazz-for­mat ra­dio sta­tion–jazz en­thu­si­asts were not dis­ap­point­ed.

Chan­tal Es­delle demon­strates her ver­sa­til­i­ty at JazzBeat on Wednes­day night, as she vo­calis­es and makes mu­sic on the key­boards with the band Moyenne.

This was the fifth in­stall­ment of the nine-day fes­ti­val first or­gan­ised in 2001 as an event to com­mem­o­rate the 63rd an­niver­sary of the in­cor­po­ra­tion of the sub­urb of St James in­to the city of Port-of-Spain. The fes­ti­val is al­so an op­por­tu­ni­ty for the com­mu­ni­ty to recog­nise and ho­n­our res­i­dents who have made no­table con­tri­bu­tions in their var­i­ous fields. The JazzBeat au­di­ence en­joyed the voic­es and in­stru­ments of Ray Hol­man and Friends, Jo­han Chucka­ree, and the band Moyenne, with Chan­tal Es­delle, Dou­glas Re­don, Dar­ryl Shep­pard, and Glen­ford Sobers. Hol­man and his band, and Sobers, who played as part of the band Moyenne, are both well known for their skill and ver­sa­til­i­ty with the steel­pan. They are both be­com­ing even more pop­u­lar for their skill in blend­ing the na­tion­al in­stru­ment with Jazz in a vari­a­tion of the genre some­times re­ferred to as "Caribbean Jazz Fu­sion."

Moyenne mem­bers–Es­delle, Re­don, Shep­pard, and Sobers–brought the show to a fit­ting cli­max with their skill­ful blend of tra­di­tion­al Jazz with tra­di­tion­al ca­lyp­so. Pa­trons were sill danc­ing and singing as they made their way out of the Am­phithe­atre at the end of the show. Notwith­stand­ing in­clement weath­er We Beat St James 2010 is ex­pect­ed to have an ex­plo­sive cli­max this evening with the much an­tic­i­pat­ed pa­rade of steel­bands and tra­di­tion­al Car­ni­val char­ac­ters along West­ern Main Road. Tonight's event is spon­sored by the Min­istry of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism.