Star-studded cast to honour Sparrow in final farewell today

A star-stud­ded cast of lo­cal artistes, in­clud­ing Machel Mon­tano, De­stra Gar­cia, Su­perblue, Crazy and Shur­wayne Win­ches­ter, will take the stage to­day to pay trib­ute to ca­lyp­so leg­end Slinger “Mighty Spar­row” Fran­cis­co.

The artistes are among 14 per­form­ers list­ed for the Na­tion­al Farewell and Cel­e­bra­tion of Life for the late Fran­cis­co, who died in New York on Sep­tem­ber 27 at the age of 91.

The pro­gramme, or­gan­ised by the Min­istry of Cul­ture and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, will al­so fea­ture Karen Fran­cis­co, Samuel Thomas Jr, Zachary Ran­some, Aaron Dun­can, Taz’yah O’Con­nor, Shel­don Reid, Chucky Gor­don, Kurt Allen and Sean Daniel.

The farewell will be held at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA) in Port-of-Spain from 1.30 pm. 

The per­form­ers are ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er mu­si­cal trib­utes cel­e­brat­ing Spar­row’s life, his con­tri­bu­tion to ca­lyp­so and his en­dur­ing in­flu­ence on Trinidad and To­ba­go’s cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty.

Spar­row, whose ca­reer spanned decades, be­came one of the coun­try’s most cel­e­brat­ed cul­tur­al fig­ures, help­ing to take ca­lyp­so to au­di­ences across the world.

Pri­or to this, mem­bers of the pub­lic will have an op­por­tu­ni­ty to pay their fi­nal re­spects to Spar­row dur­ing a pub­lic pro­ces­sion sched­uled to be­gin at 10 am from the Trea­sury Build­ing and move along In­de­pen­dence Square and Fred­er­ick Street, be­fore ar­riv­ing at NA­PA.

Per­sons wish­ing to join the pro­ces­sion have been ad­vised to as­sem­ble at the rear of the of­fi­cial cortège and fol­low the in­struc­tions of pro­ces­sion mar­shals, po­lice of­fi­cers and oth­er au­tho­rised per­son­nel. They are al­so be­ing asked not to cross, ob­struct or in­ter­rupt the pro­ces­sion. For those un­able to at­tend the pro­ces­sion, a live pub­lic view­ing will be held at the Grand Stand, Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah. Park­ing will be avail­able through des­ig­nat­ed en­trances on the west­ern side of the Sa­van­nah.

side via the Hilton en­trance, and the south-east­ern side at Tran­quil­i­ty Lane, where ac­cess is re­strict­ed to des­ig­nat­ed users.