By Jeanette Contant-Galitello
Minor2Major is a culmination of my entire musical life experience and in a sense, started when I was a child.
I came from a musical family and displayed rare musical abilities at an early age. I started learning to play the piano at two, and at three, gave my first public piano performance at a local hall, kneeling on the stool to reach the keys. Two years later I joined our family steel band, the Rainbow Steel Band.
I was born with very little eyesight and went to a bording school to be educated using braille.
At ten, my music teacher said that I aught to be receiving lessons from a music professor, who could adequately nurture the kind of abilities I had, but the school did not have professors. Rather than finding a solution they simply did nothing. Therefore, though my talent was recognised, it was left unaided, unchannelled and unguided. I was on my own.
I performed frequently during childhood, both with my family steel band and alone playing the piano and singing and was often featured in the local press, occasionally reaching national press and appearing on television.
After graduating from University in French and English, I taught languages freelance for some time to support my musical projects. It was an uphill struggle.
Eventually I started working at the BBC World Service and then moved onto BBC Worldwide where I stayed for a number of years. But my musical calling was too strong. Determined to make my living through my music, I thus relinquished my permanent contract and corporate pension, mortgage and bills in toe.
Knowing how hard it was to break into the industry especially for a visually impaired woman, I set up a steel band entertainment business called Kiskadee Music Management, to support my real passion. Within only a few months of being in business I met my future husband Christopher, an IT Project Manager at the time. So enthusiastic was he about what I was doing that he learned to play the pans, quit his job and joined me full time, forming the Kiskadee Steel Band Duo.
This was only intended to be a means to an end but its success grew so rapidly that it soon became the most popular steel band duo in the UK, appearing on Trisha, Big Brother’s Live Reunion, Tamsin Outhwaite’s Wedding reception and other celeb do’s. Bookings flooded in, CD sales soared and there was little time left for anything else. Then we expanded into the corporate training arena, one of my areas at the BBC, offering teamworking workshops where we taught participants to play the steel drums as a team.
But at the height of our success we suddenly realised that what we’d created as a means to an end had become the end in itself. Though by now I’d also built up an impressive recording studio, collaborated with some fine record producers and worked with some world-famous artists, nothing in this area seemed to bear fruit.
Tired and disillusioned with a corrupt and narrow-minded commercial music industry, my husband and I decided to turn dream into reality. We had a vision which was to write and create music to inspire, move and uplift; to source and support talent which is often overlooked because of age, image, disability or other irrelevant factors; and finally, to create a new and ethical way of sharing the gift of music.
With my ability to write and sing very hooky songs, my studio production skills and my musical arrangements, coupled with Christopher’s first-class business degree, his project management experience and our combined dynamism and revolutionary ideas, the vision crystalised and Minor2major was born.
For Further Information visit www.minor2major.co.uk.
Well, I hope you enjoyed reading my abridged version. Another time I will share many many more stories in greater detail.
Jeanette