THE SOUL IN IRON ..................................................................................................... 3 CARIBBEAN HOT POT .............................................................................................. 11 NOTES ON PANS ........................................................................................................ 16 MODERNITY AND MUSIC .......................................................................................

21 BODY MUSIC TO SWEET PAN ................................................................................ 26 A CLEAR AND ROBUST SOUND ............................................................................ 29 THE SAGA OF SOUTH PAN...................................................................................... 31 EAST SIDE STORY..................................................................................................... 34 THE STEEL PULSE OF PORT OF SPAIN................................................................. 37 INVADERS, KING OF THE IRON MEN ................................................................... 39 THE FIRST WHITE BOY STEELBAND ................................................................... 41 CASABLANCA, THE GREATEST ............................................................................ 44 THE HILL BOYS ......................................................................................................... 45 THE CHINESE CONNECTION .................................................................................. 47 ALL STARS SHINE FORTH ...................................................................................... 49 I LOVE YOU, RAJABUT ON PAN ........................................................................ 51 WHEN TOKYO RULED THE HILL .......................................................................... 54 THE BAND THEY COULDNT BAN ........................................................................ 55 DEEP SOUTH PAN ..................................................................................................... 57 SAGA OF A FLAGWOMAN ...................................................................................... 59 THE MASTER CARVER ............................................................................................ 64 RETURN OF THE MUFFMAN .................................................................................. 67 A SOFT TOUCH ON THE IRON ................................................................................ 69 THE PIONEER WHO SOUGHT MUSICAL REVENGE........................................... 71 SWEDES HAVE A GO AT TUNING ......................................................................... 73 THE MAN FOR WHOM THE STEEL SINGS ........................................................... 76 ERIC'S IMPOSSIBLE LOVE....................................................................................... 79 A FISH BAND .............................................................................................................. 82 ALL STARS VERSUS ALL STARS ........................................................................... 83 BACK TO BATAAN ................................................................................................... 85 A MAN FOR ALL BANDS ......................................................................................... 87 IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY ............................................................................. 89 MAN FROM THE HILL .............................................................................................. 91 TRIPOLI ....................................................................................................................... 93 THE FIRST MAN OF FYZABAD............................................................................... 95 IF YOU PLAY THE CHORDS .................................................................................... 97 THE SAMPSONS OF SUN VALLEY......................................................................... 98 THE SKULL AND CROSSBONES BAND .............................................................. 101 THE PING PONGS OF PEARL HARBOUR ............................................................ 103 THE RISING SUN OF BELMONT ........................................................................... 104 WHEN THE JACK WAS KING ................................................................................ 106 A DAISY AMONGST THE THORNS ...................................................................... 107 RED ARMY'S RELUCTANT SOLDIER .................................................................. 109 THE IRON MAN IN THE ENGINE .......................................................................... 111 THE BIGGER THE BETTER .................................................................................... 113 BLANCAS BUGLE BOY ......................................................................................... 115 ARTHUR TRAMCAR ............................................................................................... 117 MILTON LYONS ....................................................................................................... 119

THE WOLF AT THE CROSSROADS ...................................................................... 121 KING XAVIER .......................................................................................................... 123 THE KENTUCKIANS LAST FIGHT ...................................................................... 126 HERCULES IN THE CROSSFIRE............................................................................ 127 GARVEYS GHOST .................................................................................................. 129 HELLZAPOPPINS SECRET WEAPON .................................................................. 131 BAJAN CECIL ........................................................................................................... 133 DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE BOOM TOWN ........................................................ 135 QUEEN OF THE STEELBANDS.............................................................................. 137 RENEGADE REALITIES .......................................................................................... 138 FIGHTING AMONG THE JAPS ............................................................................... 140 WHEN THE SUN ROSE IN BELMONT .................................................................. 142 REQUIEM FOR WAKE ISLAND ............................................................................. 143 THE COCONUT HEAD MAN .................................................................................. 144 MR PAMP AND THE SOUND OF STEEL .............................................................. 146 STRIKE THE IRON ................................................................................................... 148 WHEN HAMIL WENT UNHEEDED ....................................................................... 150 BREAKADOOR ......................................................................................................... 151 THE MAN WHO FORMED NORTH STARS .......................................................... 153 WITNESSING SPREE ............................................................................................... 155 CLASH OF THE TITANS ......................................................................................... 157 THE LIGHT IN SUN VALLEY................................................................................. 159 LEO WARNER .......................................................................................................... 161 THE LAST BISCUIT DRUMMER............................................................................ 162 IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY ........................................................................... 165 THE PAN BEHIND REGGAE................................................................................... 168 THE GREAT BONAPARTE...................................................................................... 170 THE UNIVERSAL CYCLE OF MUSIC ................................................................... 172

THE SOUL IN IRON

Considerations on Steelband Historiography It was an unlikely invention, the steelpan: a metal drum, a piece of industrial waste, on whose face you could play a range of nearly three chromatic octaves of precise and distinct tones. Why, even on the extremely difficult to learn Indian tabla drum, which does give different tones, you cannot play a melody. Logic protestedthe vibrations from one note must surely infect its neighbours whose sympathetic vibrations in turn would raise a cacophony. But the unlikely inventors of pan, uneducated in both music and science, positioned the notes so that each was enhanced by the vibrations of its neighboursa solution requiring a mysterious technology still inexplicable to scientists. And although it shouldn't, the instrument exists to the extent that a steelband embraces a range of percussion instruments made from steel drums which are capable of the full orchestral scale from soprano to bass. This invention of the steelpan in Trinidad and the growth of the steelband movement, then, were two separate but inter-related events which together comprise one of the most multifaceted examples of creolization in the Caribbean. The first dimension was the creation of an instrument, a process which isnt yet complete. This was primarily a technological invention within the sphere of acoustical physics. This event was achieved by several men over a period of time for each stage of steelpan fabrication was invented and perfected. Stages of steelpan manufacture include choosing the drum, sinking it, grooving the notes, raising them, tempering the steel, selecting the arrangement of notes, and so forth. Additionally, all this took place within a social context that had many other dimensions to it. The bands which nurtured the embryonic instrument, and the warfare they fought amongst themselves or against the police, were a sociological case of a youth sub-culture of gangs. But steelbands were not only gangs, they were alsoand perhaps more importantlymusical ensembles. How these ensembles metamorphosed as the instrument was elaborated, how they shaped its voice, the music they drew from in these processesall of this ought to be the subject of detailed musicological study. Steelbands, individually and collectively, soon became significant in the politics of the period, thus adding another dimension to the phenomenon. That was their role as subjects, but the steelband movement was also an important object in the politics of cultural nationalism, that is, as ideology. In the context of the squabbles between AfroTrinidadians, Euro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians, the steelband movements ideological role also acquired an ethnic dimension. Despite these immediately obvious dimensions of the invention of the steelpan and the growth of the steelband movement (for brevity I shall subsume the former into the latter), they have only been the object of very limited, uni-dimensional scrutiny. The best examples of this, best in all senses, are also the most recent: Ann Lees PhD thesis The Steelband Movement and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago and Steven Stuempfles recently published The Steelband Movement in Trinidad and Tobago: Music, Politics and National Identity.

