 Bonsoir toot moon and welcome to the cocktail mixer in honor of our invaluable sponsors and local artists of the musical fraternity and creatives of the St. Lucia Jazz and Arts Festival 2023. We also want to thank the amazing leadership of the festival, Minister Hiller, the chairs and CEOs of the Cultural Development Foundation, Events Company of St. Lucia and the St. Lucia Tourism Authority, Jereyn. This is truly a dream team with competence, high value synergistic ties, wouldn't you agree? Very much agree. And the music and the arts committee, the artists and performers, you are here and you are the ones who will take to the stage over the next five and six weeks with your talent and your passion and everything that you will bring to this festival and infuse a life and make it the unique and a special experience that it is. Thank you for being part of the St. Lucia Jazz and Arts Festival. Tickets are on sale, stlucia.org forward slash jazz, but on Saturday we introduced tickets for children at a whopping 50% off the adult price. So just to clarify, if you're under six years old and none of you qualify by the way, then you would be free. But if you're between six and 12 years old, you qualify as a child, again, none of you because this is an adult only resort, 50% off the regular price. And please note they are only available online, as you mentioned, stlucia.org forward slash jazz. Correct. Now, Richard, I think there's more you want to tell us about the festival. Exactly because there are physical tickets and we do have quite a number of ticket outlets for you and quite a few of them are very, very central. So the sell outlets in Baywalt Mall, Castries, Souffre, V4, and we also have S.A. Wines in Gablewoods Mall, Steve's Barbershop, the Corner Boutique and Cafe at the I.G.Y. Marina, Rodney Bay, U.S. Polo in Castries, and of course the box office at Event St. Lucia. That is, by the way, just opposite the Island Effect and Big Chef's Steakhouse. So that should be very convenient, right? Now we also talk about ease of access to the festival this year. And one of the things that the organizers are really working towards is ensuring ease of access. We know how the traffic can back up really quickly. And so this year we are working in partnership with the St. Lucia A&C Ports Authority in ensuring that approved water ferries or approved water taxis can transfer residents as well as visitors to the festival and that is across the island. So whether you live in Labre, Viewfort, Marigold, wherever, we are working in partnership with Slasper to ensure that this is possible. Whether you can park your vehicle, jump on a vessel, get to the festival and get back home and not be as tired as you would be driving back home. I love that because the festival, the St. Lucia Jazz and Arts Festival 2023 is a destination wide festival. It's multi-generational, it really appeals to a lot of generations, and then certainly that ease of access is very, very important as well. So very, very exciting. We will remind you of the ticket outlets later on, but I think it's time for some entertainment. Absolutely. And at this time we call on none of the band. Let me do it, let me do it, let me do it because this performer, ladies and gentlemen, is a master class in St. Lucia, excellence and humility. He transcends genres, national boundaries and generations. A man and a master musician for all seasons. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the inimitable Ronald Boo Hinkson. He created a package dubbed Art and the City. Art and the City really highlights the talents that are very prevalent in St. Lucia. And we have packaged that into an exciting package that you, as St. Lucia's, as visitors can enjoy. And to start off Art and the City, we will commence with A Little Folk Tale. A Little Folk Tale is a musical written by two young St. Lucians, Jesse Myers and Monique Auguste. At the time they were students at the A level college. The CDF has further developed their work into a musical and that will be on display. The Little Folk Tale speaks to folk law, Caribbean folk law and I'm sure some of you who are old enough to understand about your grandparents speaking about the Bolom, the larger bless and a number of those characters, the Ghaji and all of that. That will be a musical and I'm sure you will be excited. You will be moved to see because this production was put on at Carrie Foster 2019 and we got raving reviews. So we are going to put that on at the National Cultural Center on May 7. This is the first event. On Monday the 8th, we will put on a matinee that will cater for schools all over the island. So we want our youth to be a part of this experience so we will also cater to schools across the island and young people that are interested. And that happens on the 8th. We also commence with the art square. The art square will be an art gallery with high-end art pieces. You will have clay work being done at the art square. You have live art, a number of persons you can walk through a gallery. The square is going to be created in such a way that you won't even believe