Machel’s Encore: Road March Record in sight but masqueraders on his mind

Samp­son Nan­ton

Deputy Man­ag­ing Ed­i­tor

samp­son.nan­[email protected]

So­ca artiste and Road March con­tender Machel Mon­tano says de­spite the op­por­tu­ni­ty to sur­pass the late Ald­wyn “Lord Kitch­en­er” Kitch­en­er for the most Road March ti­tles this year, he re­mains pri­mar­i­ly in­ter­est­ed in en­ter­tain­ing his fans.

Mon­tano joined Lord Kitch­en­er on 11 Road March ti­tles last year with Pardy and can be­come the sole ti­tle hold­er if En­core is ad­judged the Road March win­ner this year.How­ev­er, Mon­tano said what he has al­ready at­tained in join­ing Kitch­en­er is it­self a his­toric ac­com­plish­ment.

“What has hap­pened is al­ready as big. To be on par with Lord Kitch­en­er is the pin­na­cle. It has al­ready been reached, I don’t think there’s any ma­jor ben­e­fit of beat­ing him be­cause he’s not go­ing to come back out of the wood­works and I think it would take the young­sters quite a while to amass a next 12 road march­es,” Mon­tano said dur­ing a vis­it to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

He added: “You know you have peo­ple like Fay-Ann Lyons with three; we have one or two peo­ple with two; but I think it would be a feat for them to look at and say, ‘Here is some­thing that a young per­son can do in their life­time, a liv­ing per­son.’ And for us, it is al­ways about what we’re do­ing this year. We al­ways fo­cus on the mas­quer­ad­er. We al­ways fo­cus on when they cross that ramp and they go on that stage,” he said.

Lord Kitch­en­er, who died in Feb­ru­ary 2000, won his 11 ti­tles over a 30-year pe­ri­od, from 1946 with Jump in the Line to 1976 with Flag Woman, ce­ment­ing his lega­cy as one of ca­lyp­so’s great­est icons.

Mon­tano’s first Road March ti­tle came in 1997 with Big Truck, a mile­stone that sig­nalled the rise of a new gen­er­a­tion of so­ca dom­i­nance.

Since then, he has re­mained one of Car­ni­val’s most for­mi­da­ble com­peti­tors, con­sis­tent­ly de­liv­er­ing high-en­er­gy an­thems for Car­ni­val fetes and the road. He said through­out the year, he and his team care­ful­ly con­sid­er the type of song need­ed to en­sure mas­quer­aders ful­ly en­joy the Car­ni­val ex­pe­ri­ence.

“So, this year is again the same fo­cus—the En­core is com­ing af­ter Pardy… we’re look­ing to out­do the song that we did. In the be­gin­ning, no­body be­lieved in it but as we were com­ing clos­er to the road, every­body un­der­stood what the feel­ing and the tem­po meant to be on the stage,” he said.

As part of his Car­ni­val sched­ule, Mon­tano will per­form to a free live au­di­ence at the Fla­va Vil­lage in the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah to­mor­row, dubbed Fan­tas­tic Fri­day.

He said the de­ci­sion to per­form free was root­ed in his de­sire to give back to fans and co­in­cid­ed with an in­vi­ta­tion from fel­low vet­er­an so­ca artiste Iw­er George. Mon­tano said he was walk­ing around the Sa­van­nah with his wife af­ter Patrice Roberts per­formed there live and wit­nessed the joy her show brought to at­ten­dees.

He said it re­mind­ed him of oth­er Car­ni­vals across the re­gion, where guest artistes—in­clud­ing him­self, Shag­gy and Shenseea—are in­vit­ed to per­form for non-pay­ing pa­trons at Car­ni­val vil­lages.

“So, I was walk­ing past and say­ing, ‘Wey boy, I know they would love to have Machel in this Fla­va Vil­lage in my busy sched­ule,’ and lo and be­hold, by the time I reached the US Em­bassy, Iw­er George jumped out of his car. He said, ‘Machel when you will give we a night in Fla­va?’ I say, ‘Well boy, you know I don’t come cheap,’ but I said I un­der­stand what the pur­pose is and I will al­ways do that for the peo­ple if that is the op­por­tu­ni­ty,” he said.

He said to­mor­row was his on­ly free day this week. He has al­so dis­missed ru­mours that this would be his last Car­ni­val.

“Every time I speak on cer­tain things and speak of end of one chap­ter and on to the next, they say this is the last year,” he said.

How­ev­er, he ac­knowl­edged that changes are on the hori­zon — not in terms of re­tire­ment, but in strat­e­gy. He said he in­tends to fo­cus more de­lib­er­ate­ly on pro­duc­ing al­bums that can ap­peal to in­ter­na­tion­al au­di­ences, a process he not­ed re­quires ex­tend­ed stu­dio time and a shift from the rapid Car­ni­val pro­duc­tion cy­cle.

“We think that this is im­por­tant for so­ca. We’re al­ready on that road by do­ing Bar­clays Cen­ter, Madi­son Square Gar­den and even UBS Are­na, but now we want to move in­to a more con­sis­tent form of hit­ting the glob­al mar­ket with the type of so­ca mu­sic. So, for that rea­son, we said that some­times we have to not make a Car­ni­val al­bum, we have to take a seat back­wards and spend six or eight or nine months work­ing on songs the way Michael Jack­son or Chris Brown or any­body would do it,” he said.

Mon­tano will be play­ing mas with Tribe, as he has done for sev­er­al years.