REBEL Salute and Jamaica Jazz and Blues — two of Jamaica’s biggest annual music festivals — are staged in January of each year, less than two weeks apart. This year, with increased sponsorship support, Rebel Salute’s excellent line-up and extremely effective national promotional programme, guarantee the event, a broadening of its appeal and patronage from its core target audience of the healthy lifestyle and socially conscious reggae fans.

Over its lifespan, this event has shown steady growth, confounding the cynics, until it has now become the single largest paid, one-night event on Jamaica’s cultural calendar (contrary to the boast of others), with a large contingent of overseas-based attendees. Even more profoundly, that achievement comes despite the very weak sponsorship support from both the private and public sector, in the past. Hopefully, from a sponsorship perspective, the organisers are witnessing the beginnings of a reversal of this travesty. The irony is that during the same period, we witnessed other events obtaining much higher amounts of sponsorship support, even when their attendance numbers were obviously dwindling. Understandably, part of the reason for this, of course, is that some of the biggest sponsors of events in Jamaica are the manufacturers and distributors of alcoholic beverages, the sale of which is forbidden at Rebel Salute, thereby disqualifying their financial endorsement of the festival.

On the other hand, after achieving spectacular annual growth, when Walter Elmore and Turnkey productions initially took it over and introduced some technical and programmatic innovations, right up to a high benchmark point, the year Kenny Rogers performed, in recent years, we have noticed what seems to be a waning of patronage overall, and an even more apparent decline of the overseas contingent, attending the Jamaica Jazz and Blues Festival. Quite frankly, with the current line-up of artistes released so far, I suspect that those numbers will be even further eroded this year, unless there are more musical superstars to be announced by the promoters.

This festival however, while I am sure could do with more sponsorship support, fares better than all others, relatively speaking. For instance, annually, they receive the largest slice of the Tourist Board’s sponsorship funds. While endorsing that support, I would like to see Reggae projects like Rebel Salute being treated more even-handedly, having demonstrated their ability over the years, to attract numerous visitors to the Island as patrons of these shows.

Historically, the strong point for both festivals has been their ability to successfully market a wholesome, enriching experience encompassing much more than that which occurs from the stage. The Barrett family is now strategically reaching out for a broader constituency, having consolidated its base, by the use of such popular acts like Mavado (performing under his given name, David Brooks).

In my view, Walter and Jazz, by using a similar strategy, gained an initial fillip with his pragmatic approach of diversifying the composition of his line-up, even against the objection and vocal opposition of the Jazz purists. Now however, he has so diluted the original concept (and experience) that, without some mega-stars, with sufficient pulling power in Jamaica, he runs the risk of a significant fallout in spectator support this year, because a lot of the original core group have already stopped coming.

Clyde McKenzie spoke about this business concept and marketing strategy in his column last week in analysing what went wrong at Sting recently. Watching patrons being interviewed as they exited the park, what struck me were the variant spins that were put on a central theme of why the event did not live up to their expectations. It all seemed to amount to a lack of hostility and physical abuse, either between performers, or from the crowd, aimed at particular performers. One lady went as far as to say “can you imagine a Sting weh not even one bad wud no cuss! It pap dung man!” In other words, the vibes was too nice, or put another way, Vybz Kartel, Mavado, and the old warrior Bounty Killa were missing. This simply means that Sting has built for itself a unique audience with expectations, and Mr Laing and company will have to decide if they wish to continue to ‘give the people what they want’, in the meantime, pandering to the lowest denominator.

Email: che.campbell@gmail.com