that is where you are at. So we welcome you to art square. We take you into the central library where we are going to put on or celebrate St. Lucia's 2023 cultural icon, the genius jazz musician, Lufer Fossoir. We will celebrate him in grand style and we will start off on the 7th to the 11th with an exhibition of 40 years of Lufer's life in photo. He has been followed by a French photographer and that work will be displayed at the central library. And the central library when you visit there will not be what you know it to be. The place will be transformed into a gallery space and you will be excited, you will be moved. So we invite you again to that event. We move on to the Castree City Hall. We will have another gallery in there where we put on high end sculptures, high end art pieces. So that again would be very exciting. We have the likes of Jalen Yodovic and other aspiring sculptors who are going to display their work at the City Hall. That runs from the 7th to the 11th of May. On the 9th of May, we're going to bring you the Big Pan project. The guys have been working assiduously, training and preparing themselves for this event and you're going to see a mix of pan players from across the island and they have all come together to bring on the Big Pan project and they will be putting on a performance at the Derrick Walker Square on the 9th of May. On the 10th of May, we bring you lights camera fashion which is a high end fashion show that will feature the work of our Saint Lucian creatives, designers, models. We will also infuse international designers, Saint Lucians where they have been out there doing great things so we're going to bring them back home and we're also going to work with regional designers as well. So you're in for another wonderful treat and the venue for this fashion show is the pair at Laplace Carinaj and we invite you to join us on that night. You will be wowed, there will be fashion, there will be movement, there will be performance so we invite you to that event. On the 11th of May, we invite you to celebrate our cultural icon, our genius Lufa Faswa. He will be accompanied by a 15-man orchestra made up of players from the Royal Saint Lucia Police Band. He will have a French contingent, a Venezuelan contingent, there's a couple of persons from Israel, a player from Africa and he has just a whole team with him. Lufa is working hard, he's working every day to prepare for this event and his team is coming in and the rehearsals have started. So you're in for a wonderful treat on the 11th at Pigeon Island. You have on the 11th and the 12th, you have the craft and souvenir market. This is a platform that we're creating for our artisans, crafters. You have people like Christine Sanyal who makes bags, you have people like writers done French, all of those persons will be given a platform to just display their work and an opportunity for economic activity at the same time. On the 2nd of May to the 12th of May, we will bring you an educational component where we have a jazz musician, a professor from the University of Taiwan in Taipei who is going to do training with jazz musicians, aspiring as well as practitioners in the jazz business. We will be doing training with them and you will see coming out of that experience a fusion of Taiwanese and St. Lucian traditional music and you will be wowed. That performer is Cheng Cheng Chen and she will also be performing on main stage on the 14th and she is going to select the best persons out of that training with her to perform on main stage. You will also see the entire group of musicians performing at Art Square. Art Square also promises to bring you live performances from 12 to 2 daily and 7 to 10 so you are in for a treat. What you used to know at Jazz on the Square will come back in another format but you will be entertained daily so you can look out for that. Arts on the City promises to be exciting. It promises to wow you the fashion show. We also have Head Funk performing at Point Seraphim and they will bring you wording altered scale so you will see a lot of our St. Lucian poets and along with them they are performing for two nights and they will have with them two regional artists one on each night and they will bring you their best and it's not going to just be them just reciting poems. They have put on a whole production and you will be wowed. So we invite you to be part of Art on the City. It promises to be exciting. It promises to be riveting. So we ask you to come along and enjoy Art on the City. There's a lot to offer and we will not fail you. We will excite you. So this is Art on the City and we welcome you to transform a disrupted city and this is what we want to do. We want to disrupt Castro City so it will no longer be see Castro as it is. It's going to be transformed. There will be activity throughout the week from the 7th to the 11th. There will be activity all over Castries. So we want you to come in and to be a part. There will also be You Can Art where families get an opportunity to practice to be a part of the Art experience. So if you want to do painting