Rolph IL Warn­er

At the first ever Vin­tage & Groovy So­ca Jam on Oc­to­ber 9 in Mi­a­mi, star en­ter­tain­er David Michael Rud­der had fans vir­tu­al­ly eat­ing out of his hands dur­ing an ab­solute­ly mem­o­rable per­for­mance.

In elite artis­tic com­pa­ny that in­clud­ed Scrunter, Swal­low, Win­ston So So, Al­i­son Hinds, Ken­neth (Rad­i­ca) Sal­ick, Ron­nie Mc In­tosh and Blaxx, Rud­der ex­celled in typ­i­cal fash­ion. For the oc­ca­sion, he chose Tri­ni To The Bone, High Mas, The Ham­mer, Mad­ness and Dust In Yuh Face, de­light­ing his le­gion of loy­al fans as he went from one se­lec­tion to an­oth­er at the pop­u­lar Mahi Tem­ple venue.

On his com­mand, they sang, they waved, and jumped; drown­ing them­selves in nos­tal­gia and mer­ri­ment. Rud­der gen­er­at­ed his inim­itable mas­tery with mu­si­cal di­rec­tor and key­boardist Je­re­my Led­bet­ter sound­ly and round­ly sup­port­ing him on stage. Scrunter, ren­der­ing Sing In She Par­ty, Woman On De Bass, I Am A Bach­e­lor and Jumbie, was very well re­ceived and so too was Baron, whose reper­toire in­clud­ed Feel­ing It, The Jam­mer, and Sweet So­ca Man.

Swal­low gave a great rep­re­sen­ta­tion of him­self with some of his huge hits like Fire In De Back Seat, Sub­way Jam, Wine On Some­thing and Par­ty In Space. Ent, How It Go Look and On De Road formed part of Ron­nie Mc In­tosh's very ex­hil­a­rat­ing and ex­cit­ing night's work.

The first-of-its-kind Vin­tage & Groovy So­ca Jam was pre­sent­ed by the Caribbean Con­nec­tion, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the CDC & As­so­ciates and Gem­i­ni Pro­duc­tions. Be­cause of its suc­cess­ful out­come, or­gan­is­er Mike An­drews lat­er re­vealed, "We are con­tem­plat­ing tak­ing the con­cept to Trinidad for the 2010 Car­ni­val."

On the night, the Roy Cape All Stars mu­si­cians, who pos­sess the en­vi­able ca­pa­bil­i­ty of sight-read­ing mu­sic, were able to pro­vide ac­com­pa­ni­ment for more than 30 ca­lyp­soes dat­ing�back through the years.

To mem­o­rise all of that ma­te­r­i­al would have been too Her­culean a chore, which em­pha­sis­es the need for the mod­ern crop of mu­si­cians to learn to sight-read mu­sic. The band start­ed the night's pro­ceed­ings with a wide-rang­ing reper­toire, which con­sist­ed of peren­ni­al hit ca­lyp­soes which were ren­dered by front­line vo­cal­ists Blaxx, Olan­tun­ji and Ri­ta Jones.�Bring­ing the cur­tains down was the Al­i­son Hinds Show with the Ba­jan so­ca queen do­ing an ar­ray of her hits. Iron Bazodee, and Roll It were among what she dished up for her fans, who wait­ed a long time to see her. Sad­ly, quite a size­able part of the au­di­ence had be­gun to leave the premis­es by the time the band-change was com­plet­ed.