On an un­usu­al Car­ni­val Tues­day, de­void of joy­ous rev­el­ry in the streets, where colour and cre­ativ­i­ty were re­placed with the gloom of a trag­ic in­dus­tri­al ac­ci­dent, the na­tion’s biggest mu­si­cal star pro­vid­ed a mo­ment of cel­e­bra­tion at an event thou­sands of miles away.

Per­form­ing be­fore a live au­di­ence of hun­dreds of thou­sands, plus mil­lions more on live streams, Machel Mon­tano made a sig­nif­i­cant ad­vance in his mis­sion to spread the joy of so­ca mu­sic to all cor­ners of the globe with his per­for­mance at Ma­haShiv­Ra­tri cel­e­bra­tions at the Isha Yo­ga Cen­tre in In­dia.

His four-song per­for­mance at a 12-hour event was a sig­na­ture mo­ment in the evo­lu­tion of one of T&T’s mu­sic gen­res, as well as an un­ex­pect­ed high point to the scaled-down Car­ni­val ac­tiv­i­ties of 2022.

It was on­ly fit­ting that so­ca, the soul of ca­lyp­so, a mu­si­cal genre that merges African and East In­di­an rhythms, should be the as­pect of T&T cul­ture pre­sent­ed at that mega event in the coun­try from which so much of our na­tion­al iden­ti­ty orig­i­nates.

The sym­bol­ism and pow­er of the mo­ment were un­de­ni­able. At one point dur­ing his per­for­mance, Mon­tano was joined on stage by Marge Black­man, daugh­ter of the man who cre­at­ed so­ca, Ras Shorty I.

Against the back­drop of Ma­haShiv­Ra­tri, an an­nu­al fes­ti­val ded­i­cat­ed to the Hin­du god Shi­va and the most sig­nif­i­cant event in In­dia’s spir­i­tu­al cal­en­dar, Mon­tano had the biggest au­di­ence of his ca­reer danc­ing, clap­ping and wav­ing to his mu­sic.

The so­ca su­per­star, who has been mak­ing an­nu­al vis­its to In­dia, has been there for the last sev­en months par­tic­i­pat­ing in a yo­ga pro­gramme un­der the tute­lage of Sad­hgu­ru, one of the most in­flu­en­tial vi­sion­ar­ies of the mod­ern age.

And in con­for­mi­ty with the spir­i­tu­al sig­nif­i­cance of the oc­ca­sion, Mon­tano, dressed in a red and black kur­ta, tur­ban and bare­foot­ed, gave a per­for­mance that was high en­er­gy but with­out his usu­al gy­ra­tions.

He de­scribed it as the most pro­found mo­ment of his life and it was cer­tain­ly a ma­jor mile­stone in his 40 years in the mu­sic in­dus­try.

For the en­ter­tain­er, whose de­but was as a nine-year-old pri­ma­ry school stu­dent, it was al­so an op­por­tu­ni­ty to use his lever­age as an artist to reach an au­di­ence be­yond his tra­di­tion­al so­ca fol­low­ing. His part­ner­ship with Sad­hgu­ru’s Con­scious Plan­et Save Soil move­ment, which aims to raise aware­ness and en­cour­age gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy ac­tion to re­vi­talise the soil, gives him ac­cess to a huge glob­al au­di­ence.

He has lived up to his rep­u­ta­tion as one of so­ca mu­sic’s most ded­i­cat­ed cam­paign­ers, tak­ing the mu­sic to a new au­di­ence on a dif­fer­ent kind of stage. Based on the thou­sands of so­cial me­dia posts since that his­toric per­for­mance, he has won over le­gions of fans on the sub­con­ti­nent.

But that was not Mon­tano’s on­ly suc­cess. He al­so lift­ed the spir­its of his thou­sands of fans here at home who viewed the per­for­mance on YouTube and his In­sta­gram page, de­liv­er­ing some light and joy on a day that had been over­shad­owed by plen­ty of un­wel­come news.

In do­ing so, he demon­strat­ed the pow­er of mu­sic to in­spire, en­light­en and heal.