The first was written as a dissertation for the department of sociology at UWI St Augustine, and the second is an expanded version of the authors PhD thesis for the department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. The local researcher emphasises the class conflictas JD Elder did three decades earlierand calls it sociology; the foreign researcher emphasises the cohering of a national identity and calls it anthropology. Both Ann Lee and Steve Stuempfles theses are thoroughly researched works of scholarship. Indeed, now that Stuempfles thesis has been published as a book, it is definitely the most important study of the steelband available to the public. And yet they are both very limited accounts which do not do justice to the phenomenon of the steelband movement in Trinidad and Tobago. Here is where I must confess I have a problem with the academic approach to culture in the West Indies. Long ago in the West Indies, culture was a matter of black peoples family structure or religion, or Indian peoples retentions. Ethnicity it was called by foreign anthropologists and local sociologists. In the metropolitan countries, Culture was a higher affair found in concert halls, art galleries, theatres, book shops and that was pronounced on by specialists in the respective fieldsart critics, literary critics, drama critics, who were sometimes practitioners in the arts themselves. The Sixties brought youth movement, counter culture, black power and so forth, and all of a sudden culture included popular culturecinema, science fiction, pop music, football, cricket, whatever. Immediately, arts faculties seized upon many expressions of popular culture and hitched them on to literature. In Trinidad calypso found itself in the literary camp, which resulted in Gordon Rohlehrs magnum opus Calypso and Politics in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Steelband, however, not being a linguistic form, fell to the social scientists by default. The result was to create a research problematic whereby the steelband movement was seen as an aspect of ethnicity or national identity or pluralismmore like some quaint folk practice rather than a serious, modern art form. Anthropology and sociology might have been insightful when focused on lowerclass family structures or lower-class cultural persistence. The anonymity they favour, the fictitious names they enjoy hiding people behind, are perhaps useful, or at least are not nugatory, when dealing with social phenomena which change very slowly and where any single individual can have little impact. When the anthropologists cultural terrain includes the popular arts, however, such as the steelband movement, the result can be startlingly inadequate. For instance, Judith Ann Wellers ethnographic Profile of a Trinidad Steel Band describes the class, race and religion of the members of a middle-class band she calls Rhythm and Blues Steelband, its informal organisation and musical and social activities. Its common knowledge that the band was really Dixieland, the first college boys steelband, so its also known that the band was initially formed by Portuguese and Chinese youths such as Ernest Fereira and Rolf Moyou (whose sister was married to the young Eric Williams), but none of this is mentioned. Today the monograph is of little use to the researcher and it is regretted that Weller hadnt chosen to write about another band, namely the small group of turbulent youth who formed Renegades. They were led by the late Steven Goldteeth Nicholson, the man Weller married, and an account of his band would have contributed so much more than her Profile to an understanding of the steelband movement by describing the origins of what is now the most successful band ever.

These ideas might never have occurred to me had I not decided to write an article for the Sunday Express in February 1993, focusing on the badjohn roots of steelband. In the previous year I had already written about the background of the 1992 Panorama champions, Exodus Steel Orchestra; the 1992 Pan Ramajay champions Potential Steel Orchestra; and the Casablanca Steel Orchestra on the occasion of the films fiftieth anniversary. Additionally, I had interviewed the Swedish physicist Ulf Kronman on his pioneering research into the acoustics of pan. And yet, for whatever reason, it was only in 1993, when researching the badjohn roots of steelband, I was struck by the inadequacy of how the steelband movement was studied. It seems obvious now, at least to me, like how no one would dream of limiting jazz to its function as Afro-American identity, with not a mention of Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker or any of the many other men and women who created the music. As I said, it seems obvious now; and how I arrived at the realisation was quite simple too: I walked over to the nearby Tokyo Steel Orchestra pan theatre to chat with a handful of old-timers about the fighters in their band. I could have scoured the library, but I suppose the journalist in me preferred to speak to the actual men who did the deeds. And as I sat in the hot sun on a bench in John John, listening to the reminiscences of one Aldwyn George, I grew more and more enthralled by the stories he told me about various Tokyo fighters: Bake Nose, Spree, Lil Drums, Dana, Mud Mouth, Dewa, Badji. The single feature article immediately burgeoned into a five-part series, to which I have continued to add whenever the opportunity presented itself. This was due to more than the anecdotal wealth of that first group of steelband veterans with whom I spoke. Rather, it was the different focus forced upon medespite the fact that, in retrospect, the article was not particularly insightfulfor I had to confront the specificity of the Tokyo Steel Orchestra, originally known as Destination Tokyo, and the specificity of those old men I had chanced upon, for they s poke about their lives and their band in a way that permitted no extrapolation into a vague steelband movement. All of a sudden the undifferentiated and rather monolithic steelband movement of the anthropologists and sociologists cracked. In the gap I caught a fleeting glimpse of such incredible hurly burly that was the steelband movement in its manifold human variety. Before me was a specific band made up of specific individuals who did specific things. Consequently, researching the five-part series, Body Music to Sweet Pan, carried me to San Fernando in the south, Arima in the east and Point Cumana in the west. Since then, whenever permitted I have desperately added to my stories of the men and the bands that comprised the steelband movement in the hope of capturing as much as I can before it all disappears. For therein lies the truth, the beauty and the justice of any account. Does this mean that you dont believe that a general structural explanation is possible? asked Thomas Erikson, an anthropologist who has studied ethnicity in Trinidad. Not at all, I replied: they must emerge out of the many individual stories but general structural explanations are precisely what I aim for, however qualified or nuanced. Indeed, the first discovery which necessitated my original article be extended into a series was the generality of the steelband phenomenon. Within a year of the end of World War II steelbands had sprung up in every nook and cranny of Trinidad and Tobago, wherever there were Afro-Trinidadian youth, from Point Fortin to Santa Cruz and from Point Cumana to Sangre Grande. Over a hundred bands paraded the streets on Discovery Day 1951, fifty-nine of them in Port of Spain, estimated the Trinidad

Guardian, but the number was no doubt far greater if one counted the more informal groups of youths which had a few pans and knocked on them without calling themselves a band or coming on the road or even having a name. This explosive growth of the steelband movement raised several important issues of which I shall mention two. First: how did it take place? A tentative answer might be found in the following examples: Wellington Blues Bostock from Red Army in Port of Spain was sent to live in San Juan by his mother after he got in trouble with the law. There he founded San Juan All Stars. Carlton Zigilee Barrow left Bar 20 in Port of Spain and went to St James to get away from police harassment. Ivan Skull Henry migrated from Port of Spain, first to Point Fortin and then to Arima to evade warrants for his arrest. In Arima he started Melodians. Likewise, Henroy Harper went to Santa Cruz to evade arrest. Emile Zola Williams, from San Fernando, passed through Port of Spain on his way to work at the American naval base at Chaguaramas, whereas Donald Seon has it that for unknown reasonsmost likely fleeing the lawone Billy from Destination Tokyo in Port of Spain migrated to San Fernando where he started the first South steelband, Pearl Harbour. Andrew Beddoe, another Destination Tokyo man, visited Tacarigua to attend a Shango ceremonyhe was a master Orisha drummerand started Boom Town there. Addawell and Nooksin Sampson moved from Port of Spain, by Alexanders Ragtime Band, with their parents to St James, where they created Harlem Nightingales. And so on and on. Examples such as these suggest general tendencies, but they could only be arrived at through detailed research into specific bands and specific individuals scattered throughout the country. Second is a hypothesis rather than a question prompted by the universality of the steelband movement: that is, it encouraged and supported, both morally and physically, the embattled youth. This leads to my speculation as to the naming of the steelbands: Desperadoes, Night Invaders, Shores of Tripoli, Crossfire, Destination Tokyo, Boys Town, Free French, Five Graves to Cairo, Sands of Iwojima, Bar 20, and so on. They were for the most part derived from the movies, and this is generally explained as being due to the centrality of the movies to working-class fantasies, especially those of aggressively masculine black youth. This is usually taken to be irony in the extreme, because here was the most intense creativity wearing the garb of Hollywood mimicry. Why not? After all, as Marx pointed out in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the actors in the French Revolution clothed themselves in the garb of Imperial Rome. But is that all there was to it? An additional impulsewhich I must emphasise is speculativeoccurred to me when Rudy Two Left Smith of Red Army referred to the steelband movement as a revolution. Perhaps those young men had intuitively recognised that the movement they had created was bigger than anything else in the society, bigger than their colonial opponentsbearing in mind this was in the days before the tidal wave that was the Peoples National Movement. Perhaps the youths knew in however inarticulate a fashion that they were a part of something larger than their otherwise narrow lives. Larger and stronger than anything else in the society at the time, steelband had evoked in them passions deeper and more noble than any they had ever felt before. A parallel might be the youth movement which swept the western world in the Sixties. As such the panmen chose names for their bands that carried an appropriately epic grandeur.

