Inaugural St. Lucia Music Awards, February 29, 2008

updated at 09:34pm on Friday, February 29, 2008  

  

St. Lucia to host inaugural St. Lucia Music Awards to coincide with Independence celebrations. 

The awards ceremony, which are being produced by Accela Marketing in collaboration with the Cultural Development Foundation (CDF), the Hewanorra Musical Society (HMS) and the St. Lucia Association of Musicians and Performers (STAMP) with support from BET J, is set to come off at the Gaiety Convention Center on Rodney Bay, Friday, February 29  2008.

A high profile host – who remains unnamed - and a star-studded roster of entertainment and business types will grace the stage for the formal, invitation-only live event during which twenty-three awards will be handed out to St. Lucian songwriters, artists and producers and at the end of a black carpet.  No red carpets in the Caribbean please!

Most significant for us here at the Collective is the prominence that the Jazz idiom will have on the night.  Recognition is, therefore, forthcoming for the Best Jazz Single of the Year and Instrumentalist of the Year.  While these are guaranteed wins for Jazz, we are also looking forward to seeing Jazz prominently featured in the other awards categories in the coming years.  

Awards will also be handed out for Band of the Year; Female Artist of the Year; Male Artist of the Year; Album of the Year; and Best New Artist of the Year, not to mention the Lifetime Achievement Award that will be presented to an individual who has made an outstanding long-term contribution to the St. Lucian music industry.

Created to raise the profile of St. Lucian performers and the music industry as a whole, the event organisers are hoping that the St. Lucia Music Awards will not only increase the sales of St. Lucian music, but also “…increase confidence among our artistes and increase visibility for St. Lucian music in the Caribbean and throughout the world,” to quote Lorine Charles-St. Jules, the St. Lucia Tourist Board’s Director of Marketing for North America.    

Enter BET J producers of St. Lucia Jazz.  St. Lucian national Cybelle Brown, BET J’s Vice President of Sales and Business Development, is lending a hand to their St. Lucian partners in realising their goals by inviting senior executives from J Records, Atlantic Records and Hidden Beach Recordings to evaluate the talent that will be on show during the awards. 

“We saw this event as a perfect opportunity to utilize our company’s assets and our contacts in the US entertainment industry to make it an invaluable experience for St. Lucian musicians and performers,” chirps VP Cybelle Brown.  “BET J has enjoyed a wonderful partnership with St. Lucia for many years and it’s just one of our many ways of giving back to the destinations we work with,” Brown added. 

“We are also on a mission to establish quality standards for the music industry, to encourage artistes who have potential for future development,” chimes Agnes Francis, Managing Director of Accela Marketing. 

St. Lucia Music Awards Nominees Announced

The list of nominees for the awards that are up for grabs was compiled by a seven-person panel comprising of individuals with  backgrounds in music, media and audio/visual production who were closely supervised by the accounting firm of KPMG.

In explaining the process by which the nominees were arrived at, Francis said that “most of the categories were judged on individual songs but the categories of Instrumental of the Year, Producer of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, Band of the Year and Album of the Year were judged on a body of work.”

There are some exceptions to that.  These are the awards for Best New Artiste, Female Artiste of the Year, and Male Artiste of the Year, and Favourite Regional Performer.  These will be chosen by public voting via text and online.  The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award has been selected by the Awards Committee on the basis of this person’s Volume of Work and Impact on the music industry.

The nominees for Best Jazz Single are:

Linda “Chocolate”Berthier   WINNER	Feeling the Vibe
Rob “Zi” Taylor	The Good Life
Carl Gustave featuring    Emerson Nurse	Plug Me In

  

The nominees for Instrumental of the Year are:

Rob “Zi” Taylor                   WINNER	The Calling
Carl Gustave featuring    Emerson Nurse	Plug Me In
RSLPB	Helen of the West

Go there for the full list of nominees.  For related stories, go there and there and there.