Pan Potent Excitement

When Trinidad's Carib Tokyo steelband and their manager, Ray Holman, went to court in an effort to get the group in last Saturday's Panorama finals they were in a sense playing true to form.

For few events in Trinidad's annual carnival celebrations arouse as much emotion as this competition. To Jamaicans the emotion may seem disproportionate. But that's because only politics elicit such fervour here. In Trinidad, the priorities are a bit different. In the event, Holman failed to get the injunction and Amoco Renegades went on the win its eight Panorama title, ahead of Phase II.

Desporadoes and Exodous tied for third. All over Trinidad there are arguments - suspended briefly for Tuesday's last lap jump-up to pan music - over the merits of Carib Tokyo's claim. And on every street corner there is someone with a view of which band whould have won or should have been in the Panorama finals.

Panorama, with its potent excitement, its raw, combustible energy, is still playing out in the collect head of Trinidadians. kindles our primal urges . Somewhere in its history, Trinidad retained the ritual of the drum and transformed it to steel orchestras of up to 120 panists. The provide a music that is the soul of Trinidad.

The steelband competion is fiercely nationalistic because it rescues an element of the Caribbean imagination from the grip of foreign cultural influences. Carnival came from Europe originally, but West Indians invented Pan. Its shaky beginings, its immense potential and its resilience mirror our history and, perhaps, our destiny.

Pan music is distinctly Caribbean. In Antigua there are claims for its invention. St. Vincent, St. Kitts and St. Thomas have good steelbands, and Grenadians play great mood music on steel. Jamaicans know well the Panoridim Steelband on UWI's Mona campus, and lately the Hummingbirds, the house band at Countryside Club.

There are steel bands in the music department of over 33 U.S. colleges and universities, and another two dozen in elementary and high schools. An Akron, Ohio-based group, Panyard Publications, Inc., documents pan music scores. Two steel-band associations--one near Pittsburgh, Penn., the other in Brooklyn, N.Y.--market the music.

Steel bands have performed at New York City's Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls, and they are the core of an annual event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Each Labour Day weekend steelbands also compete on the grounds of the Brooklyn Museum. The sound of steel has also become more prominent as a dramatic element in movie scores.

Crude and noisy when it first joined the family of instruments in the 1930s, the steel drum was initially seen as no more than a novelty. Hollywood and Madison Avenue accepted it as a mood-setter and used it as an icon for the Caribbean. Along with another piece of native exotica, the limbo dancer, steel bands typically served as backdrops on movies and television sets.

Essentially, a steel band replicates all the instruments of a conventional ensemble. The high-pitched single and double tenors carry the melody. The slightly lower double seconds alternately play melody and harmony. In the mid-range, there are cello, guitar and quadrophonic pans. Finally, there are the tenor bass (usually ensembles of four) and the low bass pans (six to nine in most bands). "Although all pans come form one source, the drum, " says Les Slater, publisher of Pan magazine, "the ensemble is capable of producing a variety of tonal voices without the aid of woodwinds or strings."

In Trinidad, they believe that the only thing certain that can be said about pan's origins is that the first instrument was invented there. Other islanders claim otherwise. Sifting through the poorly documented history, however, one can make some legitimate assumptions. The steel drum started out as just that: a drum. From tin containers of various sizes and density, a variety of drums were designed to accompany a cacophonous musical ensemble that celebrated carnival in Trinidad in the 1930s.

In the early 1940s, musicians began experimenting with those drums, hoping to create a melodic instrument from one that was purely percussive. The first attempts produced pans with only two and three notes, hardly enough to play a tune. Both Neville Jules and Winston "Spree" Simon, two of pan's early pioneers, claim to have been the first to make a drum with four notes

[Pans] Their pans were pounded into a convex shape. Ellie Mannette, another leading figure in the instrument's development, went one better. The concave form of the drum he designed improved the tone. Experiments to create a more professional instrument accelerated, especially after Mannette tuned the first pan made from a 55-gallon oil drum, the standard pan used today.Steel bands emerged from the poor districts and their music was initially devalued by the larger society. The first steel bands were affiliated with street gangs and often there were violent clashes on the streets of Port of Spain. Today, in contrast, many secondary schools have steelbands in their music departments.

Tonal improvements and wider acceptance of pan owe much to Mannette, still the foremost tuner. Now living in the United States, Mannette continues to muscle out notes on empty drums with the precision and skill of an 18th century violin maker. His instruments are highly prized by professional musicians such as Andy Narell, whose father brought Mannette to America.

Narell adopted the steel pan when he was eight years old, and has taken the sound of pan to listeners of jazz radio all over the United States. He calls Mannette the Stradivarius of pan. Mannette's legendary perfectionism surfaced once when he "recalled" Narell's pan after hearing a cut on the radio from the musician's album, Little Secrets. "I value craftsmanship more than anything else," Mannette told a writer some years ago. Along with Cliff Alexis, who runs a pan programme at Northern Illinois University, Manette has been responsible for developing dozens of steelbands on U.S. campuses.

Manette's best melody drums sound much like keyboard instruments, as do those of the better tuners. As a result, the soloist is probably pan's best ambassador. Narell is popular in America. But the wizardry of Trinidad's soloists is legendary. Among these are Len "Boogsie" Sharpe, a demonically dexterous player who has become the Milt Jackson of the pan. Jamaicans who saw him here a few years ago know he can play the pan upside down and harmonize his own melody with a third playing stick.

Robert Greenidge, too, has demonstrated masterful improvisational ability. He has recorded on albums by Grover Washington, Earth, Wind and Fire , and Jimmy Buffett, and plays a showstopping rendition of Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust." Like Boogsie, Greenidge is also a steelband arranger,and his band, the Desperadoes, is always a favourite to win Panorama. Others who have emulated Emanuel Riley, pan's first soloist, are Rudy Smith, a jazz panist, Earl Rodney, Ken "Professor" Philmore and Othello Mollineaux.

Pan at its best is heard at Panorama, and at the biennal music festival. At Panorama arrangers get players, most of whom can't read music, to render what amounts to a ten-minute calypso symphony. Aiming for rhythmic complexity and melodic elegance, the best arrangers are fine composers themselves. Among the better known are Clive Bradley, Ray Holman, Jit Samaroo, Beverly Griffith and Godwin Bowen. Pat Bishop, a classically trained arranger and conductor of the Desperadoes, calls Panorama "an art form all its own."

At the Steelband Music Festival, bands explore the pan's range in classical, jazz and pop music. They interpret anything from Beethoven to the Beastie Boys. As a judge at the 1988 festival, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis left Trinidad fascinated by what he had heard. The winning band that year, the Desperadoes , later played at Carnegie Hall with Skitch Henderson, an avid pan fan, and the New York Pops.

From its obscure beginnings as crude percussion, the steel drum has become a lead melody instrument. Today, its rich, airy tone lends resonance to conventional music. Africans everywhere in the new world styled drums of one sort or the other for communication and music. In Trinidad, that creativity reshaped steel containers and spawned a distinctive art form.