NIGEL CAMPBELL
The final night of the St Lucia Jazz & Arts Festival on Mother’s Day May 14, dubbed The Ultimate Celebration, a celebration of St Lucian and Caribbean music excellence alongside a pop music living legend, was, for all intents and purposes, Sting & Shaggy in Concert and the rest.
The disparity between the headliners and the opening acts in their relative successes and accolades may look like an opportunity for connection and collaboration to get a toe in the door of a global music career, but on a local level, and certainly for this festival in 2023, some opportunities were missed.
[caption id="attachment_1016894" align="alignnone" width="592"] Sting and Shaggy on stage at the St Lucia Jazz & Arts Festival on May 14. -[/caption]
There is no doubt that all the opening acts for Sting and Shaggy that night, exclusively St Lucian, are household names here: singers Irvin Ace Loctar and Teddyson John, and musicians Barbara Cadet and Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. But the potential for international media coverage of their performances was stymied by packed agendas and logistical hurdles that affected the full media presence, including TT Newsday, for the whole day of performances. Hopefully, these issues will be rectified as part of the future festival planning and development for what has become one of the biggest music festivals in the Caribbean, if not the biggest.
Officials of the St Lucia Tourism Authority have confirmed that the audience numbers and ticket sales were the highest recorded in years. This, it was said openly by St Lucians, was the happy return after six years to what Jazz in St Lucia is supposed to be; a grand celebration, highly popular among visitors and locals, filled with music superstars and family fun.
The cost-saving experiment of the SOLEIL – the St Lucia Summer Festival, begun in 2017 under the former administration of Allen Chastanet and spread over months, was not sustained after the pandemic, nor with a change of government and renewed vision for the festival.
Musicians who make it need to have a media presence. Industries of music, film, theatre have a media that support, report and widen the presence of those disciplines into the consciousness of the population. When media are prevented from covering the local musicians who do not have the media and marketing muscle of the majors, it is not helping. Modern social media is filled with "influencers" who are reporting on shows that are not informed nor have to show any journalistic scrutiny, acumen and gravitas. They were there in St Lucia. There is a demand for content to make algorithms work or satisfy editorial space. I have read newspaper reports of festivals regionally that have matter on the established stars, and are not willing to write or cover the opening acts. What happened in St Lucia, was that two out of nearly 20 international journalists were willing to cover Cadet, Teddyson John and Irvin Loctar, and other artists in the preceding days. I, for one, continue to wonder about that gulf in media
