Kali­fa Clyne

So­ca mu­sic needs to be giv­en the recog­ni­tion for the role it plays in Car­ni­val, says chair­man of Caribbean Pres­tige Foun­da­tion (CPF) William Munro. He was speak­ing to the me­dia af­ter the launch of Car­ni­val 2013 yes­ter­day. "We have been do­ing our work, sell­ing T&T in a pos­i­tive way. The so­ca artistes de­served to be on the plat­form, launch­ing Car­ni­val," said Munro.

Though Munro said he was work­ing close­ly with the Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Min­istry re­gard­ing the CPF's So­ca Monarch Com­pe­ti­tion, he felt more need­ed to be done. "We pro­mote so­ca tourism. Peo­ple come for this com­pe­ti­tion," he added. Munro said so­ca mu­sic and artistes con­tributed to the econ­o­my of T&T.

"I know that very soon the so­ca mu­sic will be at the Gram­mys as long as it gets the sup­port nec­es­sary," he said. Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Min­is­ter Lin­coln Dou­glas said his min­istry sup­port­ed so­ca mu­sic through its sup­port of ca­lyp­so. "We sup­port ca­lyp­so as the orig­i­nal art­form and out of that you have var­i­ous types of art­forms, whether so­ca and chut­ney so­ca," said Dou­glas.