Thats just a bit of speculation en passant, and it might seem a minor issue. But the self-confidence it represented was of major importance, for without such tremendous self-confidence those youths would have been unable to challenge both the law and the strong disapproval of their parents. It must be borne in mind that those were not times when young people did as they pleased like nowadays. We were disobedient, Kenny Hart from City Syncopaters told me, but we had respect. And they suffered for it. Carlton Zigilee Barrow from Bar 20 had twenty-three convictions associated with the steelband by the time he was seventeen years old. Kelvin Pierpoint from Boys Town in Point Cumana was beaten by his mother with a torch light for playing pan. Cyril Goddard from Hells Kitchen in Tunapuna was locked inside his house and beaten unconscious by his father. Ethelbert TB Brown from Casablanca could not return home because his mother, on hearing news that he was seen in a steelband, was waiting with boiling water to scald him into a white man. Neighbours shunned them and, as Sparrow sang, If your sister talk to a steelband man/the family want to break she hand/put she out, lick out every teet in she mouth. And the police werent easy either. Under these onslaughts, a few of these youths stopped playing pan. Most, however, continued and indeed they became more defianttattooed onto their arms the names and insignias of their bands. All of this so far fits into the general mythology of the steelband movement which academic researchers have taken as their starting point: that is, the narrative of a chance discovery of one or two notes on a metal container causes the bamboo percussion used at Carnival to be supplanted by metal; the instrument is elaborated through rivalry between bands which also leads to gang warfare; state repression and social ostracism of the steelband men escalate the violence until enlightened leaders deflect the competitiveness into musical channels and national acceptance. This narrative is not only contained in popular accounts such as Sparrows Outcast, which I have quoted above; it also forms the backdrop of the few extensive scholarly studies of the steelband. Even accounts written by men who were involved in the steelband movement in its formative years subscribe to this narrative, men such as Lennox Pierre who almost single-handedly created the first steelband association in 1950, and George Goddard, a stalwart of the movement from the beginning and its leader throughout the Sixties. And no wonder: its an appealing narrative with a Cinderella-type romance which gives Trinidad and Tobago a heroic sense of national culture. Besides, it contains much that is indeed true. Disdaining the stories of individual men and women, however, leaves the mythic account inanimate: there is no sense of the struggles, the defeats and victories, the creativity and achievements of the men who invented the steelpan and whose movement nurtured it. And creativity, collective and individual, is the motor of creolization. (Historians have generally been more sensitive to human agency, perhaps because our history has been one long attempted denial of human agency. Unfortunately they have not focused on the steelband, perhaps considering it too contemporary.) This lacuna aside, the mythic narrative omits the exceptions, and these are as important as the rule. For instance, as far as the repression aspect of the narrative goes, there are equally important exceptions. Often, for instance, parentsusually mothers tolerated their teenage sons joining steelbands provided they remained in sight. So after Zigilee was first convicted and put on probation for playing in the Hell Yard band, his mother allowed him to form Bar 20 across the road where she felt she could keep an eye on him. Similarly, the Mannette brothers Ossie, Birdie and Ellie, were allowed to form Oval Boys, which became the legendary Invaders, because the band was in a vacant lot

next door. Zainool Mohammed likewise allowed, encouraged even, his son Lennox Bobby to form the Cavaliers once the band was downstairs their house. And as Andrew Pan De Labastide put it, My mother was my greatest fan. Even respectable middleclass girls were allowed to join Girl Pat Steelband because the band was housed in the living room of their leader Hazel Henley, and never played on the road. Girl Pat was formed in 1951. Thats around the time when middle class college boys were forming bands such as Dixieland, Silver Stars and Stomboli. Still, it was a radical thing for decent young women to form a steelbandthe art form carried an unsavoury stigma of black, lower-class male hooliganism. Daisy James, who secretly played in Casablanca from the mid-Forties, recalls that her younger sister was not allowed into a prestige school because her brothers Fitzroy and Sonny were steelband men. What would have happened if it was known that Daisy was in the band too? In this light the story of Girl Pats Hazel Henley gives a colourful example of the significance of the individual biography in the making of history. She was born to Trinidadian parents in the US, developed rickets as a child and was unable to walk until she was seven years old and was brought back to the West Indies. In the tropics her condition improved rapidly, and she recalls that after years of frustrating immobility, the first thing she did when she realised she could walk was to dance wine was the word she usedto the music of a passing Salvation Army band. It shamed her parents, but how fitting that she should be the pioneer of womens participation in the main vehicle for street dancing. Hazel Henleys case is poignant but peripheral. The story would like to be able to give you and cannot is that of Ellie Mannette, the leader and tuner for the Invaders. He has lived for many years in the US and to interview him is beyond my means, which is unfortunate because hes probably the single most important man in the invention of the steelpan. It was he who sank the pan into a concave shapethey were convex before and opened the way for the proliferation of notes. He started using the 55-gallon oil drum with its harder steel and larger face. Some say he was the one to put rubber on the tips of the sticks, although Im not sure about that. His pans had the greatest number of notes and the sweetest and most distinctive tonal quality. His placement of notes was the first style emulated by other tuners. Even today, when there are many very good pan tuners, some virtuosos still insist that a Mannette pan is still the best. One such pannist, the American Andy Narell, has published a long interview with Ellie Mannette in the Trinidadian evening paper The Sun, but otherwise he has been completely ignored, as have also been Neville Jules, Sonny Roach, Sterling Betancourt (who was given an honorary doctorate in England), and everyone else for that matter. Such aversion to the panmen themselves attained a grotesque dimension in an interview conducted for the Oral and Pictorial Records Project at UWI in St Augustine on The Innovations of Anthony Williams. Tony Muffman Williams is regarded as one of the greatest all-round steelband men everdesigner of the now standard fourths and fifths tenor pan, the cello pan and the modern mobile steelband ensemble and leader and arranger of the great North Stars band. The interviewer somehow found it more appropriate to interrogate George Goddard, a steelband administrator, about Williamss innovations. I am not an expert because my involvement in the steelband has gone along the lines of a trade union leader, protested Goddard. I was more interested in the social aspects of the steelband, more than the musical aspect. Nevertheless, despite Goddards repeated claims of ignorance, the interviewer kept attempting to interrogate him about

