Blog 2.0

The Pan Movement across the world has gone into orbit but our Panorama is still stuck in the mud. Please know that the reality is our instrument is no longer ours: the pan has taken on a life of its own and is roaming freely, taking root wherever it is appreciated. At this time, our only claim to it is that pan originated in Trinbago. Trinbago as the mecca of pan music is now becoming in jeopardy. If better music is being played elsewhere, there is where the focus and attention will be. The organizers of the Panorama are stifling the growth, creativity and development of pan music in Trinbago, especially at Panorama.

               Panorama 2015 is now behind us and the decision of the judges is final, but almost everyone disagrees with their selections. What this tells us is that the judges have to go, that the judges do not have the capacity to assess and appreciate creativity and innovation in music, that the judges have become programmed to the extent that they seem to be working from some formula and that the judges are stuck in a rut.

Music that is creative and innovative confuses them and with a simple stroke of their pencil they dismiss anything that might be outside of their comfort zone. Where does this leave our Panorama musicians – our arrangers?

The judges have our arrangers in a state of confusion.

If we are stuck with these judges who are selected by Pan Trinbago, then understand that the ‘formula’ has to evolve, because the music is certainly not stuck in time. There are arrangers who are taking the music to another level. My question at this time is, are any of these judges musicians. A degree in music does not make you a musician and does not give you the ability to judge the music of musicians. The ability to teach scales to children does not qualify you to judge a Panorama competition. To the judges on the panel of Panorama 2015, I pose this question. “How many minutes of published music have you produced?“

So you award your points and there is a winner and nine losers and the state of confusion is perpetuated. At this 2015 Panorama the band that was announced as winner clearly did not have the best music, which happens all too often at Panorama. As a result we are no better off this year than we were before. Keen competition is what brings about improvement. An arranger knows when there is an arrangement that is better than his/hers and would strive to be better. But when the judges, with their left-brain formulas, award their points and a winner is announced who clearly did not deserve to win, then our Panorama is in jeopardy. This is a competition that is watched and scrutinized internationally by musicians. What are they to think. It remains popular but it is not growing. Most of our bands sound the same year after year and this is condoned and encouraged by the judges. The judges and therefore Pan Trinbago are contributing significantly to the demise of Pan in Trinidad and Tobago.

               The system of judging and/or the judges have to go. There are six judges on the panel for the large band category of Panorama. My suggestion is that a maximum of two judges from Trinbago be on the panel and the remaining four be sought out internationally to eliminate any bias that the local judges might have. Only then will we be able to say that the competition was fairly judged and the best band on the night won.

               No more than one-third of the judges on the panel should be from Trinbago and at least one of these should be from Tobago. The remaining judges could be sought from countries such as, but not restricted to, Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, St. Lucia, Haiti, Martinique, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil, countries of the African Continent, India etc.

               Please let us not take this lightly. Who we are as a people and our contribution to the world are at stake here. I appeal to the general public and specifically to the arrangers, captains and tuners of all steel-bands to take action now and get rid of this system of judging Panorama. I am suggesting a meeting be held as soon as possible. Please contact me through email- dosomethingforpan@gmail.com

As I hope you all know, I started a small project on The Cape Verde Island, São Vicente.

First part is done successfully, which was introducing and teaching pan. They never heard, saw or played a steelpan before. I was lucky that Nostalgia Steelband from London, lend me some pans, and took them with me, payed my own ticket to get there, and taught them how to play. 

The goal was to form a small steelband together with the inhabitants of São Vicente and play on their carnival parade.

And it worked! ( look at the video Cruzeiros Do Norte) They love the sound and want to learn everything there is to learn about pan.

So now I have to start the Second part of this project.

AND I NEED ALL OF YOU TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

Cape Verde is a poor country, hardly any work available.

How can we get pans over there, with them not having the possibility to pay for the instruments.

The local music teacher Eddy Max, is looking for ways, by talking to the council, to see if they are willing to contribute.

My question to all of you, and especially the big steelbands, is if there is a possibility to donate a pan.

Then they can start a panyard. They would be so grateful if this works.

The Third part of the project will be to learn them how to make their own pans. I can't do that myself, don't have the skills. But as I got in contact with Bowie Bowei from Nigeria, he is willing to help me in this.

PLEASE HELP FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PAN!! and sent them some pans.

If you have any other ideas, please tell me and respond to this letter.

Hope we can succeed in spreading pan to another part of the world!

