WESTERN BUREAU:
MULTICAST ENTERTAINMENT chose Sunday and the Ashanti Oasis Restaurant in Hope Gardens, St. Andrew, to launch the Multicast Poetz debut album.
Being World Poetry Day, it was a good date for the launch and the Ashanti Oasis, containing and surrounded by flourishing plants, was a good place to send roots into oral and literary soil.
The launch was intimate enough to be done without a microphone, with hostess Barbara Blake-Hannah utilising the wooden bridge spanning the centre of Ashanti as a platform to outline the origins of Multicast Entertainment and the Multicast Poetz. She explained that the principals behind Multicast are her son Makonnen Blake-Hannah and Eric Dixon. "At CME 2002 (the Caribbean Music Expo) they learnt a lot about the business of making music and they decided to form a company," she said.
MAJOR CONTRIBUTORS
Blake-Hannah explained that "these young people making music and these young people writing poetry" got together through the instrumentation of two persons, "the godfather of the new poetry movement", Mutabaruka and Weekenz Tuesday Night Poetry organiser Connie Bell.
These young people writing poetry are Neto, who contributes 'Cruisin' Up The Waltham', 'Price of Paradise' and 'War Zone'; Marsha with 'Standing Here In Limbo', Takura with 'Jamaican Food', Steppa with 'Consider My Meditation' and 'Whe Di Music Gone' and Ginsu with 'New World Order' and 'The Plan'.
Mutabaruka contributes 'Flippity Flop' as special guest on the 11-track album and was one of three persons presented with a copy of the album on Sunday evening, the other two being Jamaica Federation of Musicians (JFM) president Desi Young and a Gleaner representative.
"We are doing something new," Makonnen Blake-Hannah said, referring to the project, promising that "it is the first of many things."
FEEL OF WRITING
The bridge also served as a stage area for four of the poets on the album to give a live feel of their work. Ginsu was up first and, after he expressed his feelings about being on the album and some humour about his hat covering his eyes he gave a rhythmic look into his purpose for writing, saying that:
A talk what a see
An all I see is hardship and
poverty...
What is good for you
Can be good for me
So why the racism and
inequality?
He used his hands to illustrate his poetry, his fingers fluttering down to illustrate the "collapse of the world's largest military."
"The journey of the word has been coming from a distance. Every time it get to rise to another level we give thanks," Neto said, before delivering his free flowing discourse on life, including the observation that "many pretenders to the throne/but Rasta know the real king." "So the scroll unfolds and the saga begins," he ended.
Takura was introduced as a farmer, a graduate of CASE in Portland, and he stuck to his
'livity' with Jamaican Food as he remembered "de morning after Gilbert, when we get a bowl a cornmeal porridge."
"So just let your medicine be your food/and your food be your medicine," Takura ended.
"A real grassroots ting. No mic. Word soun' haffi go loud, well loud," Steppa said, as he launched into The Finance. "De finance raise de pay of politicians/decrease de pay of paediatricians," Steppa said, also:
Reachin' out to de taxi operator
Who cyan survive by charter
Robot is him daily order
Getting pressure from police
inspector...
It was the first of two showings by each poet, between which Marc Johnson noted that music production house Shocking Vibes had contributed $100,000 worth of studio time to the project.
"I just want to ask everybody involved to make our contribution to the music positive, because we need it," Johnson said.