Tony Williamss career. It never occurred to the interviewer to pay a visit to Tony Williamshe lives in Bengal Street in St Jamesand ask him what he wanted to know. Williamss greatness was all-round: as a captain, an arranger and, most lastingly, as a tuner. And to overlook the achievements of such men, especially in the field of tuning, is perhaps the greatest dereliction in studies of the steelband movement, concentrating as they do on the socio-political dimensions of the phenomenon. The story of pan is before all else the story of tuning the instrument. I say tuning because that is what it is called, but the word is fatally misleading because a pan tuner does not tune a steel pan the way a guitarist or a violinist tunes his instrumentby turning a key. Rather, pan tuning means the actual fabrication of the instrument, which includes making the notes give off their distinctive tones. The development of the art of tuning is synonymous with the invention of the instrument. In this Ellie Mannette was the master, and although his stature must not be taken to diminish the genius of other tuners, Mannette was the Antonio Stradivari of the steelband movement. And whereas Mannettes pans had the greatest range of notes and the richest tones, his band, the Woodbrook Invaders, had the most virtuosos, many drawn from other bands in the western suburbs of Port of Spain. Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley joined from Green Eyes, Othello Mollineaux came from Symphonettes. Then there were Kelvin Dove, Ray Holman, Francis Wickham, Ellies brother Vernon Birdie Mannette, Anise Halfers Hadeed, and many other talented Invaders players. Why? Bands were captained either by men with a flair for organisation or by those with a musical gift. The first group included men such as George Yeates of Desperadoes, Oscar Pile of Casablanca, Prince Batson of Trinidad All Stars. These men were relatively educated, articulate and all had jobs. The second group, to which Ellie Mannette belongs, included Sonny Roach of Sun Valley, Tony Williams of North Stars, Aldwyn Jordan of Nocturne Fascinators, Spree Simon of Johannesberg Fascinators and Neville Jules of Trinidad All Stars. And yet, in this company Mannette stands out in being the only one who didnt arrange for his band. When I asked Birdie Mannette who used to arrange for Invaders, his reply was, We didnt have no special arranger. Everybody did a little thing. Wed listen to the radio and Id try to remember a part, somebody else would try to remember another part, and three or four of us would try to put the tune together. Perhaps this why Invaders, famous for their improvisational style on the road, never won a Panorama, never won a Steelband Festival, even though it has always been acknowledged as the greatest JOuvert band. The idea appears more persuasive when Ellie Mannette and Invaders are contrasted with Neville Jules and Trinidad All Stars. Jules, whose forte was the background (bass) pans, couldnt put as many notes on his tenor pans as Mannette. So to get the same range he multiplied the types of pans he tuned. Likewise, Jules couldnt abide with individuals improvising. All of these tendencies inclined Jules to orchestrating every note played by every player in the Trinidad All Stars. So proprietary was this creator of the Bomb competition, about his arrangements that he rehearsed the band secretly, having the players use their fingertips so the tune could not be heard by spies. Consequently, Trinidad All Stars has won the largest number of Steelband Festivals where European classical music is performed. The Trinidad All Stars was known for its self-discipline and was the only major band never to have rioted with another band. Indeed, that is why they never saw fit to join the first steelband association, which was formed to curtail the fighting. Their pacifism not only accorded with the bands extreme self-discipline but also with necessity, for it never represented a community. If you live in the heart of town you

cant have a district, people keep going and coming, explained the bands martinet captain Prince Batson. Also, the bands catchment area, which included Charlotte Street, Duke Street and George Street, although they were adjacent to one another, somehow experienced strong centrifugal forces. Some time in the Thirties, for instance, a fight in Hell Yard over a pack of cards sent men scuttling back to their respective streets. This was memorialized in calypso: Murder in the wang with Hell Yard and George Street/Once again they meet (repeat)/The only thing that made me feel bad/Knowing that they fought for a pack of card/But the pelting of the bottle and the throwing of the stone/They made George Street a battle zone. The archetypal community bands were Desperadoes from up Laventille, and Destination Tokyo from John John, and although their musical contribution to the steelband movement in the Forties and Fifties was insignificant, they were the ones which forged the relationship between their communities and the early Peoples National Movement. As a result of that relationship grew the make-work Crash Program which initially involved men from the warring Desperadoes and Tokyo. Still, these two bands differed in how they acquired and maintained their status as representatives of their respective communities. In the case of Laventille, smaller bands such as Serenaders, Joyland, Caribbean Hit Paraders and Spike Jones, were incorporatedwith an unstated coercioninto Desperadoes. George Yeates came from Caribbean Hit Paraders and Rudolph Charles from Spike Jones. Yeates forged the bands link with the government and had the band placed in the districts Community Centre. Charles turned the band into what it is todayone of the most important steelbands ever, and the staunchest supporter of the PNM. It wasnt unusual for smaller bands to be coerced to remain in the larger one, especially if the smaller band had younger players with more talent. Kenny Hart and other youngsters in Casablanca, for instance, made one early attempt to leave and form their own band, Cross of Lorraine. Within two weeks time the bad boys and them come and take up all the pan and them and say its only one band must be around here and thats Casablanca, recalls Hart. So we had was to go back up the hill. Hart and his friends such as Philmore Boots Davidson remained in Casablanca until 1950, when they broke off to form City Syncopaters. At that time most of Casablanca badjohns were in gaol for the 1948 riot with Rising Sun in Belmont. Tokyo, on the other hand, appears to be quite different, although I am less familiar with the history of that band. It seems that John John tolerated several different bands co-existing once they all joined together for Carnival. Thus, for instance, the famous Winston Spree Simon left Tokyo for Johannesberg Fascinators, but continued tuning for Tokyo. The two bands joined together to go into town. Neither Desperadoes nor Tokyo was of any musical significance in the Forties, when the leading bands were Casablanca, Trinidad All Stars, Invaders, Sun Valley, North Stars and Southern Symphony. About the latter I know very little, but the pre-eminence of the others is owed to the assistance of musically trained people who were in the bands or sympathised with what they were attempting. Casablancas tuner and arranger Croppy Simmonds, for example, had an uncle who was in charge of a brass band. Simmonds organised for his uncle to give music lessons to interested members of the band such as Patsy Haynes, Art de Coteau and TB Browne. Furthermore, Philmore Boots Davidson, who broke away from Casablanca to form Syncopaters in 1950, was from a musical familyhis sister gave music lessons and their house had a piano. And thats not

counting the many boys who came from the nearby orphanage and were trained in musicit was they who made Casablancas buglers the most famous. Invaders, of course, had the assistance of both amateur violinist Lennox Pierre and choreographer Beryl McBurnie. Sun Valley had Bajan Cecil Ward, who was trained in music; next door was the sympathetic Akal family who allowed them to use their piano. After he returned from his 1951 tour of England with the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra, Tony Williams, who had already left Sun Valley for North Stars, took a course in vocal music. I didnt take piano because I thought the fingering would take too long to learn, he once told me. He was walking from the market one Sunday morning in St James when I recognised and stopped him to ask where he learnt music. It was not a formally recorded interview but a brief sidewalk conversation. Although I was curious about the question, I had not got around to interviewing Williams, as I have not got around to interviewing dozens of other steelband pioneersthe demands of my job do not leave much time for such research. But the urgency of this project made even the fleeting conversation important. For these men are old and unless they are interviewed soon, their stories will disappear forever. And yet another injustice, only a more permanent one, will have been done to the steelband movement and the men who made it happen.

