Nick Sallen, Editor-in-Chief - Dakota Student
Dakota Student / Nicholas Nelson
A dozen band members ran onto the Chester Fritz Auditorium stage to start the Steel Pan Band Concert. Wearing floral patterned shirts to enhance the carribean theme, the band immediately started playing “Yumbambe,” a Cuban calypso tune with solos from the lead pan section.
“My favorite pans were the bass and lead pans,” Maxwell McCann, a junior first-year member of the ensemble, said. “Leads because of the melody, bass because you’re in the center of six pans and they all reverberate around you and you do a lot of moving around, so it’s easier to get into it.”
Most of the band members hail from North Dakota and a majority are percussion majors. This year, the band was a little bit smaller than usual with 13 performers in the ensemble. Hannah Carlson, David Fehr, Mitch Geiger, Frankie Good, Elijah Gray, Alec Hepper, Brandon Hettwer, Isaac Jensen, Maxwell McCann, Jason Master, Rachel Again Muniz, Jake Robinson and Yuesen Yang comprised this year’s steel pan band.
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For many years as a member of the Winnipeg Steel Orchestra we performed concerts at UND crossing the border between Manitoba Canada and Fargo North Dakota.