Bo­bie-lee Dixon

When Kees Di­ef­fen­thaller first graced the so­ca stage in the late 90's as lead vo­cal­ist of then cov­er band Im­ij and Com­pa­ny, he was an in­stant hit with the women. But Kees soon proved that he had much more than looks to give to the in­dus­try. A lit­tle guy with a huge voice, he was able to place the sweet­ness back in­to so­ca. Ini­tial­ly de­liv­er­ing ren­di­tions of songs sung by ex­ist­ing pop­u­lar artistes, the San Fer­nan­do na­tive even­tu­al­ly de­cid­ed to ex­it the cov­er band in 2005 to ven­ture in­to the for­ma­tion of his own, known to­day as Kes The Band.

Since then he has been mak­ing his mark in the in­dus­try. Tak­ing all gen­res and fus­ing them to make a "Kees Sound," Di­ef­fen­thaller has giv­en us pop, rock, R&B, reg­gae and tech­no ver­sions of so­ca-all much to the de­light of his grow­ing fan base. To­day Kees has been able to reach star­dom in lit­tle time. The reign­ing Groovy So­ca Monarch King al­so has to add to his list of achieve­ments, a nom­i­na­tion this year for a Black En­ter­tain­ment Tele­vi­sion (BET) Soul Train Award. To­day, the T&T Guardian is proud to fea­ture Kees as this week's So­ca Monarch Artiste of the Week. Look out for next Wednes­day's artiste of the week– Ben­ji.

His­to­ry

Born and raised in the south­land Kees, a for­mer res­i­dent of Palmiste San Fer­nan­do, at­tend­ed the Cedar Grove Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School and then Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, where he ob­tained sev­en Ones in CXC, two As and two Bs at A'Lev­els in Sci­ences. With those ac­com­plish­ments, Kees's par­ents want­ed him to be­come a doc­tor, but he had an­oth­er pro­fes­sion in mind-one he dreamt of as a child-to be­come a singer. This dream came true when he be­came the front-line singer of cov­er band Im­ij and Com­pa­ny. How­ev­er, in 2005, he ex­it­ed the band to form his own-Kes The Band which in­cludes two of his broth­ers.

Since branch­ing out, Kees has man­aged to achieve sig­nif­i­cant suc­cess on a world­wide scale! Along with his band he has re­leased sev­er­al al­bums, with more than a dozen tracks mak­ing it in­to the top ten of ma­jor Caribbean charts. Ad­di­tion­al­ly the band has won nu­mer­ous awards for song­writ­ing; toured glob­al­ly, per­formed at ma­jor fes­ti­vals and events in the Unit­ed States, Cana­da and Ger­many; opened for acts such as Sean Paul, Musiq Soul Child, Ush­er, John Leg­end, and Ri­han­na; and had their mu­sic fea­tured on tele­vi­sion shows broad­cast on MTV and BET, as well as li­censed tracks to pop­u­lar games on ma­jor video game plat­forms.

In No­vem­ber 2007 Kees was flown to Nashville Ten­nessee to work with mul­ti­ple Gram­my Award Win­ner Desmond Child. The song he co-wrote with Child was record­ed by Amer­i­can Idol Ace Young and is fea­tured on his self ti­tle al­bum. At the 2009 LA AS­CAP Con­fer­ence Kees was se­lect­ed out of hun­dreds to per­form at the show­case and left every­one clam­our­ing to meet them. Kees is cer­tain­ly cre­at­ing an em­pire for him­self. With a house­hold name, good looks and un­beat­able tal­ent, he is def­i­nite­ly here to stay and here to take the mu­sic of T&T to the in­ter­na­tion­al world.

• In­for­ma­tion on Kees gath­ered from is­land­mix.com and Face­book-Kes The Band.