Bunji Garlin, Fay-Ann Lyons-Alvarez and the Asylum Band issued a statement over the weekend to give their fans an explanation of their withdrawal Friday from World Music Night of the Tobago Jazz Experience.
“We have communicated with the media before, however we now detect an attempt to put a spin on the story that amazingly attempts to put our band in a bad light,” the statement said.
The band said the relationships between an event promoter and performers are governed by contracts and riders and are managed by good communications.
“From the inception of this relationship, communication from the Tobago Jazz Experience has been uniformly poor. The event manager has indicated that there may have been a communication problem, and he is half right, they did not communicate. No performance contract ever requires the performer(s) to make their own travel or accommodation arrangements, at least none that we have ever been involved with. One of our sound engineers, Mr Brewster, arrived in Trinidad to go to Tobago to help with preparing our sound on Thursday, as the Tobago Jazz Experience directed. We were therefore surprised to be informed that no accommodation was booked for him and the official who was assigned to room all guests was asking our management “why is he here today?” He was told that they did not know that he was coming. This was at least strange, given the fact that they booked his flight. At this stage, we attempted to contact the organisers with no success.”
Lyons-Alvarez said she finally got events coordinator John Arnold who said the requested hotel was not available.
“After a little discussion they said the whole band would be roomed at the Grafton hotel. Nonetheless, on Friday we journeyed to Tobago, we encountered no problems with the flight, although we had to end up arranging different ground transportation since the one that was sent for us had to leave as he has a government contract to pick up school kids. When we got to the hotel, we discovered that only five rooms were booked. At this point our four-hour ordeal started. Our management and the hotel attempted to contact the organisers,” Lyons-Alvarez said.
She added their queries were met with hostility. “We had much difficulty contacting anyone as had the Grafton Hotel staff. One of the desk clerks said they had been calling the event’s rooming officials for hours to clear issues for other guests under their purview other than ours. The following is a sample of the responses that we did receive. “so I must call the hotel and say what”; “so what I supposed to do for that” and “all yuh hutting up mi head and raising my blood pressure”. We wish to restate that we were in the lobby of the hotel for going on four hours before we decided to leave.”
Lyons-Alvarez said they could not check in all their band members at Grafton since the rooms were THA reserved and the rest of the band had to be THA approved in order to even enter the room.
“We have also noted that there is an attempt to suggest that we somehow inflated the numbers in our bad with joy riders. The band which publicly performed for all of Carnival 2014 is the same one that travelled to Tobago, using tickets that were purchased and booked by the Tobago Jazz Experience. For further clarity, the following is a list of the individuals who travelled, and their roles. one machine/percussionist, one drummer, one bassist, one guitarist, one keyboardist, three horn players, one back up singer, two engineers (one on stage, one on front house), two roadies (equipment handlers), one manager, two front line singers (Bunji and Fay-Ann), one media liaison (cameras),” Lyons-Alvarez said.
Lyons-Alvarez’s statement ended, “The Asylum Family is firmly committed “to run and take the microphone and just sing and make people proud” They however have little control over the vagaries of promoters. While they admitted that they did indeed mess up on the issue of party/rooming arrangements, we hope to see the false statement given to media by one of their officials that ‘the row was because they expected ten people but we showed up with 17 and that we wanted to stay where another artiste was staying’ be rescinded and corrected.”
The Asylum Family wishes to honestly and sincerely apologise to our true fans but an issue like this must never ever happen to anyone whether local or foreign.”