Melis­sa Doughty

When T&T cel­e­brates its 50th an­niver­sary of in­de­pen­dence on Au­gust 31, Di­vine Echoes may not be heard. The con­tracts of mem­bers of the state-run or­ches­tra will have ex­pired by then and will not be re­newed. Di­vine Echoes, formed in 2007, is the brain­child of for­mer prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, who at­tempt­ed to re­vive the "big band era."

A Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial, in a tele­phone in­ter­view on Mon­day said Di­vine Echoes had not been dis­band­ed. The source said the band, which is based in Char­lieville, Ch­agua­nas, has been play­ing in dif­fer­ent ar­eas, as well as teach­ing mu­sic in schools. When pressed about how much it costs to main­tain the band, the source re­fused to com­ment.

How­ev­er, Tam­ba Gwin­di, who re­placed An­tho­ny Williams in 2009 as the band man­ag­er, said he was in­formed oral­ly by the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter that con­tracts would not be re­newed af­ter next Au­gust 23. He has not re­ceived writ­ten doc­u­men­ta­tion say­ing so.

The band, he said, nev­er was in­vit­ed to per­form at any of­fi­cial Gov­ern­ment func­tions, even though Gwin­di made at­tempts to con­tact the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter. No one, he said, told the band any­thing about its fu­ture when the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship as­sumed of­fice. He be­lieves this is a great loss be­cause of the sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion it made to mo­bilise youths.

Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30 peo­ple will be un­em­ployed when their con­tracts ex­pire but Gwin­di has no fear for them. "They work on the wider cir­cuit in T&T. Life as a 'gig­ging mu­si­cian' will con­tin­ue," he said. For the band, how­ev­er, the fu­ture is now un­cer­tain. He added: "This was a great com­mu­ni­ty pro­gramme to keep youths off the streets.

"There were many stu­dents who came in­to the ban­d­room to re­ceive train­ing. Al­though we did not do for­mal train­ing, in a sense, we did work with school­teach­ers as well as CXC stu­dents." Op­po­si­tion MP for Port-of-Spain South, Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald, for­mer Min­is­ter of Cul­ture, in an in­ter­view out­side Par­lia­ment, ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment at not see­ing the group.

She said: "Ac­tu­al­ly I heard they are still around but they are not as vis­i­ble as they should be be­cause when I was at the min­istry there were lots of per­for­mances. "They are a fine group of young peo­ple and, be­lieve me, it was one way of har­ness­ing the youth. But I don't re­al­ly hear much about them any more." She be­lieved the pub­lic would miss the group if it was dis­band­ed.