Regards

Deanne Pijl

The Netherlands

Darryl Joseph's dispassionate account on why All Stars won in 2015  was spot on. What he did not mention in his article was the dedication of the Drill master and his drive for excellence. Additionally, the band had experts in the field who listened to  the practice sessions  and  provided  feed back to the Arranger and Drill master.

Also,  the band is blessed with  an arranger who is humble  enough  to willingly   accept feed back and to adjust his arrangement accordingly..

last but not least the band members never leave the yard with out the circle of prayer after each practice session.

When All STARS  plays..even the Gods are happy!!

Joan Gower de.Chabert   

How can one contemplate genius? How does one recognise that savant quality in gifted musicians? Here in the “Third World” of foreigners' fantasies, the reputations of communities have been placed on the shoulders of political giants, on the shoulders of criminals, on the shoulders of cricket captains and steelpan arrangers. For this Carnival 2015, I ventured to gather that magic of the urban panyard as a locus for creativity, for communality, for a congregation of the curious at the periphery looking in.

Travel writers have marvelled or maligned the steelband in print going back more than half a century. Patrick Leigh Fermor writing in The Traveller's Tree after a visit to All Stars panyard in the late 1940s noted, “[t]he sound that burst on the ears was hallucinating. From a mile away it might be almost agreeable.” "Almost" is not nearly good enough. Adjectives like “agreeable” are curt not ebullient. VS Naipaul a decade later in The Middle Passage reminisced infamously, “the steel band used to be regarded as a high manifestation of West Indian Culture, and it was a sound I detested.” A writer before his time or just a fastidious paladin in the service of the colonial ideal? These were still the early days for the phenomenon of the steelband.

In 1955, another “outsider,” Dane Chandos in his travel book The Trade Wind Islands wrote after his experience in a Woodbrook panyard that, “steel-bands-men...only at night turn to the serious business of living, pooling their thoughts, their humor, their ambitions and aspirations, with those of the other members of the gang.” The gang! When tropical urban youth gather it is described as a gang. History notes the violence of those gangs. Pan battles were rife. In Trinidad, however, out of chaos comes beauty.

The steelband, the community of players, now mostly female, the musicians on a mission are wilful participants in a kind of transformation of sound. The pans have evolved sonically over the years by those revered tuners—those iconic men of steel, Bertie, Butch, Wire, Tony, Ellie—into, among other things, engineering novelties like the awarded and gradually accepted G-Pan family. As Kim Johnson said so poetically, “the audacity of the creole imagination,” generations ago, birthed a movement. A movement of music, of genius, of people.

The steelband and the arranger. A unity. The last bastion of original Western orchestral music? Let's see. Travelling east to hear Birdsong just before the Panorama Semis, aware that steelpan iconoclast Andy Narell hasn't enthralled Trini pan cognoscenti as an arranger and composer, I discerned musical indifference from afar for what on close inspection was music that followed its own path parallel to the ingrained Panorama jam. Was it too soon, or was it a response to chauvinism gone awry with catcalls for his deportation because of arrogance? Westward ho, and one encounters panyard communities passionate with the fervour of zealots. Exodus, All Stars, Renegades, Despers, Silver Stars; Pelham, “Smooth,” Duvone, “Robbie,” Liam all enriched the well of orchestral music from this island. Tunapuna, Hell Yard, Charford Court, The Hill (come down), Newtown; communities enthralled. For this writer, however, that visceral feeling that one knows when something is working was left to the one and only.

Len “Boogsie” Sharpe, that avatar of all that's right and wrong in our music industry—brilliant prolific creativity and an errant lack of control to time and order—is Trinidad and Tobago's mad genius. In music, we have given regard to that definition to Mozart, to Charlie Parker, to Stevie Wonder. Men, sadly only men, who have made 90-degree turns in the music and enriched us. In the liner notes for his CD, “A Tribute To the Mighty Sparrow: Len 'Boogsie' Sharpe on the PHI,” I wrote:

Len “Boogsie” Sharpe has reached a point in his career where accolades are superficial. He is that temperamental genius who can compose in his head without the enhanced skill of an academy-trained musician, the scores for up to eight mini-symphonies for large steelpan orchestras in one short Carnival season. In Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean diaspora and the world, “Boogsie” is an icon of steelpan, that self-sufficient and brilliant musician who can do it all. In that sometimes erratic mind of his, “Boogsie” can cajole melodies and improvisations from any steelpan family member, making the familiar new, and the new, unforgettable.

