Duvone Stewart opened the gates of hell and met them face to face; the killer and the man who killed the killer.

He faced the demons, conquered them and had love to spare, with a little bit of help from his “close friend, mentor, motivator, critic” Wayne Alleyne whom he saw lying in a pool of blood on the ground just outside his home on Queen Street in Port of Spain.

A murder statistic for the rest of Trinidad and Tobago, but this 59-year-old man was another one who was killed only to send a message to the other side in the turf war in the battle zone of East Port of Spain; the heartland of the island’s top three steelbands; Desperadoes, Renegades and All Stars.

“They made an example of Wayne. He was so close to me that it was real. It hit me hard. Every single thing that was expressed musically in the performance of Renegades, I turned around that experience and transformed it,” Duvonne said about the murder on December 11th 2017.

Yet when he cried, in front of the whole world to see, he stifled the tears in the soulful and expressive arrangement of Year For Love which ended a twenty-year-drought-long transition for the Renegades from its record-breaking success in the 90’s with the late Dr Jit Samaroo.

It was more than a high for the accomplished arranger of the Single, Small and Medium bands who ,stepped into the hallowed halls of Trinidad’s music history as a musical activist, leading a cadre of international players from the bands he has arranged for in the US, UK, France, Japan and St Vincent here in the Caribbean.
The Renegades, also, got a chance to breathe.

To manage the Charlotte Street band throughout the restless season, required more guts than the glory they achieved with the victory at Panorama Finals on February 10th.

In a community splintered by gang warfare-Nelson Street at war with Duncan Street, Prince Street at war with Queen Street and Laventille Road at war with the rest, for example- they dared to go from block to block- the band’s executive and administration- moving around inviting them to the pan yard.

And, at practice, in between sharing notes with the players Duvone would preach to his team and the immediate neighbourhood which included the TTPS Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) next door.

The community held it together and there was peace and love, under a watchful eye, for a season. The music triumphed.

“It was a year for a purpose. It was a mission that everybody understood and it was well executed with the passion, the true, real, playing ethic of a song that was infectious because many players in the band lost a loved one through the hands of the criminal and they played a significant part in saying This Is The Year For Love,”

Duvone said.

Never mind that ten days after Carnival the tension that was held in check overflowed when 25-year-old Akil James was shot dead at Calvary Hill, a stone’s throw away; a Rasta City top ranker who was killed on Rasta City turf.
Parts of East Port of Spain bordering the panyard – Observatory, Bath, Oxford, Basilon Charlotte and Piccadilly Streets -erupted as they burned debris, ironically enough, smack in front of the Renegades on February 20th.

Finally, Stewart is on the international circuit and is freeing his mind as he shares the story behind his captivating arrangement to music students starting at Howard University in Washington D.C in March and extending to the University of West Virginia in June and then a recall at Howard, followed by Berklee School of Music after which he will move on to Europe to familiar ground at the University of Nantes , then on to Paris before England.

Renegades’ Year for Love was a soulful cry from the belly of Trinidad’s hell vocalized by instruments in a manner that no journalist, teacher, preacher, priest or community activist has verbalized.

It was the definitive moment of protest in Trinidad Carnival 2018. A thesis waiting for a social scientist.

“I was in hell. I see what could take place down there. In there I had a conversation with Wayne, the guy who killed Wayne and the guy who killed the guy who killed Wayne, a man with a Pump, talking to the killer. Fire will bun dem.

“For me, it was an audiovisual production for the world that came from inside. I planned it out, the pyrotechnics, everything,” the 41-year-old father of one, said about the band ’s statement on Final Night.

Read on for the mitigating factors, to understand how the landmark arrangement came together, spiritually, in a year when Duvone also conquering health issues literally became fit and ready to finally grab the baton from the late Jit Samaroo and run his leg of this race to also take a new breed of arrangers into the promised land.