3 Canal's Wendell Manwarren Carnival used to have an edge. It used to terrify, fascinate, enrapture. Go back in history and witness the “Jamette” carnival.
“Around the 1860’s the Carnival came to have a distinct character, the ‘Jamette’ carnival,” notes historian Bridget Brereton in The Trinidad Carnival in the Late Nineteenth Century.
“The jamettes who were the band members were the singers, dancers, stickmen, prostitutes, pimps and “bad johns” in general. They boasted of their skill and bravery, verbal wit, talent in song, dance and drumming, their indifference to the law, their sexual prowess, their familiarity with jail and sometimes their contempt for the church. In short, they reversed the canons of respectability, the norms of the superstructure.”
Rapso band 3 Canal has, over a decade, built a strong following with its distinctive blend of socio-political soca and rap. Amidst the increasingly anonymous soca now being produced annually for Carnival, the band has become a rare voice; an alternative to the purely ornamental dance music that often proliferates on the fete scene. But it has, ironically, done so by always going back to the basics of what Carnival was and should be, while at the same time experimenting with new melodies and musical forms tones.
This year, the band will maintain this tradition, but will also take a step in a new direction...READ more here .
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