CARIBBEAN HOT POT

In 1823 James Stewart, a sugar planter for two decades in the Jamaican parish of Trelawney, described a party of the white upper class. Even if the music of the violins were better than it is, he said, it would be spoiled by the uncouth and deafening noise of the drums, which the negro musicians think indispensable. Stewart expressed surprise at this music, which the dancers strangely continue to tolerate. Today, we are surprised too. For the Caribbean nations, infamous for their brutal history of Amerindian genocide and African slavery, were never considered more than labour camps for the production of gold, tobacco and sugar. They were valued only for the wealth which they yielded, and society there has never assumed any particularly noble aspect, thought James Anthony Froude in 1887, the natural graces of life do not show themselves under such conditions. And yet the region has become, in spite of poverty, in spite of its minuscule population, one of the world's most fertile areas in the efflorescence of music. For instance, reggae is unchallenged as the most important development in music in the 70s and 80s and, indeed, has been a conscience for the world in the post-flowerpower era. Calypso and its offshoots accounted for one in four US record sales in the late 50s and today, alongside its companion, steelband, through their association with carnival have given birth to the largest and most vibrant public festivals in North America and Europe. From the 40s through the 60s a succession of Hispanic Caribbean beatsthe rumba, the conga, the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, the boogaloo have quickened Western dance steps with an irresistible sensuousness, just as their progeny, salsa and meringue, are doing today. This musical fecundity saw its origin in the scene described by Stewart, a scene which took place throughout the Caribbean: black creole slaves playing European music

in an African style for white creole planters. The result was a variety of musics that ranged from the purely European to purely African. At the European end of the spectrum are the work songs and ring game tunes that can be traced directly to European folksongs. The jibaro and guajiro music of the rural farmers in Puerto Rico and Cuba respectively grew out of the Spanish ten-line verse form known as the decima. In the northern Dominican Republic are performed salves and tonadas, vocal choruses derived from Spain. In the French areas choral groups pass from house to house at Christmas time singing French folk and Christmas songs called creche. In yet other islands British sea shanties are sung much as they were on the other side of the Atlantic a century before. Generally, most village dance bands include in their repertoire European social dance musicwaltzes, mazurkas, quadrilles, and so forth. These earlier pan-European musics used the same instrumentsviolins, guitars, flutesand the same diatonic harmonic system, and they can be heard in Spanish Puerto Rico, English Jamaica, French Haiti and Dutch Curacao. But perhaps the most pristine European music is found in countries which possess conservatories for formal musical training. Again, most Caribbean countries have music festivals where classical European music is performed. Perhaps the grandest classical music festival in the region, organised by the world famous Spanish cellist, Pablo Casals, is held in Puerto Rico. An interesting variant is found in Trinidad where classical concerts are periodically performed...on steelpans: the region's only totally indigenous instruments. Another unusual variant takes the form of the European jigs, reels, minuets and contradanses, played with fiddles, fifes, tambourines and drums for the purpose of invoking African spirits. More pervasive, for the obvious demographic reasons, are the musics that occupy the African end of the continuum. This tradition finds expression in African instrumentation, that is, a variety of drums, rattles, scrapers and other percussive instruments, always performed with lead and supporting parts. The initial European attitude towards this African music was more than merely revulsion; slave owners were afraid of the music because of the communicative functions of the drums and the unifying force the music represented. Consequently, throughout the Caribbean, drums were outlawed. Another African aspect of Caribbean music is the close interaction between musicians and dancers, especially in the call-response singing. This is found not only in the lead-chorus structure of the music but also in the close relationship of the musicians to their audience. Today audience participation, clapping, dancing, calling for more or booing offstage, is an integral part of the show. These features are preserved in fairly pristine form throughout the Caribbean, from the Bahamas in the north where two or three-drum ensembles accompany a saw scraped with a knife for the jumping dance, to Suriname in the south, where the six different tribes of Maroons practice the most fundamentally African music in the region. In between these extremes, for instance, is Jamaica where is a rich variety of drumming traditions directly related to African religious practices. Kromanti ceremonies of the Maroons alone use several particular styles of African drumming and singing. In the west there are the gumbe dances, the nago and etu traditions of the Yoruba. In Trelawney is a Kongo drumming tradition in which a single drummer produces complex rhythmic variations by using his heel to change the drum pitch. Buru is played by a three drum ensemble in the central part of the island, and was important in the development of

the Rastafarian nyabingi style of drumming. In the east are the kumina cults played on two drums, and the convince or bongo traditions which use clapping and African singing. Even in as small an island as Carriacou, which has only about 6,000 people, the big drum dance embraces the styles of kromanti, arada, chamba, congo, banda, ibo, manding, and temnewhich are all related to different nations or African tribesin addition to old bongo, juba and kalinda. Where there are other ethnic groups such as Asians and Aboriginals the spectrum of music is even wider. Trinidad, for instance, in addition to European and African styles of music, also possesses several Indian types of song, from Hindu bhajans to Muslim cassidas, each with their corresponding instrumentation, as well as yet other types from Venezuela. And all of these have are living traditions. Suriname does not have the Venezuelan input but instead one can hear Javanese gamelan ensembles. Some of the Surinamese maroon music incorporates Amerindian influences. The sheer extent of the Caribbean musical spectrum is not the important feature, though, but the fact that individual musicians are comfortable along its length and breadth. The same pianist could find himself playing light ballads in a hotel, improvised jazz in a private session, gospel music in a church, classical music in concert and calypso in a nightclub. Musicologist Kenneth Bilby describes one Jamaican musician whom he trailed for several days: Starting one morning by playing guitar in a coastal mento band for tourists, he returned later that day to his rural village to join in a fife and drum performance, playing the leading drum, and then in the evening added his voice to a Revival church chorus. The next day he treated a group of friends to an impromptu performance of British ballads, accompanying himself on guitar, and late that night played guitar and led a number of religious songs at a nine night (wake). On the afternoon of the third day, I found him jamming on electric bass with a local reggae band, and by the early evening he was contributing some excellent banjo playing to a village quadrille dance. The next morning found him on the coast entertaining the tourists again, this time on harmonica, and when I left him that evening he was on his way to a kumina ceremony, where he intended to sit in on the supporting drum. This polymorphous artist is the heir of those negro musicians James Stewart saw in 1823. Their legacy, passed on amidst poverty and suffering, is one of the richest in the world. Even when playing European tunes, the Caribbean musicians of whatever colourbecause its no longer a matter of race now, recalling how the white dancers tolerated the drumming theninstinctively liberate them from their metrical straight jackets to set feet tapping, fingers snapping and hips swaying. The African rhythms are alloyed to the European melodies to produce the uniquely Caribbean music. But it is more than that. The fusions which Caribbean musicians have practised centuries before jazz self-consciously attempted it are also responsible for the adaptability of the musicians and of the musics that allow them to change with the times and the circumstances. Take reggae for instance: it began as the mento, a rural music influenced by calypso and Afro Cuban music. Bob Marley would have grown up singing calypsoes. When it moved into the urban areas in the 1950s, it absorbed rhythmic patterns of both Jamaican Afro creole cults and North American blues which slowed it down. The result was the ska which in turn incorporated soul influences and slowed down further into becoming the rocksteady. To this was added in the 1960s Rastafarian drumming and their millenarian vision which produced reggae. Whereas most popular music, played in 4/4 time emphasises the first and third beats, reggae quite distinctively emphasises the

