BC Pires
THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY
PAN IN THE Savannah Sunday – which Y’Boy know is really “semis” nowadays but which Y’Boy, becaw he in this pan thing long-long-long, doesn’t can think about excepting as “prelims” – and Y’Boy walking by he one on the Savannah pitch-walk opposite the US Sex Worker-Briber-in-Chief Embassy, right there by the Sagicor building, which part it had, on the wall behind the main steps, that dynamic work of art what Trinis did call “the Minshall Muriel.”
And, all on a sudden, jus’ so, Y’Boy stop dead in he tracks.
From quite-oh, quite-oh, quite by the entrance to Savannah Track by Memorial Park, for the first time in donkey years, Y’Boy could hear the sound of pan.
You ever hear ’bout “spirit lash?”
Y’Boy stand up there on the pitch-walk like a chupidee, begging for mercy, for a half-minute or so.
Clear-clear, like the moon over Laventy.
Replies
To hear pan in Trinidad, Y’Boy know you have is to go in the panyards.
But, anytime, every time, no matter how many times he go to a panyard, Y’Boy does marvel at this minor miracle: that you could walk in, freeco-dry so, from a arbitrary street and into an open-air theatre filled with the sound of the only new acoustic instrument Y’Boy ever hear ’bout in the last century. And tilt your head up to the sky and hear this heavenly music.
Pandemonium Steel Orchestra / "Panyard Vibration" / Panorama 1977 / (Audio)
Y’Boy is a Boogsie Sharpe/Phase II man, but that don’t mean his heart don’t race when he hear a Robbie Greenidge or a Jit Samaroo or a Andy Narell run.
Is not today Y’Boy listening to all kind of music critically. Y’Boy talking from his informed mind and his open heart and his freed soul – not out his bottom, like the majority of Trini “commentators.” Y’Boy done know that this is complex music that could stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, note-for-note, down the ages, right next to – or even above – Mozart and Beethoven and the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis.
2020 Vision" - Phase II Pan Groove (2020 Panorama LARGE BAND Semi-Finals)