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Gregg Truman<br />
The first year on the evening of the main<br />
show at Rosehall Greathouse, rain was<br />
pouring down like it can only in Jamaica.<br />
We were experiencing almost Monsoon-like<br />
conditions, but the acts were going on until it<br />
was time for the final act – the Isely Brothers.<br />
The limousine brought them from the hotel to<br />
the parking lot close to the stage. Ronald Isely<br />
looked down and between the parking lot and<br />
the stage was a mud lake. He said “I am not going<br />
down in that. I am not getting my alligator boots dirty<br />
in this mud! What were we going to do? We ran back to Sandals<br />
and brought hundreds of towels from the laundry room and<br />
laid them out for him to walk on so he wouldn’t get his boots<br />
dirty. His performance was amazing!<br />
Marcia McDonnough<br />
I remember that year at Rose Hall<br />
Greathouse when we had to mount<br />
TV sets in the trees for one of the<br />
qualifying games for World<br />
Cup Football. The match was<br />
underway, the tension was<br />
high; Jamaica needed a goal<br />
to win. Black Uhuru was on<br />
stage singing “Solidarity”.<br />
When it came to the part of the<br />
song that asked, “What we need, what we<br />
need? the crowd shouted, ‘A GOAL”. Sure<br />
enough, just after that we scored and were<br />
one step closer to qualifying for the World<br />
Cup. Everyone was ecstatic!<br />
My other memory of the later years was Celine<br />
Dion’s sound check. She came into the stadium<br />
in the evening before the show and came on<br />
stage for her sound check.<br />
She looked around and saw everyone getting<br />
the grounds ready…putting out chairs, putting<br />
final touches to the booths etc. She called<br />
out to everyone using the mic and said..”<br />
hey, everybody come closer”, and then she<br />
started the sound check. Her sound check<br />
was fabulous and everyone in the stadium<br />
had a wonderful time. About a week later<br />
someone I knew saw me and said, “Bwoy<br />
Marcia, I was so happy that I came early and<br />
saw Celine’s early show”. Of course, I didn’t<br />
know which early show she was talking about…<br />
only to realise that she thought the sound<br />
check was actually an early show. Celine was<br />
just awesome in every way.<br />
I can't speak about Jazz without mentioning<br />
Walter Elmore. Even though I had worked with<br />
the festival from inception as a member of Air<br />
Jamaica, it was Walter who truly brought me<br />
into to the full production and management of<br />
the event when he took it over from Air Jamaica.<br />
That started the most wonderful journey for me as it<br />
went from conceptualising the look and feel, figuring<br />
out who the artists should be, developing relationships<br />
with the sponsors and so much more.<br />
Walter has a gift for figuring out the production of large<br />
events. He would go to an empty piece of land… full of bush<br />
and trees, and he would say, “Marcia see the stage over<br />
there, the skyboxes facing that way, and the food court in<br />
that space” and the venue would come to life on the bushy<br />
piece of land as he described it. It was amazing.<br />
I remember when we had to move from Rose Hall Aqueduct to<br />
the Trelawney Stadium, and we agonised over leaving Montego<br />
Bay and going into Trelawny which seemed so far away. We<br />
decided to call it Greenfield Stadium so that it wouldn’t sound<br />
so far. And within weeks we did a full campaign with digital flyover<br />
and all, to get people comfortable with the idea. When we<br />
finished setting up the stadium with all the skyboxes and the<br />
booth layouts etc, the transformation was amazing.<br />
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