second and fourth beats. Despite the initial awkwardness this produces in unfamiliar dancers, nevertheless the deep emphasis on slow bass guitar riffs gives the music a seriousness which is yet of incomparable sensuousness. Since the 1970s reggae has spawned dub, a version in which various tracks are removed from the musicvoices, guitar, keyboardsto create a different sound. The gap was left for live DJs to extemporise a commentary, adding their live performance to an essentially studio music. This in itself then turned into dance hall music, something akin to the American rap in which the voice is used as a percussive instrument. Curiously, when the voice isn't so used, the melodic pattern it follows in very African fashion bears no rhythmic relationship to the underlying percussion and bass, making any melody amenable to the same rhythmic lines. This has made possible to take music from all over and sing it on top of a reggae rhythm and turn it into reggae. On the other end of the English Caribbean is calypso, the oldest West Indian music. It emerged in the 19th century from the kalinda chants which were sung in French patois by organised bands whose leaderschantouellesritually battled one another with sticks. By a complex evolution the chantouelles metamorphosed into calypsonians of the 1920s who sang in English in bamboo tents. Their repertoire, drawn from a wide variety of sources, had been widely expanded to include satiric songs, social commentaries, ballads, and aggressively boastful songs. Many of these came under political and moral censorship in the turbulent 1930s, leading to the practice of double entendre whereby calypso lyrics are designed to deliver their message obliquely. The ingenuity emerges from the indirection. After the 1930s calypso blossomed in musical and lyrical complexity, absorbing influences as it passed through the 40s, the 50s, the 60s and the 70s from popular ballads, folk music, jazz, Latin music, soul, reggae and Indian folk music. Soca (soul/calypso) with its extremely danceable swing was one product, even though the labels calypso and soca are too restrictive to encompass the different musical styles and permutations which have emerged. Overall, however, the mood of calypso/ soca is one of laughter, joyously abandoned or satirically mocking, as opposed to reggae's aura of righteousness and duty. Around the same time that the chantwell left the band to remake himself as a calypsonian, those hed left behind, the drummers, went along their own trajectory. Drumming was outlawed so they took up tamboo bamboo. This was the percussion groups which pounded different lengths of bamboo on the ground to produce different tones, accompanied by bottles, tins, dustbin covers, scrapers and whatever else could be knocked to produce a rhythm. Sometime during the Second World War, however, when all street festivals were outlawed, black people in the slums of Port of Spain spontaneously cast aside the bamboo and began experimenting with alternatives. And on VE Day, May 8, 1945, the towns streets were filled with the ringing, clanging, booming of simple melodies pounded by bands of men on metal drums. The inheritors of Stewarts negro musicians had given birth to the steelband. Trinidad music also partakes of the Venezuelan carolling tradition known as parang, now in the process of spawning an indigenous parang-soca. Furthermore, in common with Guyana and Suriname, Trinidad has a wide range of East Indian styles of music, ranging from Muslim cassidas to Hindu bhajans, from religious to secular, spiritual to bawdy. Mostly derived in an unmodified state from Indian traditional folk, classical and film music, the three Caribbean countries with a large Indian population have recently begun to fashion an indigenous chutney.

Sung in Hindi, chutney is an up tempo music of voices, harmonium, a double sided drum called dholak, and a percussive length of iron called dhantal. Though performed mainly by male ensembles, chutney grew out of erotic women's songs used to educate child brides in the arts of love, and to some extent out of Indian film music. (Interestingly, it is also argued that the satirical elements in calypso have grown out of African womens songs.) In keeping with its Indian roots, chutney follows different principles to Africanderived music. There is neither the African call-response nor the European verse-refrain structure of melodies. The vocals lead while the drums, soloing throughout, embellish the rhythm. Melodies are shaped by the phrasing and phonetics of the Hindi language. And yet the rhythmic emphases of both Indian and African music is creating in Trinidad chutney-soca: a synthesis hardly surprising insofar as soca was itself produced when Indian tassa drumming became infused into calypso rhythms. African traditions, both being, in the rural areas, much more unmodified than in Trinidad. Still, the popular caseco music, derived from French Guianas caseco and somewhat calypso-like in style, has begun to record songs in maroon languages with their instrumentation and drumming styles. Given the rich and vibrant musical traditions existing in the Surinamese countryside, we can expect exciting sounds to come from Paramaribo in the future. Generally, however, the dominant musical influence in the southern Caribbean is Trinidad and most of the Anglophone Lesser Antilles have calypsonians and steelband. But the French islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the nearby islands which were once French, St. Lucia and Dominica, also have cadance and its recent offshoot, zouk. Like all Caribbean music, however, cadance provides a lesson in crossover and fusion. It began at the turn of the century in Martinique and Guadeloupe as the beguine, a rhythm like a calypso-rhumba combination with fast triplets and clarinet solos. In 1935 it was popularised in watery form by Cole Porters Begin the Beguine. By the early 70s it had acquired electric instrumentation and infusions from soca and Dominican meringue as well as guitar and cymbal styles from Zaire in West Africa to create cadance. Around 1975 the Haitian compas and calypso was absorbed with a horn section to give this cadance a fast, bouncy beat. Ten years later the music acquired additional electronic instrumentation and an increase in tempo. This new zouk is even more pan-Caribbean in flvour, and yet it retains the characteristic French romance of its sound. Guadeloupe and Martiniques zouk has also begun to fuse with the compas of the other French patois-speaking country. Despite the periodic intermarrying between the music of the French Antilles and Haiti, however, the latters music is quite distinctive in its history and sound. It emerged in the 1940s when Haitian folk and voodoo rhythms were brought together with the Dominican meringue and American swing jazz. The style was further indigenized in the 50s when the beat or compas was changed. The 60s big bands were replaced by smaller mini-jazz bands whose sound was funkier and more in keeping with the ebullience of the times. The influence of Antillian cadance replaced the melodic horn solos of mini-jazz compas with a horn section and the music became more intricate. The current popularity of zouk is giving compas a more electronic feel, which contrasts with a music which periodically reaches back to traditional voodoo rhythms and melodies and the traditional one tone bamboo instruments called vaccines. Next door, the Dominican Republic has pursued its own musical trajectory. Dominican meringue is very different from Haiti's turn of the century salon meringue. The Dominican meringue, the most internationally well-known of that countrys many

