It was an amazing stroke of brilliance or luck (we suspect it was the latter) that saw the organizers of the second Carifesta concert at the Guyana National Stadium, Providence on Sunday night, select Kirk Jardine as host. Because had it not been for his comedic skills, the few hundred people who actually attended would have left within the first half-hour and the performers would have been playing for the NCN cameras.
After the sizzling performances at the Banks Super Concert last Saturday night, Sunday night’s event (and don’t dare call it a Super Concert) was at times as flat as an opened week-old soda left sitting in a warm place.
The event kicked off with the catchy Brazilian Forro music and dancing and patrons began to assume that things would get livelier. They were wrong.
Carolan Lynch’s singing debut evoked mild interest, but only because she had been in the news for an entirely different reason recently. Even though Alabama was on stage with her, after the first few seconds people returned to whatever old ‘gaff’ they were carrying on while they waited (some of them in vain) for the big acts.
It even appeared that some persons had fallen asleep, as there was a jolt in the crowd when Charmaine Blackman entered stage right. With her green hair and glitzy stage outfit, she was hard to ignore. Thankfully, she exited after belting out some 4 songs in her usual shrill tone.
Chow-Pow had his work cut out, keeping the crowd interested between sets of a toneless ‘Lil Man’, an American-rap wannabe whose name we didn’t quite catch, and an Anguillan band, which played what sounded like instrumental jazzy blues.
Chow-Pow’s sharp stand-up comedy in which he poked fun at those closest to the stage and let loose a few ribald punch lines, worked. During this time, too, there were probably more people at the bar than facing the stage.
We had taken along a Trinidadian friend who was here on business and he wanted to catch some local chutney acts. We left without seeing a single one. Our friend liked Celeste David, but thought her set was too short and when after the first few lines of “Back it Up”, she was forced to vacate the stage to make way for yet another Anguillan band (and this one included a man on a banjo), we gave up. It was time to leave.
As we trekked back to the car park we heard the band perform an Anguillan national song and then proceed to massacre “She’s Royal”.
Our Trini friend wanted to know why, since it was supposed to be a “super” concert, the event did not just have all of the top local artistes and why it was that our local songsters were not being promoted more.
Good question. He noted that top Trinidadian, Barbadian and Jamaican singers were well known here, whereas hardly anyone in any of those three territories knew who the top Guyanese singers were.
And while Guyanese had willingly rammed the stadium to the point where they could barely breathe, to listen to Rupee and Mr Vegas the previous night, it would have been easy to play a cricket match without risking hitting any of the audience on Sunday. Big Red, Celeste and even X2 would hardly evoke the same response in Barbados or Jamaica, which we saw here on Saturday night.
Chow-Pow is a funny guy, but we don’t see Caribbean promoters falling over themselves to book him.
Instead, Guyanese are rushing to buy Learie Joseph and Oliver Samuels’ tapes.
Our foreign-mindedness has spread to the point where even though it might have occurred to the organizers of Sunday night’s concert that an unknown Anguillan band would fizzle, they still played not just one, but two, perhaps more, when it was obvious that their performances would have been better suited to the Promenade Gardens’ bandstand.
We do not mean to demean our visitors; we’re sure they meant well, but it must have occurred even to them that they were not being well received and that perhaps an audience of the elderly sitting on benches on a quiet afternoon would have enjoyed their offerings more.
This column was written well before last night, but we’re willing to say, ahead of time that unless it was completely rained out the DDL Super Concert would have lived up to its name. Well? We told you so! (thescene@stabroeknews.com)
