'Seh Sup'm' ends 2010 season on a high

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Seh Sup'm, the monthly fusion of poetry and live music with its home at the Village Blues Bar, Barbican Road, St Andrew, climaxed its 2010 season with an excellent final show on Sunday night.

It was a standout not only because of the very strong guest performances, starting with Dr Michael Abrahams (who closed with a side-splitting 'Golden' transformational speech) and finishing with Tony Rebel - who claimed originating the term singjay and duly did a combination of deejaying and singing - but also because of the structure and timing of the event.

So November's Seh Sup'm started earlier than regular attendees would have been used to in the series, and despite extended performances by Mutabaruka, Queen Ifrica (both of whom spoke extensively between their pieces), and closing performer Tony Rebel, it never dragged.

It was also the second benefit M&N Foundation for Aspiring Youth show for the year, Maxsalia Salmon reporting that from the first one in March, they had been able to offer two scholarships to two postgraduate students at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Abrahams closed with laughs about hypothetical transformations in the country ("the national bird will be the John Crow, as this bird most accurately depicts the behavior of our politicians). But he was serious - deadly so - in Dis Can Work, about a woman who stayed in an abusive relationship till the fatal, acidic end, insisting against all advice that the relationship could work.

The group Triplicity, two of whom would later play guitar and drum for Tony Rebel in an impromptu jam, traced the downward trajectory of 'Helen', a once promising person who they now had to ask "what you selling girl". And in the open mic, the Kreativ Activis was scorching about the treatment meted out to another set of girls, 'Armadale: Children on Fire', closing with the statistics "one room, 24 girls, 14 mattress, one grenade".

Mutabaruka presaged his performance by saying "we have some observations that lead us to poetry". Some of those observations about migration (with people in New York packing barrels with cheap items to send to Jamaica), family (where people sit on "the sofa whe you owe fa" eating dinner), the promising duo of politicians and preachers, religion and Rastafari made for a riveting, rib-tickling, riotous between poem text.

Among the poems Mutabaruka did were 'The Monkey Speaks His Mind', 'Johnny Drughead', 'I Am The Man' and the closing 'The System is a Fraud'.

Yashika Graham was quietly intense, bringing a strong touch of poetry about relationships to the night, including Hard ("Make it hard for her not to smile and look back"). In one of the night's shorter performances, Graham also had room to advocate for change, promising "we will return for the deputy/for the left hand is no less guilty than the right".

Ifrica shed her shoes before going onstage and, in about the hour before she put them back on, she was militant, loving, scathing and persistent in her emphasis on the family and children. She announced that she is the ambassador for the Child Development Agency and explained the genesis of the song Keep it to Yourself - a song which, she said, led to the indefinite 'pending' status of her being named a UNICEF ambassador as some "concerned citizens" had said she was a homophobic gay-basher.

"I did this when a gay book was introduced in the curriculum in Jamaica," Ifrica said. "It is talking about defence of our children."

Every track, Lioness on the Rise, Iguana, the anti-bleaching Brown Skin, Heroes, Far Away and the closing Below The Waist, was delivered at length in Ifrica's fluid style to an eager audience, which appreciated the between song talks as much.

"Is a struggle to not be on every pan whe knock and every TV station and every phone company," she said.

And she observed that as Digicel has done a lot of branding in Half-Way Tree, "I would love to see a sign on the little shops, 'Did you hug your child today?' by Digicel."

Tony Rebel, closing the night, opened with the lament of "another bill again", and the singalong started early with Sweet Jamaica. He said he had planned to not talk much, delivering Just Friends and Fresh Vegetable, which the women especially loved, but some patter proved effective. Among that was his statement that he invented the term sing-jay, during his stint with Columbia Records, as he both sang and deejayed.

He did a good amount of singing on Sunday night, leading a chorale - and teaching some - on Night Nurse, a scaled down Triplicity providing the music. And he also sang tracks by Beres Hammond and Garnet Silk.

Rebel closed the night with If Jah is Standing by my Side in English then Spanish, also saying that he has poetry and would appreciate a chance to return to Seh Sup'm to do them.