Afro-Latin styles, originated as a rural music played with an accordion, a metal guiro scraper, a double-sided tamboura drum and a C-melody saxophone played like the New Orleans creole clarinets. Today the meringue dance bands are larger and have a horn section and modern instrumentation, but the tamboura, the scraper, the sax and a syncopated cinquillo are characteristic. Played with fast sax phrases to a 2/4 beat, the meringue, like most Latin music, comes with its particular dance of intricate footwork. The strong Hispanic Catholic culture, which finds expression in the clearly demarcated male and female roles, both on and off the dance floor, has not made the meringue any less African, though, and the meringue structure uses a great deal of call and response. Meringue is sometimes included with bombas and plenas from Puerto Rico, cumbias from Colombia and joropos from Venezuela under the general rubric of salsa. Then, the term is used to refer to a generically fast Latin dance rhythm, as oposed to a slow bolero. A more restricted definition, however, relates salsa to a variety of fast AfroCuban rhythms linked to the 1930s rhumba and the 1940s mambo. These rhythms include guanguancos, guarachas and, especially, sones. The first rhythm invented by Cubans, the son, came from Oriente province in the 1920s with voices, a nine-stringed guitar called the tres, a marimbula bass, maraccas, claves and bongo. Once in Havana, a trumpet, played in the special septeto style, was added. White Havana danced to the conservatory trained flute and fiddle charanga ensembles, but the rowdy music black carnival conjunto bands were growing in popularity. The conjuntos sang in a more African fashion with two or three trumpets and used a strongly percussive style. Indoors they added piano and bass. The cross-fertilisation of these ensemblesthe trumpet-led septetos, the stringed charangas and the brass and percussion conjuntosgave birth to the rhumba in the 30s, the mambo in the 40s, the cha-cha-cha in the 50s. Further blending, this time abroad in New York, with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, produced the boogaloo in the 60s and, today the sensous and romantic salsa. All of these styles of Caribbean music have shown an openness to new influences and an adaptability to the times without losing contact with their roots. Just as jazz periodically goes back to gospel and blues, Caribbean musicians touch base in the African derived religious sounds from which they emerged. It is this changing sameness which has given the modern and industrially alienated world the impossiblea folk music suited to the times. Because, after all, were not the first people to experience modern industrial forms of organisation and production?

NOTES ON PANS
Pan, or what the Americans call the steel drums, can be found throughout the world. There are about eight hundred collegiate steelbands in the US today, including at least one in Alaska, and that does not count either the numerous community bands in the country or the many individual pannists who are professional musicians. Pan News, a Swiss steelband newsletter, has over a hundred and twenty five full time bands on its files. The Nigerian army has a steelband as does the Dutch police force and the US Navy. There are bands all over Europe, in Japan, Venezuela, Kuwait. And of course they are common in the Caribbean. To most people outside of Trinidad a steelband is a small

group of kids, or perhaps a five or six-man ensemble on a cruise ship or a beach front hotel, who play pop tunes or Yellow Bird on pans. That, to a Trinidadian, however, is as anaemic as the worst muzak. And the real thing, the authentic sound of the instrument, its irresistible power, can only be heard live from the gigantic, pulsing orchestras known as conventional steelbands. What are these conventional steelbands, how they evolved, what is their relationship to the societythose are the subject of the following notes, although not necessarily in that order. I In his unpublished memoirs John Slater, founder of the early steelband Crusaders, recalls one of his childhood pastimes in the 1930s at Eastern Boys Government School was drumming. This Slater and his friends did in spite of the disapproval of their strict schoolmaster. Roderick Tench Waldron and I loved to beat our fingers on the desk as if we were drumming, while at the same time singing calypsoes (in our teachers absence of course), recalls Slater. But whenever we got caught, we used to suffer the consequences. Over three decades later I too, as a secondary schoolboy in the late sixties and early seventies, drummed. It was nothing unusual, we all did it in my class at Trinity College. I am not sure when we started but by third form a teacher could not leave the class unsupervised for a moment without us striking up a racket, artlessly pounding and thumping away on our desks. Indeed, even when the teacher was droning about Spanish verbs or the like, we would softly drum. This we did partly to annoy the teachers, but the main reason we drummed was for its own sake. I cannot describe to anyone who has never experienced it, the trance-like pleasure we got from the drumming, other than to say it was akin to the sensuous pleasure we discovered later in dancing. Sometimes our drumming was accompanied by oral imitation of instruments, this boy the bass, that one the saxophone. One boy, a rather dull, otherwise untalented youth, would at the slightest instigation launch into a marvellous electric guitar whine. Guitar Mouth he was nicknamed. Many years later, in researching the history of the steelband movement, I discovered that mouth bands had been commonplace among working class black youth as a means of transportation. If a gang had to walk somewhere, say, they were returning from a party, they would start up a mouth band which would play all the way home. Indeed, mouth bands even became a didactic tool: when the members of Casablanca Steel Orchestra wanted to learn a piece of music they would listen outside a party to how the regular dance bands played it. Each youth would take the part of a particular instrument, and they would then tramp back to their panyard, each one singing the lines of their chosen instrument, until they could transfer what they had learnt onto their pans. Twelve oclock, one oclock sometimes we outside (a party) and them dont know, we outside because we didnt like to dance, we like the music, so I always outside listening, Raymond One Man Mark, an early captain of Casablanca, told me in an interview. Sometimes I have a little side with me and we outside and we singing different parts we go play on the pan and when the thing done we gone back up the road, we eh stopping because if you stop you go forget. We sing until we go in the panyard. Any hour and we gone in and we get it and remember it. It was through that method that Casablanca learned Ruby, a calypso played by Sel Duncans dance band on Henry Street, and surprised other panmen. When we come out on the road with that all them fellas want to know where we get that tune.

I cannot tell you how such cultural practices are transmitted but I recall working in Grenada in the summer of 1980 and having to walk a considerable distance with another student and spontaneously we started up a mouth band to carry us the way. I had never done it or seen it done before, no one had ever taught me the practice, but it did not seem a remarkable thing to do at the time. Back in high school, however, my class mainly drummed. Many a time we strove for a cymbal effect by crashing down with a pencil or six-inch ruler on my geometry tin. The sets of Oxford geometry instruments we used came in flat, rectangular boxes made of thin metalbut they never gave a satisfactory resonance. Generally we were content to drum with our hands, the base of our palms and the tips of our fingers, on the desktops until we became experts on the acoustics of school furniture. There were two types. The newer ones were essentially tables, a flat square of varnished plywood screwed on to a frame of tubular metal. And there were the more rickety, ancient desks which were all of wood and had a compartment for your books below a hinged lid. These latter desks were terrible for writingtheir surfaces were pock marked from years of schoolboys gouging out names and obscene bas reliefs on them with penknives. But having a hollow resonating box they gave a marvellously booming bass sound. The habit of unconsciously tapping on a tabletop never died in me and one morning long after I had left university I found myself beating out a rhythm on the breakfast table while a guest at my house was washing the dishes. He was the guitarist in a reggae band which rehearsed in my garage. Several years younger than I, his background was more working class as was his alma mater, whereas I had attended a fairly prestigious institution. Nevertheless, once he noticed my absent-minded syncopation he remarked, That same rhythm once got my whole class in trouble. And he related an incident from his high school days when an entire class made so much noise drumming during examinations time that they were collectively punished. Since then I have interrogated many Trinidadians if they drummed on desks in school. Without exception they reply in immediate surprise as if the answer was so obvious that the question was silly: Of course. Thus did it strike me how the compelling urge to drum and the inchoate pleasure it gave was deeply rooted in Trinidadian hearts. Discussing this with Ernest Brown, an African American researcher who has studied black music in Africa and in the US, I asked the same question. He thought for a while. No, he said. We were more into sports. And yet, you do not hear it in calypso, which has not the overwhelmingly percussive foundation as one would have expected and which you can hear, for instance, in Cuban or Dominican music, even though the Hispanic countries have a far smaller proportion of Africans. How was this powerful compulsion to drum manifest in Trinidad? Where was the energy channelled? For, as the point was made in admittedly overstated form by Rafael de Leon, also known as the calypsonian Roaring Lion: calypso was never accompanied by drums; it was always accompanied by string instrument (sic.). The question perplexed me until I posed it to Jeffrey Beddoe, a priest in the Yoruba religion of Orisha in Trinidad, and a drummer. He was also the brother of the late Trinidadian master-drummer Andrew Beddoe. Both Beddoes had been panmen as teenagers, Andrew with Tokyo, Geoffrey with Desperadoes, but both soon returned to their original instrument, the drum. In this the Beddoes were not alone. There were other panmen who eventually abandoned pan and returned to the drums, such as Carlton Mimp Francis, an early member of Desperadoes.

