Nailah wants to bring renewed energy

FROM the wellspring of Garfield Ras Shorty I Blackman, Nailah Blackman has come. The musical root of a family of musicians sprouting from the life and work of one often regarded as the father of soca. The 19-year-old is walking in the footsteps of her grandfather and has given her first offering to soca .

Blackman’s Workout done collaboratively with Kees Dieffenthaller has become one of the more popular song out for Carnival 2017. It is the first of many to come, she said .

Like Ras Shorty I, Blackman hopes to put her own stamp and sound on the local genre. Blackman’s root also springs from mother and calypsonian, Abbi Blackman and father Carlyle Thornhill (a manager and writer in the music industry). He managed her mother and uncle, Dereck (OC) Blackman .

Blackman’s music journey began at an early age, four to be exact .

“Music started for me at a very young age. I started singing in public at the age of four-years-old. My dad would write calypsoes and my mother would compose them and I would go to many different calypso competitions such as NJAC, national competitions, school competitions .

There are competitions everywhere around Carnival time and even just in general that I would do from four till high school.” Blackman attended Rio Claro East Secondary School.

“I was always doing music because I love to sing, always. Coming from a music family like my own, it was kind of bound to for me. Whereas I knew what I wanted to be from a very young age .

I modelled my life and my being and my entity behind what she [her mother; Abbi Blackman] was doing because I thought it was fantastic,” she said .

At 11, she began writing her own songs. She then joined her aunt’s Nehilet Blackman’s “All Girls Band”, a gospel band where she sang background vocals.

Although she is not a Christian, she used the experience to hone her skills and develop the art of performing. At 12, she learned to play the guitar and was, at that time, writing, robustly, as well.

At 15, she was prompted by Nehilet to “forge her own path.” She then teamed with her uncle, gospel artiste Isaac Blackman, “doing studio recordings and doing my own material. I tried to forge a song from him but I couldn’t because everything that we created sounded like his and I wanted my own sound.” She began working with Kasey Phillips who then introduced her to other producers. “I started there and I soon became known by other producers and I started going to different places seeing who I clicked with…who I had that musical chemistry with and I started doing my EP by a producer by the name of Keron ‘Sherriff Mumbles’ Thompson and we released my first single entitled ‘Cigarettes’ in 2016,” she said.

Blackman then made the decision to do more.

Doing more meant developing her musical interests, among them soca. “I wanted to do soca even before. I also did a lot of soca competitions in school but people talked me out of it because they felt I was much bigger than soca,” she said.

She began working with Mumbles and Anson [Soverall] to do soca. Visiting Soverall, he played her a rhythm and,“I fell in love with it and I started writing.” Another writer was in the studio at the time and said the song would be great as a duet. The male part was written and pitched to different male artistes. “Two weeks after, I met Kees in a studio and I told him I have a song and it would be great if you could be on it. I played the song for him and he loved the track but felt the male part was not suited well for him.

He wanted to re-write the male part, so that was when writers and artistes like Preddy, Anson and Kees, we all came together to rewrite the male part,” and her 2017 track “Workout” was born.

But as she began her journey in the soca world, she has plans to greatly impact it. Soca, Blackman said, is much more than people perceive it.

“I feel people put down soca because of what we have made it. Soca is an amazing genre.

It is only mediocre because people make it a joke. People make it about money, people make it about hype, people make it about everything other than the music. I want to bring that back. My grandfather being the creator of soca music, I wanted to bring back some sort of life and justice and integrity to the music,” she said.

While for some, “soca is a topic and the topic being what happens in Carnival,” for Blackman, “soca is an all-year thing. It is a rhythmic structure, it is a feeling.” And so looking at soca as more than ...she hopes to infuse different sounds into her music but more interestingly, she wants to experiment more with the Indo- Trinidadian sounds which gave rise to soca in the first place.

She has been approached by different artistes since her 2017 soca debut and is expected to release a single with a top Jamaican artiste-although she was reluctant to say who.

She also plans to redo some of her grandfather’s classics among them his 1974 Endless Vibration.

As for what she defines her style as, “It is such a fusion. It is very ballad type, very contemporary but it is very jazz, very funk, very indie, very alternative as well. But it is extremely Caribbean. It is such a fusion there is no box I can put it in as yet and until I can find my path I am just going to stay out in the wind.”