The Jamaican Observer
Dennis Morrison
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
At my teenage daughter's urging, I checked in at Sumfest last Thursday night to observe this year's staging of this event, which has taken root after its tentative beginnings in the early 1990s. To be truthful, I was also drawn by the heightened advertising and PR campaign that the promoters embarked upon this time around.
Like the last Air Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival, the campaign for Sumfest started earlier than usual, and I am sure this would have had a positive impact on attendance and sponsorship.
With all their hard work, I really hope the promoters made good money this time around, especially as the heightened campaign drove larger numbers to the show over the three final nights - Thursday to Saturday. The obvious increased private sector support for the event should also improve its financial viability, although some of the big-name artistes would have carried high price tags.
Advertising and promotion also don't come cheap. With greater private sector support, the call on the JTB is less, freeing up resources for other events that need seed money to get them going as we seek to expand the role of entertainment in stimulating visitor arrivals in the less active periods of the year.
It was quite clear to me last week that at the rate crowd support is going, Sumfest will soon outgrow the layout at the Catherine Hall venue, which has been home since its inception. The promoters must, therefore, start from now to plan proactively for the time when they will either have to expand the layout at the present venue or seek an alternative.
Over the next three years, thousands of hotel rooms will be built to the east and west of Montego Bay, providing a much enlarged, captive audience for the show. The new Greenfield Stadium in Trelawny, built as a multi-purpose centre to include entertainment, could well be the alternative.
For those who still doubt the extent of the growth taking place in the tourism industry, I should mention that we have had three successive years of record stop-over visitor arrivals since 2003, in spite of turbulent hurricane seasons, among other things. So far this year, we have seen record arrivals in nearly every month, such that for the period December 15 to July 21, stop-over arrivals are up 20.2 per cent over the previous year.
Following the blistering pace set in March, April, May and June, July has continued to surpass all expectations as the preliminary figures show an increase of 25 per cent up to the 21st of the month. To those who may say that last July was not a good month because of the arrival of hurricanes Dennis and Emily, I should point out that if we use 2004 as the reference, arrivals are still up 15.7 per cent.
As far as this year's show was concerned, the promoters of Sumfest have made one obvious innovation to the tradition where each night was dedicated to a different genre or sub-genre of music. Like Reggae Sunsplash, we are accustomed to there being a night for dancehall, one for international artistes and another for singers.
Mirroring the popular trend of crossovers between reggae and R&B and rap, this year's Sumfest had some major DJs appearing on Friday night instead of dancehall night on Thursday, and so on. This, like the crossovers in the recorded music, is a far cry from the 1980s when reggae music was hardly accepted in the African-American community, with not even Bob Marley being able to make a serious breakthrough into that market in those days.
The prospect of the reappearance of some artistes, who were sidelined last year because of the offensive aspects of their stage acts, had caused some uncertainty. There was, however, some measure of improvement in the artistes conforming to the code of conduct agreed by sponsors and promoters of these events.
Still, too many of the dancehall acts are restricted to a heavy reliance on profanities and sexuality. Of the group, Cham seemed to me to be the one least reliant on profanities, offering a more rounded presentation. The African-American performers, particularly 50 Cent, were among the worst offenders, to the point of boredom.
Meanwhile, deejays far outnumber singers among our current line-up of reggae artistes. And conversion to Rastafarianism seems to be a requirement for male reggae performers.
Reggae Sunsplash returns on the heels of Sumfest, having been absent for nearly a decade, and I am looking forward to seeing how well it does. It was known for attracting large numbers of tourists, and therefore I hope that the Ocho Rios tourism community will work closely with the promoters to get tourists out of the hotels and to the show. This way, the concern being expressed that there is no room for two such shows coming in so short a space of time would prove unwarranted.
The competition should drive innovation, and with innovation always comes progress. Speaking of progress, I must say that perhaps the thing that impressed me most at Sumfest is how the quality of our backing bands has risen over the years, a point noted by the more discerning of even my daughter's generation. Our musicians have come a long way since the 1960s when my schoolmate, guitarist Ux Brown, became one of the pioneers of the reggae beat
No comments:
Post a Comment