The Machel Montano factor

To describe Machel Montano's Carnival season as successful would be an understatement.

The soca star entered the Chutney Soca Monarch competition for the first time and won. The song, Pepper Vine, had a ground-breaking mix featuring Lady Lava, the "queen of steam," and the queen of chutney soca, Drupatee Ramgoonai.

Montano had given us a taste of his chutney soca flavour before.

His successful collaboration with Ramgoonai in 2000 on the hit Real Unity became the foundation music and concept for his 2015 cross-cultural film, Bazodee.

After beginning his career with Too Young To Soca, the 50-year-old Montano shows no signs of being too old to soca either, even if he is sometimes daunted by the women of substance that occasionally get on stage to wine on him.

He tied with Lord Kitchener for the largest haul of 11 Road March titles with this year's win. Before retiring from the International Soca Monarch competition, Montano had won seven times, five times in the upbeat Power Soca category, the milieu in which he has been a conquering force over the past two decades of Carnival parades.

Montano might not have seen it all, or done it all, in TT's Carnival but he has come closer than most to achieving a decisive dominance in soca across all its forms and instances.

Casual observers might be tempted to think that Montano is all about the fast-paced soca and shouts of "Huyyyy," but this is an artiste who understands that fun, work, and business must live in the same house for continued success as an entertainer.

In October 2024, he successfully earned a master's degree in Carnival Studies at UTT, having underlined his scholarship with a refreshed approach to calypso that took him to the top in that year's Calypso Monarch competition.

Montano has chosen to make generous financial donations and expressions of support during this year's Carnival season, but his contributions reach further into society than that.

Beyond the awards and accolades, he took the decision in 2017 to expand his involvement in music through Monk Music which has emerged as a market-changing presence in the music publishing and revenue-collection business.

Described as "artist-led and artist-focused," the record label, artiste services and music distribution company work to reward creators across all the diverse channels that digital music streams into.

As you might expect, Monk Music distributes his Pardy and Pepper Vine, but the distribution company also oversees Bunji Garlin's Carry It, Fay Ann and Syri Lyons' Road Meeting and Yung Bredda's The Greatest Bend Over.

In a marketplace that allows digital files to spread and proliferate on the internet, a potent central organisation that seeks fair recompense for the creators of popular Carnival music is an important intervention.

There may be reasons to dislike Machel Montano, but there are many more tangible instances of positive change that he has wrought that are both indisputably valuable.