Bakka Beach touts the music of the nation - Building nightlife for tourists, Jamaicans to mingle as one in St Ann
Published:Friday | March 6, 2020 | 12:00 AMJanet Silvera/Senior Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
Guardsman Hospitality is heating up nightlife in Discovery Bay, St Ann, with its weekly Friday night Bakka Beach parties, aimed at bringing community members and guests from the surrounding hotels together.
The aim, the group’s general manager, Laura Heron, told The Gleaner, is to have an intermingling where guests can enjoy elements of Jamaica’s six distinct music genres, local food, and learn the traditional and latest dance moves.
Heron’s brainchild, the idea she says was conceptualised in a bid to promote Jamaican popular culture to tourists on the north coast, who, unlike their counterparts who stay in Kingston, oftentimes do not get to experience the organic dancehall and popular culture.
In fact, Bakka Beach is a replication of fixed nightly parties in Kingston such as Stone Love’s Weddy Weddy Wednesdays, and Uptown Mondays, where tourists from across the world immerse themselves in the popular culture and learn the latest dance moves from Kingstonians.
At the Puerto Seco event, the resident deejays and St Ann-based selector Luigi provides the music which spans mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub, a musical journey which leads up to dancehall later in the night. Jamaican party staples jerk chicken, jerk pork and beer are also served.
“The concept is to really try and get our visitors to the island to integrate with the local communities in the same place and have fun and introduce our dance, our music – in particular dancehall – to them, which has become very, very popular internationally,” Heron told The Gleaner.
FAR REACH
“People don’t even understand the reach of dancehall and how far it has gone, so we are hoping that this kind of experience will lend itself to that, and allow the hotels to feel comfortable about letting their guests out of the hotel to mingle with the local community,” she added.
General manager of Puerto Seco Beach, Rory Baugh, a man renowned for his classical music prowess, is as excited about showcasing the Jamaican culture as his boss.
For him, Bakka Beach resulted from the tweaking of a Friday night series that had been taking place at Puerto Seco, but was “not pulling the crowd that we wanted to pull”.
His research, he said, led to Kingston where a subsequent visit to the Whopping Thursday party in the city proved to be a huge eye-opener, and provided the impetus for the naming of the Puerto Seco party.
“I actually saw a wonderful thing happening between the international visitors and the Jamaican at the parties public dancing and having a great time to our music, whether it be roots rock reggae, dancehall – everything,” he explained.
He noted that a friend took him to Whopping where he had an amazing time. Still in awe, Baugh said it was like a dance class out of So You Say You Can Dance.
“The Jamaicans were teaching the visitors how to dance. What I saw in Kingston was tourists from everywhere, from all over, ballet dancers, opera singers, musicians; these tourists will come to Kingston and they are staying there for days and travelling the island seeing everything that we have to offer,” he added.
He said over the coming months, Puerto Seco will be placing a lot of effort on improving the product.
“Each week we will expound and expand on what we are doing here and make it an entertainment venue for all. We want people to come out, have a great time ... . The music of Jamaica is the rhythm of the nation.”