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Glendon Morris working on one of his pieces
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Big fish and the little fish
Staff Article
Interview Recorded: April 25, 2005
Posted: May 15, 2005
Coming back to the big fish and the little fish. Sponsorship is the most difficult thing to get especially if you are a small band. If you know a little bit about advertising, they look at numbers. How much mileage are they going to get with two hundred people? When you go to them is, "my quota is finished for Carnival already, I have given to this one and that one, I am sorry." That is the story right through. The size of our band is based on our style of mas'. If we were playing a bikini and beads mas' with the kind of dynamism as our committee has, you would find that we would be able to pull in the younger people.
The older people who usually play mas' are stopping now, and the younger ones are graduating to Poison. Look at 'Trini Revelers'; they were just a small band the other day and now they are winning left, right and center. That is because they have targeted the thirty-five and forty year olds; the middle-aged crowd, not the young people. We have problems even with that, because the people who contacted our band are sixty and sixty-five years old who know that kind of mas' from years ago. We have more or less accepted that and we decided to make a good band and have good fun in it, and if we get a few members all the merrier. My neighbors had two children twenty and twenty-two, but they were poor. I told one of them who helped me make mas', that she could play in our band and I would make a costume for her. She said ok because she couldn't afford to play mas' in Poison. On Carnival day, I have never seen such a sour face in all my life; she was bored stiff. The music didn't appeal to her because we were playing music to suit our Fancy Sailor Dance. She said, "I would never do this again."
Let me give you an idea about our type of mas'. Last year we played 'Golden Memories', which were things we saw fifty years ago. When we got down to Independence Square, the band was waiting for a long time to get across the judging area, so we decided to play back in times music with Joey Lewis and others. We were all holding on and dancing in the middle of the street because it was a back in times party. You wouldn't see that at Carnival time now, but that was how we felt, and we had a good time. This year we played Yuletide and when we were going across the stage, we were playing Scrunter's 'I Want A Piece of Pork For Meh Christmas'. We had fun and everybody appreciated it. That is the kind of mas' we bring out. To try and get increased membership would be very difficult.
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