Bisee Jazz Venue ESP Marks Six Years With Awards Celebrating St Lucian Music

Saint Lucia's home-grown jazz scene marked another milestone last weekend, when the Bisee venue Entertainment Sounds Productions staged its sixth anniversary celebration and fourth awards ceremony, an eight-hour evening of music that stretched from steel pan to family bands and ended with a lifetime achievement honour for one of the island's most respected panmen. The story was first reported by The Voice St. Lucia News.

The occasion was chronicled by veteran writer Earl Bousquet, who reported that the event at ESP, as the venue is known, gathered performers spanning at least three generations of Saint Lucian musicians. Bousquet, who has followed the island's jazz story for more than five decades, described each visit to the venue as feeling like a first, because the line-up always includes players he has never heard before.

Among the standouts were the National Combined Schools Choir, which delivered ten songs in English, Kwéyòl, French and Spanish under conductor Robert Renee, the only Caribbean conductor invited to a recent national concert in Venezuela hosted by the Simon Bolivar National Choir. Steelpan featured heavily: Alexius 'Bongo Light' Compton, who began playing with the Scrubb outfit at 17 and is now 66, performed on two tenor pans, while the multiple award-winning pannist Omar Gabriel, formerly of the St Mary's College band, also took the stage.

The youngest talent drew particular attention. Nine-year-old Rehani Chitolie, who first picked up a steel pan only two years ago, already holds overseas bookings for 2027 across several Caribbean territories. Mannaseth Edwards performed with an ensemble that grew from a quartet to a sextet during the evening, accompanied by his son Joel on tenor pan after just eight days of practice, playing Lord Kitchener's 'Pan in A Minor'. A young performer named Isiah also played a John Coltrane standard.

Awards followed. Denio Philip, a contractor who quietly converted ESP from a one-room space into its current double-sided venue and is now planning an 'ESP Theatre', took the first honour. The B-9 Rock Band received the second, and Marilyn Mc Donald, manager of the Babonneau Steel Band, the third. She then introduced Allison Marquis, described as Saint Lucia's finest steel-band arranger, as the winner of the 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award. The Babonneau outfit she belongs to has won nine national Panorama titles. The night closed with the resident Star Seeds family band, led by Empress Ila performing alongside her sons and daughters.

The venue sits in Bisee, on the approach to the north of the island, an area close to Rodney Bay, where visitors find the widest nightly choice of restaurants, bars and live music. Much of the island's music culture is Creole at heart, shaped by African, French, British and Caribbean influences, and expressed through the Kwéyòl language, food and community gatherings. Anyone attending a show such as this is hearing a living strand of the culture and traditions of Saint Lucia, not a performance staged only for the annual festival calendar.

For Bousquet, the evening confirmed how far the music has travelled. He traced the line from his teenage years at the home of the late pianist and former education minister Hunter J. Francois, halfway up Morne du Don in Castries, through Luther Francois leading Rasputin & The Mad Monks at the former Gaiety Club on Laborie Street, to Emmerson Nurse's band at the Halcyon Days hotel in Vieux Fort and the cassette that recorded the Morne du Don scene. Steel pan players, once looked down upon and heard mainly at carnival, now share the stage on equal terms.

The wider context matters to anyone considering holidays to St Lucia. The Saint Lucia Jazz Festival, launched in the 1980s as a strictly international jazz event, has grown into one of the Caribbean's most awarded annual platforms for all types of music, and it remains a fixture among St Lucia festivals. Yet drummer Ricky Francois, quoted in the report, argues that ESP is where visitors will find, week by week, the true Saint Lucia Jazz that the annual festival cannot offer, and he has invited the festival's organisers to visit on any weekend and hear local jazz they would never have imagined.

That weekly access changes what a visit can look like. Rather than timing a trip solely around the festival, travellers can build a stay around regular local sessions, with Rodney Bay's Friday Night Street Party, running for more than 50 years, and Dennery's weekly gatherings adding further night-time options. Every beach in Saint Lucia is public, even beside resorts, so a weekend can move naturally from Sunday church in Castries to an afternoon shoreline shared with local families, in the rhythm the island itself keeps.

Accommodation spans the full range, from boutique hotels in St Lucia's smaller properties to the many all-inclusive resorts in St Lucia that package music and dining together. Couples often choose a honeymoon in St Lucia around the southern coast near the Pitons, while families fill school breaks with everything from rainforest walks to snorkelling trips, adding live music on the nights in between. The choice of where to stay, whether among villas in St Lucia's hillsides or larger hotels in St Lucia's resort belt, matters less than how the island's creative life threads through all of it.

ESP's next project is the ESP Theatre, already in the works under Denio Philip, which should expand what the venue can host. Bousquet closed by crediting the foundation laid by Linton Earl Valmont, his former DJ colleague on the Page 7 Hi-Fi sound system, whose birthday fell on the night of the ceremony, and by praising Empress Ila's musical family. For a scene that began in a Castries living room half a century ago, the future, as the evening's theme had it, is now.

What comes next is clear: ESP will keep its weekly programme running while the theatre takes shape, and the awards will continue recognising the players, young and old, who carry the music forward. For visitors, that means the island's jazz is no longer something heard once a year at a festival, but something on offer every weekend in Bisee.