Tallawah at 21

It is said that at 21, you’ve come of age – set to manifest all that’s been moulded…but this 21st anniversary year of the South Florida Tallawah Mento Band is a special celebration of a maturing Jamaican melody that has been, uniquely, a branded cultural expression.

Mento has indeed kept apace…and is still in place.

The band’s founder, Colin Barrington Smith, a registered senior who’s refreshingly youthful, has received national honours for outstanding contribution to the preservation of Jamaica’s folk culture and indigenous music– a man who simply towers. Multifaceted, music and art, he says, are his “stimulants”. From age four, he was at the top of his class in art – and in 1960, while still in high school at Cornwall College, one of his paintings was selected for a Commonwealth exhibition. At age six, his mother taught him the basics on an organ left to her by her father – and he would also develop a love for the guitar at age seven, listening to a man named Herbie Arnold (a name he would never forget) playing the instrument each morning coming from his girlfriend’s house – the same man who his grandaunt, a music teacher, would summon to play for her whenever she visited the family house in Woodlands, St Elizabeth.

From him likkle him tallawah…an artiste who plays the banjo, guitar, keyboards (the organist for three Lodges in South Florida) and the rhumba box. There are so many stories to tell.

HEIGHTENED ENTERTAINMENT APPEAL

It all started when Val Derby, Ernie Smith, Vincent Allen and Colin Smith, all members of the Jamaican Folk Revue choral group in South Florida, the group’s main complement of musicians, were rehearsing one evening. A coordinator of the Jamaica Independence Dance, passing by, was quite taken and extended an invitation for the group to play at the event. They had no name for their quartet and so took the stage as The Little Mento Band. Following their stirring performance the MC remarked, ‘Dem little but dem tallawah’ – the Jamaican idiomatic expression for being small, but strong and powerful.

The rest is history.

After a year and a half, Smith said, with the group now taking themselves “seriously” and becoming a staple on South Florida’s social scene, the Tallawah Mento Band expanded to include wind instruments (saxophone, trombone, flute). “It made a tremendous difference,” Smith added, which heightened the entertainment appeal to the rhumba box that had been brought from Jamaica by Vincent Derby and mastered by Smith, who had actually made one twice before to his specification, tunable with eight keys. The band has now grown to 14 members – 10 performing regularly. Flutist Trecia Powell, who joined after the fourth year, is still with the group – and three of the four founders, Colin, Errol and Val, remain members. The band has been blessed with periodic contributions of stalwarts, notably among them Keith Stoddart–performing for many years– the outstanding jazz guitarist influencing the acclaimed Ernie Ranglin.

PANAFEST – CORNERSTONE CELEBRATION

Smith, beams with particular youthful zeal, as he highlights the band’s special 21st anniversary event. The Tallawah Mento Band and the Jamaican Folk Revue have been invited to participate in the 25th anniversary of the Pan African Historical Theatre Festival (PANAFEST), being held from July 23-August 2, 2025 in Ghana by the PANAFEST Foundation under the auspices of the African Union and the government of Ghana.

PANAFEST has long been a cornerstone celebration of African unity, heritage, and culture, providing a platform for Africans and the global African diaspora to come together in solidarity, creativity and dialogue, with the theme for this year’s event being ‘Let Us Speak of Reparative Justice: Pan-African Artistic Activism’. The band has been having tri-weekly rehearsals for a special fundraising concert on June 21, Juneteenth, at the Lauderhill Performing Arts Centre. Additionally, promotional presentations are being made to community organisations, including churches and alumni associations, to encourage support and attendance at the concert.Smith cannot keep still when talking about this event. It will be the second ever Jamaican act, with Rita Marley performing at the Festival in 1994. The groups (Tallawah / Folk Review) will be travelling from July 19-August 3, accompanied by the famed dub poet Malachi Smith. On August 1, at midnight on Emancipation Day, they will be performing at the Reverential Night Concert, doing revival and market songs…and hits of Bob Marley and The Wailers and Jimmy Cliff. They will also be performing at the Gate of No Return, to be renamed the Gate of Return, symbolising Africans returning home, and are to be featured at both dungeons that were holding areas for slaves before the transatlantic journey and at the River, where slaves had their last bath before departing. PANAFEST 25, indeed, is reopening windows to our souls.

And what of the future? What more is there to be done?

“More master classes,’ he says, ‘for youngsters to play the music and carry on the tradition…and the likelihood of more fusion with prevailing music forms. On a tour of South Africa, I heard the group Culture’s Ganja Time to mento music’s Mango Time; and there’s a leading DJ who has a hit to mento music. It’s not isolated.”

If the origins of mento, which some say comes from the Spanish word mentar (‘to mention’, and ‘to call out’, because of the subtle ways in which mento music is a critique of the community), then it will never be isolated.

Mento will indeed keep apace…and maintain its place.