From the Truck to the Tuxedo and Back

That long arc matters. Etienne Charles’s role in the 2026 Unity Jazz Festival was not simply as a featured guest, but as a creative catalyst who helped shape how Soca was presented within a broader musical lineage. Ahead of the festival, Charles told Jazz at Lincoln Center, “I couldn’t be more excited to reunite with my brother Kees and continue the creative journey we’ve shared for years” (Jazz at Lincoln Center Press Release, December 2025). His relationship with Kes has been artistic and sustained. The two have collaborated on recorded music over the years, including IzWE, credited to Kes and featuring Etienne Charles and the Laventille Rhythm Section, and Magic, alongside Jimmy October, a track that brings Charles’s trumpet into Kes’s melodic and rhythmic world. These collaborations created a shared musical language that made Lincoln Center feel less like a crossover experiment and more like a natural extension of work already in motion.

During the Unity Jazz Festival performances, Kes played a selection of both fan favorites and collaborative pieces, including Cocoa Tea, Tack Back, Jolene, Savannah Grass, Yes Please, and Magic (featuring trumpet and scatting by Charles). This setlist underscored that some of his biggest hits are fit for any stage, not just the traditional festival circuit where Soca is notably known.

Emerging Lanes for Soca

These performances illustrate more than just a headline moment.  The Lincoln Center Unity Jazz Festival was not a one-off or isolated incident; it forms part of a larger pattern. Over the past two years, particularly since the release of The Man With No Door, Kes has repeatedly sold out rooms where Soca has not traditionally been expected across North America, with growing hard-ticket demand. These are not Carnival-dependent appearances. They are stand-alone moments that prove Soca can hold attention in theaters, parks, and formal concert settings without dilution or apology.  Kes has demonstrated clear and accelerating series of hard-ticket milestones that, taken together, form a documented event trajectory rather than isolated wins.

In June 2025, Kes achieved a historic milestone in Toronto by becoming the first Soca act to headline and fully sell out Budweiser Stage, a 16,000+ capacity amphitheater.  This off-season success marked a significant shift: a Soca act commanding a major North American venue without relying on Carnival adjacency. Due to demand, a follow-up Toronto show, KESmas, was later scheduled for December 20, 2025, reinforcing the depth and durability of the market.  That Toronto breakthrough was not an outlier.  In Montreal, a July 4, 2025 performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival’s Rogers Stage along with a KESMas event, together, these appearances positioned Montreal as a repeat, reliable market rather than a one-off tour stop. 

In New York City, Kes made history in summer 2025 by becoming the first Soca artist to sell out two SummerStage shows at Central Park, a venue deeply embedded in the city’s mainstream cultural calendar. These performances further demonstrated Soca’s ability to hold attention in open-air, multi-genre civic spaces traditionally dominated by pop, hip-hop, jazz, and global music programming.  In Boston, Kes’s stop at Leader Bank Pavilion on July 3, 2025, marked another notable milestone. The venue, a prominent waterfront amphitheater, represented one of the largest standalone Soca concert settings in the city, reinforcing the genre’s growing hard-ticket viability in markets not historically associated with large-scale Soca touring, especially when not associated with an impending Carnival.  

Taken together, these events in Toronto, Montreal, New York, and Boston illustrate a clear pattern: stand-alone, hard-ticket performances that succeed independently of Carnival seasonality. They show Soca operating as a scalable concert product capable of filling theaters, amphitheaters, parks, and formal concert spaces across North America.

This sequence of milestones is essential context for understanding the Lincoln Center performances. Jazz at Lincoln Center did not emerge in isolation; it arrived at the crest of a broader, carefully built arc in which Kes has consistently proven that Soca can hold space,  commercially and culturally, in rooms where it was once absent.

Cultural and Commercial Momentum

At home in Trinidad and Tobago, Kes’s music continues to show its strength. On January 18, 2026, just a month shy of the upcoming Trinidad Carnival, Kes holds 13 songs on the Apple Music Top 200, nearly 10 percent of the total entries and close to 20 percent of Soca tracks charting. Four of these are from the current season, while the remainder demonstrate the longevity and depth of the catalog. Notable tracks include Rum and Coca Cola, Cocoa Tea, No Sweetness, Tack Back, Medicine, Traffic Jam, Banga, Dear Promoter, Radar, Close to Me, and Jub Jub.

Internationally, Kes has achieved repeated chart success. In mid-December 2025, Rum and Coca Cola, a collaboration with producer Tano, entered the iTunes Top 100 in Canada at #99, maintaining its position for two additional days. Almost exactly one year earlier, Cocoa Tea, also produced by Tano, debuted at #97, becoming one of the most commercially significant Soca releases of 2025. These entries establish Kes and Tano as the first to place a Soca record on the Canadian iTunes Top 100, and the repeated success signals a durable, scalable audience that extends beyond Carnival or traditional soca markets.

In the U.S., three songs reached the Spotify NYC Local Pulse charts: No Sweetness (#49), Cocoa Tea (#2), which remained for 31 weeks, more than half a year, and Rum and Coca Cola (#27 over five weeks). This sustained placement in multiple territories demonstrates measurable consumer demand and repeatable market penetration. Together with the Canadian Top 100 entries, the data highlights how Kes and Tano’s collaborations are translating the Soca sound into mainstream, repeatable successes.

Each milestone both quantitative and qualitative, reinforces the notion that Kes is creating new pathways for Soca, helping to expand the lanes in which it can thrive and demonstrating its artistic versatility. 

To start 2026, Kes will move from the curated concert halls one week, to the kinetic energy of Carnival fetes and atop trucks the next.  This range highlights the adaptability of both the artist and the music and reflects a deliberate strategy for growth, cultural reach, and audience engagement.

Kes’s discography plays a crucial role, continue to circulate globally, maintaining relevance across Carnival seasons and diaspora communities. This catalog depth ensures that while Kes expands into new spaces, the core of Soca remains vibrant, recognized, and commercially viable. Each charting song, concert milestone, and cross-border collaboration serves as a building block, forming a foundation for future expansion and influence