Clay­ton Clarke

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

Rough­ly 4.2 mil­lion dol­lars was spent to pay artistes who per­formed at the 2023 To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence, Sec­re­tary of Tourism, Cul­ture, An­tiq­ui­ties and Trans­porta­tion Tashia Bur­ris re­vealed yes­ter­day.

She gave the fig­ures dur­ing the Ques­tions for Oral An­swers at the 19th Ple­nary Sit­ting of the 2022-2023 THA Ses­sion.

Re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from Mi­nor­i­ty Leader Kelvin Mor­ris on the over­all es­ti­mat­ed bud­get for the Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence dis­ag­gre­gat­ed by the cost to host each event and specif­i­cal­ly the to­tal cost to en­gage in­ter­na­tion­al artistes, as op­posed to the to­tal cost spent on lo­cal artistes, Bur­ris said the amount was $4.2 mil­lion.

She re­vealed that the largest chunk was for en­ter­tain­ers ($3.8m) for the In­ter­na­tion­al Night on April 23, where for­eign acts Boyz II Men (USA) and Kof­fee (Ja­maica) ap­peared along with lo­cal per­form­ers Tony Paul, Vaugh­nette Big­ford and Sharon Phillips.

Those who were on show at Spey­side Jazz on the sec­ond night (April 22) were paid $746,900. Among them were Ja­maican acts Richie Spice and Ever­ton Blender, along­side lo­cals Nailah Black­man and Gar­dah Knight while the stars at Gospel Night on the open­ing day (April 20) were al­lo­cat­ed $485,000.

In ad­di­tion, Bur­ris said the or­gan­is­ers spent $3,860,155.83 to en­gage in­ter­na­tion­al singers while the sum of $406,289.24 was as­signed for their lo­cal coun­ter­parts.

The bill for the In­ter­na­tion­al Night ac­tiv­i­ties to­talled $3,852,000, fol­lowed by the Spey­side Jazz ($1530,700) and the Gospel Night ($779,550).

Bur­ris said some costs were shared across the three nights. The over­all es­ti­mat­ed bud­get was $12,001623.