somebody will be there to teach you. You want to learn how to do poetry. Somebody is going to be there to teach you. You want to learn to knock a few bits on the stove and somebody is going to be there to teach you. So it just won't be just events happening but there will be educational components that you can be a part of. I am planning to do a painting. I can't draw to save my life but I want to be a part of the experience. So we invite you all to be a part of this experience Art on the City. Thank you. On behalf of the St. Nusha Tourism Authority, I would like to welcome you for joining us this evening as we recognize and also acknowledge and thank our local sponsors for joining us and committing to a brand that we call something special to St. Nusha. For 30 years, this brand has been developed not just for enthusiasts who love music, who love entertainment but also a brand that has been developed for St. Nusha. And we'd like to at this point to thank all the sponsors who have committed to being part of this brand. Those of you who have recommitted and those of you who have committed for the first time. So I want to say before we go into the formal presentations of the sponsors, please join me in giving a round of applause to all the sponsors here tonight. As the official marketing agency for St. Nusha's tourism industry, it really gives me pleasure to say to you that we have made quite a few strides today in promoting the St. Nusha Jazz and Arts Festival. After we launched the festival and the announcement of the lineup in January, we have literally been on the road actively seeking enthusiasts to come to join us in St. Nusha. We've literally been around the world to invite enthusiasts come and enjoy something special in St. Nusha. Many of you here tonight have either been at St. Nusha Jazz Festival or perhaps a friend of you have been and maybe you have done some of the events in the past. But we are really proud that tonight that the festival has returned the Jazz and Arts components. My colleagues spoke earlier about the Arts Festival. So we're going into the musical components and you may know, but I just wanted to remind you of the stellar lineup that we have prepared. So from the 5th of May, we have the opening of Jazz and as we're going to the main events from the 10th. So we have Kingdom Night on the 10th. We have Pure Jazz on the 11th. On the 12th, we have Caribbean Fusion. On the 13th, we have World Beats and we end with the ultimate celebration where everybody comes together on the 14th. What does this mean? It means that this is something more than tourism for St. Nusha and more for the destination. We have been out promoting this event as something for everybody to be part of. Not just the music, but come to St. Nusha for an experience. Come to St. Nusha and be part of a St. Nusha experience. So we have been promoting and we also encourage you as a sponsor, as an agency, as a friend of the SLTA, as a media partner to continue to promote the festival and tell your audiences that it will be something special that we have in stock for 2023. The host here mentioned about the addition of the road map and the addition of also the water taxi map. So what we are trying to encourage, we still have some availability in some of the hotels and we want to let your audiences know that please, no matter where you stay in St. Nusha, we will have a water taxi to bring you over to the main event, to the signature event at Pigeon Island. So please tell your friends, your colleagues that it's something, don't worry about where you stay, they can get to Pigeon Island. We've also been around myself, the chair and the minister in improving connectivity. We've heard from you, we've heard from the sponsors and also our constituents that we need to better improve the connectivity. As we speak now, we are working very hard in securing even more seats, especially from the Caribbean. But we've been to the UK, we've been to the US, all over the US, Canada, we've been to the Netherlands, we've been to the French West Indies, we've been to the Caribbean, all in search of this festival goer to invite them personally to come to St. Nusha to enjoy this wonderful festival that we have prepared for them. So again, I just want to say again, we are really excited that we have a really great festival for 2023. As we look back into the stats, we noticed that the Jazz Festival is more than a ticket purchase. The average visitor spends about 800 EC dollars per day when they come to St. Nusha Jazz and Arts Festival. So we know that it is a valuable event. So we thank our sponsors for cooperating with us with this brand and coming along with us. So I just want to say again, thank you sponsors. Without you, we know it's tough years as you go post pandemic and we guarantee you that your investment is appreciated. It's going to go a long way into making the festival special, memorable and we do hope that with your collaboration, not just for the festival but also for the future, we will ensure that the clients, anyone coming to St. Nusha will have a wonderful festival. Tonight we have media, we have artists, we have sponsors and we also have collaborators with us. So it's a night of networking as well. So while you go around tonight, I want to invite you to please share a moment with us, enjoy the evening and we look forward to an amazing event and we look forward to seeing all of you as we launch the 2023 edition of St. Nusha Jazz and Arts Festival. