Guy Lochhead, 11/03/12
Haitian saxophone player, composer and bandleader credited with pioneering the genre now known as kompa/konpa/compas with his friend Nemours Jean Baptiste. He later left and formed his own style, cadence rampa. Both are modernised versions of méringue music, variously combining types of beat and instrumentation. The success of cadence rampa on the dancefloor was minimal, with most audiences seeing it as too similar to kompa, and viewing Sicot as jealously competitive with Jean Baptiste. In fact, the two were good friends, though Sicot did to some extent remain in Jean Baptiste’s shadow. He died in 1985. A strange story that has some people very excited. The Wikipedia page on Compas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compas_music) is the most biased and fanatical that I have ever read. In my opinion, it seems as though Sicot was trying to make his own way as a composer without being tied to Nemous Jean Baptiste. Sometimes this came across as competitive. His actual innovation was fairly minimal though, and its telling that the public were less concerned with the slight variation in beat than they were about how the music was to dance to.