JCDC and National Gallery showcase new talent

Both the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) and the National Gallery (NG) clearly delight in presenting new artistic talent to the public. Recently, the two organisations, separately, turned the spotlight on creative writer, Rohan Facey and music band Ziah and the Pushaz, respectively.

Facey, a teacher at Camperdown High School, was revealed as the Best Overall Writer in the 2019 JCDC Creative Writing Competition during the awards ceremony at the Pegasus hotel on August 5. Ziah and the Pushaz played at the NG on Sunday in its monthly Last Sundays concert.

It is actually part of the JCDC’s mission to “unearth … and promote creative talents and expressions of the Jamaican people”, and since its formation in 1963, it has unearthed formidable talents who have gone on to make their mark on the world. This is especially true in the area of music, of course, but also with writers, and if Facey continues on his current path, he could also become known internationally.

He first entered the writing competition in 2009, then annually from 2014 to 2017. In that last year, he came in third with a Special Writer Award. His Best Overall Writer award, from the 600-plus entries this year, resulted from his winning the Best Junior Poem and Best Intermediate Poem awards and merit certificates for four plays.

I asked him about his writing habits. He tends to write early in the mornings before going off to school, reads voraciously, and loves to watch movies and listen to conversations. He writes, he continued, out of a need to express himself and “to be a voice for the voiceless, the abused, and downtrodden”.

Facey writes about human relationships, especially dysfunctional ones involving deception, domestic violence, broken trust, misguided love, people taken for granted and crime. Many of his poems are about murders.

He has a self-published book, The Unusual Echo, available on Amazon, and in the future hopes to write novels and scripts for film and television. His stories have appeared in newspapers, and he has been writing Christmas plays for his mother’s church in St Elizabeth for the past 10 years.

Another multi-award winner, Nardia Grant, came second in the competition, earning the Outstanding Writer award.

Music at the NG

You would never have known from the size and enthusiasm of the audience that Ziah and the Pushaz have only been together as a band since early this year. True, band leader and lead vocalist-violinist Ziah has played in public with individual members of the group, and they regularly jammed together at his house during 2017.

“I’d cook, and we’d make music whole day,” he told me.

The audience’s enthusiasm was justified. First, the reggae band – including Nicholas Beckford on bass, Shaqu on rumba box and congo, and Jae Jevaughn on keyboard – has an excellent sound. Ziah has an engaging stage personality, sings well, and has quite a bit of original material. He sang five of his own emotion-packed songs, namely Streets, Feels Like Home, Black Magic Woman, Heavyweight, and I Can’t Read Your Mind.

On his violin, much of the time while mixing with the audience, he played Michael Jackson’s Human Nature and Billie Jean and Chronixx’s Skanking Sweet. The audience lustily supplied the words.

Ziah told me that he has felt drawn to music since his days at Munro College (where he met Beckford), where he started “messing around” on the chapel piano. One day, he said, he saw a girl playing the violin, decided that he wanted to learn, and asked for her number. The number she gave him belonged to her mother, a violin teacher, who gave him introductory lessons. He learnt so well that straight out of school, he was able to get a job playing the instrument in a hotel.

Since then, all of his work has been in music, much of it studio work, producing and writing rhythms for other musicians. It wasn’t until he formed the band that he really started singing, he said, adding that the band will again be heard in September at the regular Jazz and Cabaret concert at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel.

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