[ad_1]
The coffin bearing the stays of artiste Cocoa Tea stands adorned with an association of yellow roses. (Picture: Llewellyn Wynter)
Because the pall-bearers led mourners from Cocoa Tea’s thanksgiving service at The Verandah in Clarendon on Sunday, April 6, the strains of Holy Mount Zion sounded all through the venue. Fittingly, the Nyahbinghi beat of his 1995 hit tune carried the singer dwelling.
Relations and colleagues from the music business and well-wishers from his beloved Clarendon turned out to provide the diminutive singer a remaining farewell in a service punctuated by reflections that had been at instances tearful, and others humorous. Musical tributes they had been aplenty.
Cocoa Tea, whose hit songs embody Misplaced My Sonia, Lonesome Aspect, and Younger Lover, died on March 11, 2025 at age 65 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from cardiac arrest. He had battled a cancer-related sickness for a number of years.
With a backdrop of pictures and movies that captured his 50-year profession, the gathering heard about Cocoa Tea’s unyielding love of group and household. His son Shaquille addressed his father’s humility regardless of world success.
“How do you eulogise a person who was multifaceted, multitalented and multidimensional? As a household, we selected to eulogise him from the perspective of a father, a husband, and a household man,” he stated.
Three of Cocoa Tea’s eight youngsters, his widow Malvia, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews additionally attended the service.
Gussie Clarke, who produced a number of of Cocoa Tea’s songs, recalled his lengthy affiliation with the singer. He stated their bond grew stronger as he battled sickness with the help of associates, amongst them fellow producer Mikey Bennett, singer Hopeton Lindo, Chris Chin of VP Data, Sean Paul, his medical doctors and nurses.
Clarke said that even in essentially the most difficult instances Cocoa Tea was resilient.
“In one in every of my visits to the medical facility with Hopeton Lindo, we took him exterior and he was in one in every of his greatest moments. He was stronger than I had ever seen him and, unaided by anybody, he received up and was strolling round within the presence of his spouse Malvia, and displaying us that he would quickly recuperate totally and looking out ahead to return to Jamaica,” Clarke recalled.
Music business veteran Maxine Stowe described Cocoa Tea as “a modern-day Psalmist”, who reworked from an artiste who sported a Jheri curl coiffure to a “militant, radical voice within the [Rastafarian] motion who was not afraid to name down lightning and thunder, brimstone and hearth, earthquake and lava, each time Babylon’s machinations reared its ugly head”.
There have been performances from Berly, Cocoa Tea’s older brother; Bongo Herman; Little John; Richie Stephens; guitarist Kenroy Mullings; Dimario McDowell; amongst others.
Shabba Ranks, Wayne Marvel, Josey Wales, Charlie Chaplin, Howard McIntosh, and Kareem Burrell had been among the different music business figures in attendance.
[ad_2]
Source link