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. I have to start by thanking the sponsors for making a commitment to the Jazz and Arts Festival for 2023. We're all excited about bringing back the festival. We know our solutions, we were particularly proud of what we had created over the years. For us, the festival was more than just music, it was a vibe, it was a lime, it was a moment for us to express our identity as St. Nusha, a moment for us to really see how we can welcome friends from around the region and far and beyond our shores. We were proud of what we had and of course many St. Nusha's were disappointed we've not had it for a few years and the team at the SLTA and events company of St. Nusha made a determined effort to put a lineup in place that would impress you, excite you and really say to everyone that you need to come back to St. Nusha because the Jazz Festival is back. In addition to this, in 2016 for the first time, we added an arts component to the festival and of course we are exceedingly proud this year to bring back the arts component. You would have heard Ramona earlier explain to you in detail all that will take place in arts in the city. We guarantee you that that experience will be one that you never could imagine that you would have had in castries. Imagine living point Seraphine, going to the Boulevard, going to the square, going to the library throughout the day, every day of the week leading up to the big weekend. I have seen the plans, I have seen all that is going to be put into place and I can assure you it will be a tremendous experience. And of course the sponsors that have been revealed here tonight, they have made a commitment to the success of the festival. We really want to say to you that we appreciate the commitment that you have made. We will continue to show our appreciation to you and we certainly look forward to your continued participation and support. So thank you very much to everyone, thank you very much. It's left me to really thank you for coming out this evening, for the extensive support that you have given the Jazz Festival. Senutia Jazz and Arts Festival is alive and well and we are buzzing. We are buzzing to the point that the VIP for Caribbean Fusion, which is Friday night and indeed Sunday, which is the ultimate celebration, is already sold out. And that is how to show you the enthusiasm and excitement about the festival. There are some physical tickets around the place. We've spoken to events in Senutia. We forbid to increase the numbers in VIP, but for now what we have is sold out. Ticket sales have been excellent. The bookings into the island have been excellent. The excitement about the festival is great. We do have Cabanas, which most of them have already been sold and some available and you can contact events in Senutia, indeed Senutia Tourism Authority to see what's available. The festival, as you've heard the artists, you've heard the lineup and all I can say to you now is get your tickets, be part of it, be part of the festival. You may have heard it before, but for us at the Senutia Tourism Authority, the festival means lots of things to us. First of all, it means marketing the country as Brands and Lucia and using the jazz festival as a brand. But also we've fallen under the umbrella of Ministry of Tourism and Creative Industries and we are here to support our creatives. So we give them the platform to express themselves in front of an international audience and be able to open up a festival as well for international musicians. So it gives them time to express themselves. So it's all part and parcel of development of artists on the island. So we are proud of what we are doing and we are proud of the investment we are making in our people and indeed in our marketing efforts to bring more visitors to the island. So I want to say once again, thank you very much and go out and get your tickets because they are going quickly. As you heard earlier on, we have tickets at the sell outlets throughout the island. We also have at the marina, at the corner and on the corner cafe at the marina. We also have the popular spot of Steve's Barber Shop, that's available as well. And the US Polo on Jeremy Street in Cassius is also available. So go on and get your tickets because they are going quickly. And I also want to announce that with the opening of the festival on the 5th of May, which is at Minofili Park, for the first time for our festival, we are having a VIP section, which has been curated by events in Lucia. So look out for the VIP section and it will be exciting. There will be lots of fun in there and lots of things to be had in there. So once again, thank you very much and continue supporting the jazz festival.