Boogsie from Kim Johnson on Vimeo.

One is witness to that erratic mind. At 2:00 a.m., a couple days before the Panorama Finals, the seemingly random staccato of music notes being shouted out, in fact is the genesis of a new melody. "Boogsie" is creating on the fly, in situ. He is not improvising, he is "extempo-ing." In the film Pan! Our Musical Odyssey, "Boogsie" proclaims:

"If I hear a note or two notes, three notes, I have the chords in my head, and bass and everything running in my head...because I have the whole picture of the whole thing, how the whole orchestra sounding in my head."

What madness is that? The comparison to Mozart, Charlie Parker, Stevie Wonder is, however, apropos.

Through this madness, one has to listen. The song is never complete with "Boogsie". There is always the possibility of revision. His musicians know it. The fans know it. They expect it. This is music for the occasion defined by the occasion. Panorama is not your mother's cup of tea! With a track record that suggests that the judges must like him—enough wins, top five placings, and original music to start an industry—he steadfastly persists in coining the new future sonic clichés, fashioning the new musical trope. "Rough it up, rough it up," is a phrase often heard from “Boogsie” to make the players excite the sound. "Panorama is not your mother's cup of tea!" The shock of the new also attracts a new cadre of pannists.

Phase II Pan Groove, like all young offshoots, made a trajectory that deviated from the norm back at its genesis, and attracted a whole lot of folk who would not have entered a panyard with the experience of witnessing either madness or genius. The fortunate traveller Chihiro Nimomiya, little Aria Bartholomew, Gary Padmore, Natasha Joseph, Johann Chuckaree. Front-liners. The immediate faces of the band. In them, we see that Phase II is a conglomeration, a United Nations gathering. Varying nationalities, races, ages, sizes all come to do service in the house of "Boogsie". The combination of player and instrument is a magnet for a divergent spectator class that includes every shade of armchair critic, newly landed fanatics who crave the next tropical hangout as advised by social media, dancing fools and the local hypocrites who are, as Earth, Wind & Fire sang, “saying nothing, talking loud.”

To suggest that pan music and the audience's sudden appreciation of it are the faddishness of the plantation nouveaux riches is to conjecture that the pendulum of taste is static. Trinidad, unfortunately, lingers with the cyclical stasis of a short Carnival season creating a short appreciation season. According to the local press at the time, the first steelband on the road was celebratory outside the Carnival. We sometimes hold dear to old totems fanning away the flames of change. Pan is global. Pan music is not cyclical. That “audacity of the creole imagination” is now visceral. In the hands of these music men, it is genius personified.

13 February 2015

P.S. 16 Feb 2015

"Boogsie" and Phase II Pan Groove did not win the Panorama large band category. All Stars playing a "Smooth" Edwards arrangement of "Unquestionable" won, with Phase II second playing "Happiness" and Rengades placing third playing Duvone Stewart's arrangement of "Jam Dem Hard", co-written adventitiously by Johann Chuckaree of Phase II.

© 2015, Nigel A. Campbell. All Rights Reserved.

Congratulations to all the Steel Orchestras (Large Medium Small Single) Players, Arrangers,Helpers ETC for making Panorama 2015 a successful one.

"Congratulations Trinidad All Stars well done keep on reaching for the Stars

On a lighter note all Arrangers have that special arranging style and sound that they are known for we can go right back to the days of Bertie Marshall, Neville Jules Clive Bradley Jit Samaroo Ray Holman right up to the Present day Boogsie Smooth  Professor Robbie Grennidge its that sound and beat lovers of pan music seek out year after year

I say to the arrangers keep on making Sweet Sounds and "Recycling"  the Pan is the Winner in the end

 and to the detractors and sour losers

 Time to Grow Up Mentally  and listen with your Ears and Mind  not yuh Mouth

Can any one of My Pan Brothers or Sisters Come up with a Solution  that would make Panorama Finals a Five Hour Show instead of a Nine Hour Show. Panorama Finishing after 4.00am  is Beyond Ridiculous.

 I'm taking this opportunity to say a hearty and public Thank You to my band Merry Tones for at last having the confidence to trust me as arranger for 2015. It was indeed a tough task given the shortness of the season and the few negative influences, which ultimately cost us a place in the Semis. Had we been a stronger force in numbers and talent I'm certain we would have placed higher that 15th. But say what….15 out of 54 could never be bad. I remain happy beyond imagination and extremely humbled by the experience. Again Thank You Merry Tones