Aba Luke

You may have heard the name James Saun­ders. You may know him as a tele­vi­sion sports jour­nal­ist. But do you know he is a mu­si­cian? The 29-year-old Moru­ga res­i­dent says he has been do­ing mu­sic for the past ten years, start­ing off in 2002 in the gospel are­na. He says al­though he dab­bles in both so­ca and dance­hall gospel mu­sic, his per­son­al val­ues are re­flect­ed in the mu­sic he re­leas­es. "I'm not con­fined to the boxed-in genre of plain gospel, be­cause you know for gospel artistes it's still taboo to be singing cer­tain types of gen­res," he said. Saun­ders says his mu­sic has made the ro­ta­tion list at a num­ber of gospel sta­tions over the years, and out­side of T&T, his mu­sic gets the love of peo­ple from as far as South Africa.

"It's a good, strange feel­ing to know that your mu­sic is get­ting at­ten­tion out­side of Trinidad. I think it's all about the mes­sage that you sing about," he said, adding that once peo­ple can iden­ti­fy with cer­tain lyrics, an au­di­ence is like­ly to fol­low. Saun­ders says he looks up to Ja­maica's Pa­pa San, from his days of do­ing strict­ly dance­hall to his new be­gin­ning in the gospel are­na. "With him now be­ing a Chris­t­ian artiste, he still rep­re­sents for dance­hall as well," said Saun­ders. The sports­cast­er, whose mu­si­cal so­bri­quet is Mr Wa­ka Wa­ka, says he re­cent­ly re­leased a sin­gle called Gen­er­a­tion Sol­diers on the Idle rid­dim. He says he is will­ing to ex­plore var­i­ous gen­res but his be­lief in Chris­tian­i­ty will al­ways be re­flect­ed in the lyrics he put out.