Caribbean Music Awards to shine spotlight on Caribbean stars … – Loop News Caribbean

On August 31, musicians, artistes and other creatives from the Caribbean and its diaspora will be honoured at the first Caribbean Music Awards.

Set to take place in New York, the CMA will honour the region’s best across categories such as Artist of the Decade, Collaboration of the Year, Music Event of the Year and Video of the Year among several others.

Special awards will be given in the categories of Lifetime Achievement, Elite Icon, Humanitarian, Producer Honours, Calypso Honours, Entertainer of the Year, Social Media Personality and Kompa Honours.

Machel Montano will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Beres Hammond will receive the Elite Icon Award and Buju Banton will receive the Humanitarian Award.

The awards are being staged by Caribbean Elite Group, publishers of the Caribbean Elite magazine.

“We started with the magazine approximately four years ago. During that journey we realised the lack of representation on the international stage for our artistes so we felt a need to create a platform that gives Caribbean artistes their flowers and highlights them on a global level and just show the world how powerful our music and culture is,” said Dane Taylor, a member of the three-member team leading the event.

Stating that there are other big award shows such as the Grammys, Taylor said many times Caribbean artistes are shortchanged because the focus is not on Caribbean music.

King of Soca Machel Montano will be honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award

He said they want to bring the same level of quality to the space and celebrate our own at the highest level.

The team assured that the production would be a quality one and experts who have worked on other award shows have been enlisted to assist in the execution of the event.

“We all have an entertainment background so it has been seamless with the artiste and creative parts. The award show part is where we are bringing top execs from different projects. The whole thing is about elevating the Caribbean and getting the word out there on a global scale so we wanted to bring in people from different shows on different aspects such as lighting and production,” said Prince Ford, another team member.

When putting together the concept for the award show, the team really wanted to ensure as much of the region was represented. Apart from the more popular genres such as dancehall, reggae and soca, the awards also embraces Kompa and Zouk, popular art forms from the francophone Caribbean. Over time the number of categories may be expanded to include other music genres as well as non-music nods to best Carnival band and fashion designer.

For this year’s nomination process, the team cast a wide net including their own subscribers. Following the pre-voting round to determine the nominees, the voting was launched. Over 100,000 votes have been registered.

Interestingly, the new artiste categories were the first to have high numbers of voting.

“It is them just being excited to be nominated. They went out really early with announcements about their inclusion and some of the veteran acts started to see some of that engagement,” explained Monique Blake, the third member of the team.

Ding Dong will be among the performers

They acknowledged that some of the nominees would probably seem controversial and fuel debate but stressed that they want to be fair.

“We know everyone is not going to be happy, everyone will have an opinion who should be in the categories but one of the things we really wanted to be intentional about is to keep it open. For instance there is an undertone that dancehall only happens in Jamaica but there are artistes like Nelly Cottoy who are dong their thing in Trinidad and representing dancehall as well and we can’t leave those artistes out because of preference. We have to be fair. If we get in trouble for being fair I am fine with that. I rather be fair and include everyone rather than not include everyone,” Blake said.

Noting that there are Caribbean people who sing other genres that did not originate in the region such as Gospel and R&B, they said they do intend to expand the categories next year.

“Why shouldn’t our artistes who make gospel be part of the larger conversation? If there is a world where what we are doing could build a bridge to start to move some of our artistes out  of just the Caribbean space into a global, other genre space coming from our culture then that is one of the main ways our artistes and our music and our sound can get out there,” Blake added.

She said a lot of record label teams would be in attendance and they have had a commitment from over 100 artistes to be present at the show.

 “I don’t think there is ever a situation where so many artistes from so many cultures have been in the building at the same time. That is one thing I want to see,” said Taylor.

“This is for our culture,” declared Blake, the third member of the team. She said having so many artistes there is very significant for Caribbean people, especially the younger ones who may know the music but aren’t familiar with the personalities.

Presenters for the event include Spice, Toni Anne Singh, Kabaka Pyramid, and Crissy, and there will be performances by Lila Ike, Nailah Blackman, Alison Hinds, Kai, and Ding Dong Ravers, among others.

Wyclef Jean will host the show, which Ford warned will not be a staid affair.

“I want people to know it’s not just a sit-down award after award after award. We want people to know they will be entertained, it’s a night of celebration, it is gonna be one of those situations where our culture will rise up and the energy will be there,” he said.

For more info on the Caribbean Music Awards, visit the website.