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Posts tagged: Machel Montano
President & Monarch: Machel Montano In The White House
June 23, 2011
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Words by Jesse Serwer
Brooklyn Labor Day and Caribana get all the hype but there’s a massive Carnival in Washington, DC, too. Machel Montano can be counted on to make a show-stopping appearance at the fete, held annually on the last Saturday in June, as he does most every year, but that’s not the only reason Trinidad’s reigning Soca Monarch be in the US capital this weekend. Friday morning, from 11 to 12:30, Montano will perform at the White House, where he’ll be a guest of the Obamas at a late, yet well-timed, luncheon in honor of National Caribbean American Heritage Month. Details on the event are scant but we imagine wine is on the menu.
Post-Game: Trinidad Carnival Roundup
March 10, 2011
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Words by Eddie STATS Houghon and Jillionaire, via The Guardian UK
Through the kind links of our UK correspondent Gabriel Heatwave of the London-based Heatwave crew Jillionaire and myself were tapped to provide the Guardian newspaper with a breakdown of the goings-on and getting-mads at this year’s Trinidad Carnival. We have reposted the column in full below, including the tunes that won the various titles in the Soca Monarch constellation. Since this went up on Tuesday, however, Machel Montano’s “Advantage” (as predicted!) also took the Road March title, winning the hearts and minds of the people in addition to the all-important judges panel and completing his massive comeback to the Carnival stage. If these J’ouvert monsters and the Tony Tempo and Heatwave carnival mixes included in Mixtape Mondays are not enough to satiate your soca hunger, you can also download the Extreme Soca Mix from Massive B’s resident Trini D-Life below and rave out while you read…
Media Watch: Machel Montano + Trinidad Carnival on NPR
March 7, 2011
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Words by Jesse Serwer
Sundays in the Serwer household rarely start before 1 PM. It’s immaterial whether Saturday night involved late-night partying or re-runs on the couch: This is when I catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get during the work-week, often with public radio playing unobtrusively in the background (Late-night BBC news broadcasts are a great alternative to counting sheep). Around 9:30 a.m. yesterday morning, however, I was startled from my standard Sunday morning stupor by the manic sounds of Machel Montano’s “Advantage,” followed by what my half-alert brain registered as a Trini accent. Turned out that soca, Trinidad carnival and Machel himself were the subjects of a segment on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. You can listen to the piece, which contains interviews with Montano, Fay-Ann Lyons, Bunji Garlin and Kes the Band’s Kees Dieffenthaller and was produced by Caribbean music critic Baz Dreisinger, below, or read the transcript over at NPR’s website. Also on their site is a companion piece running down the hottest tracks of this Carnival season. Of course, we already hipped you to most of these in our own Carnival 2011 preview, two weeks ago, though.
