Kees thrills with winning combinations

KES The Band’s Tuesday on the Rocks (TOTR5) concert was part fete, part concert and part musical showcase of the best of not just TT, but Caribbean music.

The four-hour-long event, which took place at the O2 Park in Chaguaramas on Tuesday night, started with the slow and sweet crooning of the band’s most popular Carnival 2018 offering Hello, and ended with the roll of tassa and a rhythm section as thousands streamed out of the venue at 2 am. It was everything that happened in between, those four hours that made the show unforgettable. The lyrics promising “that sweet type of love” were a harbinger for that sweet type of soca that saw couples swaying, friends embracing and smiles spreading contagiously from person to person.

The concert, named after one of the band’s 2018 contributions, When we Combine, reflected a night of perfect pairings, starting with Kees’ performance of his 2017 hit Work Out with soca artiste Nailah Blackman. Kees introduced Blackman as not the future of soca music, but the present. Blackman also performed her 2018 song Sokah and teased another of her tracks, O Lawd Oye.

Not long after Blackman left the stage, Kees introduced another soca crooner, Erphaan Alves, who had perhaps the best love song of the season with his track Overdue.

The early part of the show proved the ultimate sing-along, as the audience sang most of the tracks word for word, and many of the bands’ collaborative choices for the concert proved crowd favourites.

Bajan, Marzville, gyrated and put on a bit of a strip show as he sang his hit Give It to Ya and similarly, St Lucian – Teddyson John asked the crowd to “give him some of that.”

A highlight of the show was seeing Kees and Kerwin Dubois reunite on stage for the sweet groovy ode to TT as the Carnival capital of the world, Feteland, and Du Bois’ own instructive song Touch Down.

The event was well-paced and well-executed, from the TT flag pop-up during Kees’ performance of Where Yuh From to the paint mixture on screen during the performance of When We Combine.

Despite appealing to patriotism and asking fans to remember “who they are and where they from” and asking that they help change TT for the better, the show was distinctly Caribbean. “They want to say all kind of things about TT. I want you to remember who you are. We will change things one heart at a time,” Kees said, before taking fans back to one of his earliest tunes, One Day.

He introduced Norwegian duo Nico & Vinz, who gave an energetic performance, but it was Jamaican sensation Wallace Wilson, “Red Rat,” who took the crowd back to the sing-along mood with his 90s and early 2000s hits.

After the dancehall segment it was back to soca with Patrice Roberts, Shal Marshall, Problem Child, Sekon Sta and Voice as the band showcased the best of soca in its best setting. The repeat performance of Hello prefaced a tribute performance to Black Stalin along with soca artiste Blaxx. In the end, Kees, who refers to himself as a Caribbean man, left the stage after waving a flag made up of flags representing all of the islands from the top of the archipelago to TT at the southern end.