FAS has eyes set on even bigger Reggae Festival

  

Barbadians in coming years could be enjoying performances by reggae acts not only from the region, but further afield during the Digicel Barbados Reggae Festival.

 

Such a possibility was disclosed by Director of FAS Entertainment Inc., Al Gilkes, as spoke about future of the annual event. 

 

“When you are using and reusing reggae performers from just out of little Jamaica, you tend to find yourself recycling and then people start saying, ‘I like him, but again? You bring him back already?’ So in my opinion, we have to look beyond now Jamaica and Barbados. This year we are bringing in someone from Guyana. We have to look across the wider Caribbean in terms of sourcing our reggae artistes.”

 

He added, “Unbelievably, we were introduced this year to a reggae group from China. The problem was cost of getting them here, but if you heard that group you would believe they were all Jamaican, singing pure, pure reggae; and we know for a fact that Japan has reggae groups unlimited… and we know that outside of Jamaica, the country with the largest number of reggae performers is Africa. So it would be a matter of, as I said, if we get the support to start sourcing non-Jamaicans, non-Caribbean groups to supplant and support those we will be bringing from the Caribbean.”

 

Gilkes was speaking to the media during a site visit at one of the upcoming show’s three venues. He said he is “very happy” that the “Digicel Barbados Reggae Festival has definitely grown bigger than Barbados. It is now international in all sense of the word.”

 

Looking even further ahead at the possibilities of developing the Festival, Gilkes stated, “Sometime down the road, I would like to see it expand from being just a Reggae Festival to probably being a Reggae and World Music Festival, which would make it easier for us to fill our stages with a variety across the board of different genres of music. So that instead of just satisfying a specific number of persons, we can satisfy perhaps half of Barbados.”