Soyi­ni Grey

Forty years in any in­dus­try is a very long time for any artiste but for so­ca that is an amaz­ing feat as the mu­sic is known to be fick­le and tem­po­rary.

Machel Mon­tano, how­ev­er, start­ed as a child and has stayed the course. Now he says that af­ter 40 his goal con­tin­ues to be to push so­ca and be­yond these shores.

Machel 40—One Show is card­ed for Car­ni­val Fri­day ( Feb­ru­ary 17) and the so­ca star has said fa­mous­ly that you can on­ly see him per­form­ing a full con­cert ex­pe­ri­ence at his show.

And ap­pear­ances through­out the sea­son will be spare. Guardian Me­dia Ltd caught up with him at the pa­n­yard of the Siparia Del­tones Steel Or­ches­tra at the band’s com­pound on Rail­way Road, in Siparia.

Hours ear­li­er, he had per­formed on Ari­api­ta Av­enue as part of Caribbean Air­lines “Sat­ur­day in d’Square” event. He al­so made a very ab­bre­vi­at­ed ap­pear­ance on the mic at Gamal “Skin­ny Fab­u­lous” Doyle’s al­bum launch on Jan­u­ary 12..

Keep­ing Mon­tano from the mi­cro­phone and his fans dur­ing this “Moth­er of all Car­ni­vals” may be dif­fi­cult es­pe­cial­ly since even he has song about how “the spir­it is call­ing” him and that “when it calls you must an­swer.” Mon­tano said he has, just dif­fer­ent­ly.

“Ac­cord­ing to the Black Stal­in long ago you know the fire was on the out­side, this time it’s burn­ing on the in­side,” he said. This is a year for him to do the things he’s al­ways want­ed to do. Play­ing pan for Panora­ma was sup­posed to be on his 2023 Car­ni­val to-do list, he now says that will not hap­pen as planned. But in year 40, Mon­tano’s fo­cus is on plant­i­ng seeds to put our Car­ni­val cul­ture on the world stage.

“We plant­i­ng seeds that must grow and re­ver­ber­ate around the world, that there’s some­thing in Car­ni­val. Some­thing deep­er in ca­lyp­so. Some­thing deep­er in pan. Some­thing deep­er in mas,” he said. “Some­thing that was giv­en to us and in Trinidad and To­ba­go we did some­thing very spe­cial with the world.”

This is the rea­son for his part­ner­ship with Siparia Del­tones for the Panora­ma com­pe­ti­tion. His duet with Hugh Masakela for the song ‘The Meet­ing Place’ from the Siparia to Sowe­to project is about ful­fill­ing that spir­it.

Mon­tano ex­plained that the mes­sage of the song is im­por­tant.

“It’s about our her­itage, our his­to­ry.”

He said Masekela was very in­ter­est­ed in her­itage preser­va­tion and mak­ing the con­nec­tion from the Caribbean to Africa. And that the ve­hi­cle of choice was ca­lyp­so and the steel­pan.

“Hugh Masekela’s mis­sion was her­itage restora­tion,” Mon­tano said. It is why they pro­duced the song in the Amapi­ano style, which is type of house mu­sic that orig­i­nat­ed in South Africa in the ear­ly 2000s. Mon­tano ex­plained, “We want­ed to use a mu­sic that was cur­rent, a mu­sic that is ex­plod­ing across the world right now, with this re­la­tion­ship with Afro-beats and how sim­i­lar is it to so­ca and ca­lyp­so, we feel that con­nec­tion could be high­light­ed.”

This col­lab­o­ra­tion with African mu­sic will be con­tin­ued with his Machel 40 con­cert. Al­ready the Niger­ian Gram­my and BET award win­ning singer Ay­o­de­ji Ibrahim Ba­lo­gun “Wiz­kid” is slat­ed to per­form. Re­ma, re­al name Di­vine Iku­bor has al­so been added to the cast. His song ‘Calm Down” reached num­ber 1 on Bill­board’s Afrobeat chart and a remix with the Amer­i­can singer Se­le­na Gomez has re­newed in­ter­est in the song.