An­ge­lo Mar­celle

Af­ter mak­ing a stop in Ft Laud­erdale with his HD band, so­ca star Machel Mon­tano gave Brook­lyn, New York what it had been crav­ing for a long time. Dur­ing the Ju­ly 4 hol­i­day week­end, he held his first ma­jor con­cert in a few years in the car park of Floyd Ben­nett Field, New York City's first mu­nic­i­pal air­port, be­fore a sold out crowd. The su­per­star had per­formed at Wash­ing­ton DC's Car­ni­val the week­end be­fore, and pri­or to the event ru­mours had been cir­cu­lat­ing for weeks on the en­ter­tain­ment cir­cuit that he and his band would have had the ho­n­our of per­form­ing for US first la­dy Michelle Oba­ma.

The event ti­tled Machel Re­turns, con­tin­ued with the theme his man­age­ment and oth­er pro­mo­tion­al com­pa­nies have been us­ing to pro­mote the singer's re­turn af­ter a year off from ma­jor per­for­mances last year. Al­though Mon­tano didn't need any of­fi­cial ti­tle from a com­pe­ti­tion in his home land to se­cure his sta­tus as the lead­ing so­ca act in the world, the vic­to­ry did cre­ate a thirst for his per­for­mance among his fans all over the world. Loy­al fans in Brook­lyn were at the venue from as ear­ly as 5 pm and the ex­cite­ment lev­el was at an all time high. When he mount­ed the stage at 9 pm, the crowd went in­to a fren­zy.

His en­tire band, in­clud­ing Patrice Roberts, Farmer Nap­py and Zan where there. Al­so per­form­ing on the night were Ben­jai and Ker­win Dubois. Dur­ing a freestyle ses­sion, Mon­tano hint­ed that he was go­ing to keep Dubois on his team. Af­ter two hours of hits that left every­one mu­si­cal­ly high, the show went in­to trib­ute mode as Mon­tano showed re­spect to Bu­ju Ban­ton, who was sen­tenced to ten years in prison af­ter be­ing found guilty of three co­caine re­lat­ed charges.

Bu­ju and Mon­tano had done a col­lab­o­ra­tion in 2008 en­ti­tled Make Love. The so­ca star then per­formed a few Bob Mar­ley songs be­fore kick­ing up the tem­po again. The show was sched­uled to end at 11 pm, but the New York po­lice de­part­ment al­lowed pa­trons an ex­tra 30 min­utes to en­joy the mu­sic of the 2011 So­ca Monarch. The band was sched­uled to per­form in Chica­go the fol­low­ing day.