Araine Wint

She’s hardly bigger than the students she teaches at Shortwood Practising Primary and Junior High School in Kingston. But don’t be fooled by her size; at five feet two inches Araine Wint packs a mighty punch. On our way to the interview room we run into a group of female students involved in dubious behaviour and one stern word from the 24 year-old graduate of the Edna Manley School of the Visual and Performing Arts is enough to make the girls (who incidentally all tower over her) straighten up and shuffle shamefacedly away.

And is it any wonder that she has such a strong influence? She does, after all, play the drums, one of the more difficult instruments of the percussion family.

“I’ve always played drums,” relates a smiling Wint. “Ever since I was a child.I went around the house always beating on things.” A fact her grand aunt, Pearl Barrett, the woman who raised her, can attest to. “They (her mother and grandaunt) couldn’t understand my desire to play the drums,” Wint says with a laugh. “But the rhythm always called me. They would have wanted me to perhaps become a doctor, but the fact is music is a science.”

The last time All Woman spoke to her in 2001, Wint was one of the drummers for the band Zinc Fence and in her first year of studies at Edna Manley, where she was studying Caribbean Latin American and Jazz (CLAJ). Since then she has graduated and has played in backing bands with the group Yard, the Women in Reggae series and various old and new artistes, including Lady G, Jana Bent and Nadz.

No longer with Zinc Fence, Wint is now settled in her role as teacher, which she considers one of her biggest accomplishments to date. She is the music teacher for the entire Shortwood Practising. At Shortwood, the multi-talented Wint, who believes she has a ‘gift for teaching’, mentors the school band and teaches percussions, recorder, piano as well as music theory to grades two through nine. She speaks with warm pride of her students, some of whom she calls ‘really talented.’

Headmistress for Shortwood, Evelin Gyles, gives Wint a ringing endorsement calling her a ‘hard worker’, who has, in two years, ‘awakened an appreciation for music in the students’.

A lot of other things have transpired for Wint, too, not the least of which has been touring Europe with the performing arts group Ashe (with whom she dances and plays drums) gaining some foreign exposure and playing this past summer in various locations in Harlem and Greenwich Village. She was also accepted into the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, which boasts such local alumni like music wiz Peter Ashbourne and Shiah Coore (son of Steven ‘Cat’ Coore), bassist for current dancehall sensation Wayne Marshall’s Marshall Arts Band.

Big things indeed for the diminutive Wint, whose main focus is now on raising funds to pay for her tuition at Berklee, where she will be heading come January 2004. A good school, however, comes with a heavy price tag and for Wint, who did not apply for a scholarship, that price tag is formidable. At a whopping J$1 million for the first year (excluding boarding etc), the money is tight.

This, however, isn’t a deterrent for the ambitious Wint, who is determined to reach Berklee. “I will go, and I will succeed,” she states emphatically.

There she has ambitions of studying music production and engineering and doing a double major in Drums and Music in Education. “Why I want to go to Berklee.we have musicians (here) who are talented but at the same time they don’t have something behind their names,” Wint says. “Here, Edna Manley (school) is it.there is not another level if you want to improve on your skills. At Berklee, you’re offered a degree.”

To this end, the enterprising Wint has been staging fund-raisers in the form of benefit concerts, with the latest one scheduled to take place at the Village Café on Tuesday, December 23 at 10:30 pm.

“To be honest, I don’t see half of the money yet, but I’m going,” says a confident Wint. She has already paid a deposit on the tuition and plans to obtain a loan as well as use the school’s tuition management system and work part-time to finance her endeavours.

Wint sees herself as a ‘Jamaican Sheila E’, doing big things and representing not only Jamaica, but women as a whole. The advice she has for young girls and people in general is “follow your dreams, the sky is the limit”..