Youth Waves

“30 years Youth Waves” With the backyard of Mr. and Mrs. Piper as their stage, teenage “musicians” Patou, Alex, Junie, and Pascal would come together to “play music”. To entertain their neighbourhood friends, these teenagers played their hearts out using home-made instruments such as pots and pans for drums and bass. Vocal sounds for keyboards and a malfunctioning radio for guitar. As they progressed, Ramon & the Family Brass gave them the opportunity to use the band’s instruments to practice on. Since reggae was the easiest music genre to play, this is what they practiced. As they progressed in their rehearsals they also ventured into zouk then soca music.

Ramon allowed them to perform for audiences during his play-outs when his band took their breaks. They began brainstorming a name for their band. Root Waves, New Waves, were some of the names they came up with before settling on Youth Waves. With their new name, Alex Piper, Patou Piper, Silvere Mingau (Junie), Pascal Adams, and new-comer Trevor Castel, founded the band Youth Waves that same year, 1986. Now all they needed were their own instruments.

Mr. James Frankel, owner of La Samanna Hotel in Terres Basses, made their dream come true, giving them the necessary funds to purchase their first instruments. Youth Waves insisted on repaying him in full.

Youth Waves gave one of their first paid performances at La Samanna Hotel, and began repaying $375 monthly. Years later, Mr. Frankel wrote them a letter stating that their “loan” was paid in full, praised, and encouraged them on their climb to success.

In the 90’s they established themselves as the local international band when they gave their first international performance on Anguilla. From that point on their international audiences had grown to include Dominica, St. Kitts, Tortola, Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Barths, Fr. Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie-Galante, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and the USA. In this year they produced their first two studio recordings, That You Want That You Gon’ Get, and the single Reverse with which they won that year’s Carnival Road March title.

By the time Y2K rolled around, Youth Waves had produced albums like Tune Up, So Sweet, Versatile, Step Up, Ambassador, Evolution which contain tracks like Neural and Whine, Tune Up, Ram Jam, Pantyhose, Tonight Baby, Summertime, All Ova You, Piment la, Voting Jouvert.

International events such as, Fete de la Musique, France; Festival Terres de Blues, Marie-Galante; Carnival Tropical de Paris, France; Antillean Feesten, Germany; the annual CTO Gala Dinner, New York; Labor Day Carnival, and the Detroit Carnival, USA, are just some of the organizations/events for which Youth Waves have also performed. This level of exposure solidifies Youth Waves’ mission which is to put St. Maarten/St. Martin on the map, musically.

According to the band, “our vision and goal is to attain to a professional level that would enable us to make a living from what we love most, while focusing on producing new sounds that will cross-over on a commercial level, and worldwide.”