Evolving the monarchy

The appearance by Nelson and Superblue also served as a reminder that our greatest soca stars are fading now and deserve not just an opportunity to show their work to a new audience, but an effort at preserving their life’s work.

On Friday night, and indeed, well into Saturday morning, the cream of Trinidad and Tobago’s soca crop for 2012 competed fiercely for the thrones of Groovy Soca Monarch and Power Soca Monarch, the pinnacle adjudication of the months of effort that they had each invested in crafting this year’s party music. Guardian Media, which reports extensively on the entire festival through its radio, print and television assets, was front and centre for the event as a sponsor, a continuance of our involvement in Carnival which dates from the birth of costumed competition in the Queen’s Park Savannah.

Encouraging the growth, development and public appreciation of this globally acknowledged cultural phenomenon has, for decades, been a key part of the DNA of this company’s reporting, programming and corporate social responsibility. This year’s edition of Caribbean Prestige Foundation’s Soca Monarch competition celebrated the 20th anniversary of the event and added an hour’s worth of reminiscing to the show’s running time with a showcase for today’s audience of such seminal soca talents as Explainer, Baron and the octogenarian Lord Nelson, who gamely rendered his hit, Mih lover, with a cane and some uncharacteristically delicate wining.

The veterans were backed by the understated and always remarkable Roy Cape and his band who stitched together an oddly disjointed performance by Superblue with deft orchestral craft. Superblue worked to channel his remarkable triumphs in the earliest years of the competition and even now, some distance from the vigour of his groundbreaking run, winning the competition six times in its first eight years. That night, it was clear how much his writing, music and arrangement of the music shaped the language and approach of modern soca music.

The appearance by Nelson and Superblue also served as a reminder that our greatest soca stars are fading now and deserve not just an opportunity to show their work to a new audience, but an effort at preserving their life’s work. Soca Monarch 2012 marked not just the twentieth anniversary of the event, it was also the thirtieth anniversary of the career of Machel Montano, who staked his claim in the still quite fresh ground of soca music in 1983 with his debut song, Too young to soca.

The question many of his competitors might have been asking during the show is whether Montano is now too big to soca. The distance between the performance that the veteran singer, composer, musician and bandleader put between his work and those of even his most robust competitors left even his detractors stunned. Despite robust challenges from Iwer George, who performed a surprisingly brief version of No Pain and Kerwin Du Bois’ brash reading of his hit Bacchanlist, Montano’s artfully crafted performances of Mr Fete and Pump Yuh Flag won him the title of Groovy Soca Monarch and mounted a successful defence of his Power Soca Monarch title.

For Mr Fete in particular, the seasoned performer offered coursework to any attentive rivals on how to manage a stage performance with props that filled the stage, including the dominating presence of a refurbished Tan Tan and Saga Boy in vivid yellow, several guest stars, including Rachel Price and Calypso Rose. For his Pump Yuh Flag performance, he pulled aces in Anya Ayoung Chee and Brian Lara before pulling a deft sleight of hand trick, appearing to rocket away from the stage on a jet pack.

The crowd at the Hasely Crawford Stadium seemed keenly supportive of Montano’s close rivals Iwer George and Kerwyn Du Bois, and bridging the sentiments of the crowd, which is what the performers see and react to, and the judging and text messaging systems of points aggregation in a more transparent manner is the next logical step for the organisers of the competition. Congratulations, then, to Montano, whose life experience in soca music proved critical lever in his success at the competition and to his closest competitors, George and Du Bois, whose efforts and powerful compositions energised the show and made it so much more exciting.