Like the Beddoes, Francis is an Orisha devotee whose return to the drum was probably influenced by the religion which gave its appeal a spiritual dimension. Few of the early panmen were Orisha devotees, though. Those panmen who drummed at Orisha rituals did so simply because they liked drumming. It is in this sense must be taken the suggestion by George Yeates, a former captain of Desperadoes, in the 1950s. The young people (in the ghetto) had to travel some distance to fetch water from a public stand-pipe. They used pitch-oil (kerosene) tins and zinc buckets, and on their way down to the stand-pipes they would keep a rhythm so that the distance was not felt; and there we believe the thought of Steel Bands was originated. So when I asked Jeffrey Beddoe where did our impulse to drum find an outlet, he replied simply, It all went into pan. II The steelband which won the 1997 Panorama competition, Renegades Steel Orchestra, did so for the third consecutive time. This victory not only gave Renegades the first Panorama hat trick ever; it also gave the steelband their ninth victory which makes them the most successful steelband in history, given that the annual Panorama competition is by far the most important event in the steelband world. And it all has been accomplished on the basis of an unusual partnership between the band and its arranger and musical director, Jit Samaroo. On the one hand the East Port of Spain band was of no musical significance throughout the Fifties and Sixties but was notorious for its belligerence. Up to today many people still refer to Renegades by the name of a small faction of the band called itself in the Sixties: Lawbreakers. On the other hand, the arranger this gang of black, urban youth teamed up with in 1971 was Jit Samarooa shy, frail Hindu teenager from the small rural village of Lopinot where the musical tradition is more Venezuelan than anything else. Somehow the Renegades embraced Samaroo so that their partnership could withstand ten years without any successes. The Renegades-Samaroo combination seems unlikely but from a wider perspective it really is not. The steelband movement, despite its Afro-Trinidadian origins and its fierce rivalries, has always been very accommodating. Every one of the top bands is wheeled on to the Panorama stage by throngs of partisans which included many people who are quite clearly not slum dwellers. I wonder how many of them are from Laventille, remarked a colleague when Desperadoes took the stage with its enormous crowd of supporters. There were many more than a handful of white people who were obviously foreign amongst the crowd of men and women from Laventille, the ghetto home of the band. I knew why they were there. I too can recall pushing pans as a child when steelbands paraded on the streets for Carnival and it was a mark of belonging, an honour even, to be a part of one of the huge caravans that poured their rivers of music on the road. I too would have stood out starkly as a middle-class child amongst the more plebeian steelband supporters, and I never met the slightest hint of rejection. Openness has not merely characterised the ethos of the steelband; it was actively sought after and was responsible for the invention and elaboration of the instrument. If the original percussive impulse was African, it became highly creolisedthat is, combined with the cultural traditions and aspirations of Europe. So the development of pan is largely a story of the young men of Trinidad in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties straining to create a melodic instrument out of a drum, labouring to acquire virtuosity of

performance and composition with it. They began with rhythms and progressed to nursery rhymes, choruses for simple songs, then entire songs until, by the time of the 1952 Music Festival, they were attempting European art music. Technically, this progression represents a growing complexity of the instrument and of the ensembles. Pans acquired more notes which were in turn tuned more accurately. Steelbands acquired more pans which gave them a wider and ultimately symphonic range. As important as this, however, was the burgeoning social complexity of the steelband movement. The first barriers to be broken were those of age and sex. Daisy James, for instance, unknown to her mother, played for Casablanca Steel Orchestra during the mid-Forties when she was just a child, and the steelband movement an embryo. The men in the band, some of whom were the most feared hooligans in Port of Spain, had to hold the pan which she played because it was too heavy for a little girl. True, there was something of the mascot about her presence there, but the more important reason she was allowed into what would have otherwise been an exclusive club, was her ability to play the instrument. Likewise, by 1950, when it was clear that pan was a melodic instrument, you got the involvement of middle class white and Chinese youths in the steelband movement with bands such as Dixieland, Silver Stars, Stromboli, Starlight. There was even in Tunapuna at the time an East Indian band, Saraswatee, which played Indian music. So when Jit Samaroo teamed up with Renegades, it was nothing unusual. It brings people together, both playing and listening, in a way that no other kind of music seems to, Lady Berkley, the wife of the 20th Baron Berkley, remarked enthusiastically on December 7, 1994 in the London Times. She had played piano, clarinet, accordion and guitar. But, she explained, the thing about those instruments is that you play them by yourself, and I didnt feel comfortable with the idea of a proper orchestra. So she joined the London Melodians, an English branch of the Arima band Melodians. The London Melodians comprise about 20 members, but the full extent to which pan brings people together is manifest in the large conventional steelbands on which there is an upper limit of 120 players for the Panorama competition. That is, a half again larger than a fully constituted symphony orchestra. Trinidadian steelbands are the largest permanent musical ensembles in the world, I would think, and the gravitational force which attracts and musically synchronises so many players is rhythm. Most obviously it is the rhythm that comes from the continuous, bright metronomic clanging of the brake hub iron section which can be heard above all the other instruments of the largest conventional steelband. This part of the band is the most primitive. It has undergone almost no change since metal was introduced into the bamboo stamping tubes in the Thirties and still to many Trinidadians it is the heart of the steelband. That is why that section of the band is raised on a ramp and is popularly known as the engine room. When a group of Trinidadians need a single instrument to make noise on an outing, ultimately it is the iron they will carry. Not a tenor pan, not a bass, not a drum, not a guitar or harmonica, but a car brake hub tuned to C. You can hear it on bus excursions to the beach as at trade union demonstrations, the sharp, clanging that compels Trinidadian hips to sway and their feet to slowly shuffle with a kind of sensuous irresistibility. That is nothing new. Drums have been used for centuries to co-ordinate people. Soldiers marched steadfastly to their death to the beat of a drum corps. It is simple. A rhythm can be almost hypnotic. It can make a person transcend his individuality and merge into the collective. In the martial case he transcends his fear. And the early

steelbands were martial organisations too, down to the bugles. They fought with one another and they fought with the police. Sometimes your stones quaking, reminisced pan pioneer Carlton Zigilee Barrow of those confrontations when his band, Bar 20, was faced by the police, but you have to go on. The achievement was to continue playing throughout the melee, no matter what. Of course there is more to the rhythm of a steelband than the martialthere is the sensuous too, something it shares with reggae. Perhaps martial is the wrong word. Rather, the steelband movement and the music it created is better described as being aggressively masculine, at least in its origins . Thus both instrumental and phallic meanings of the word iron are simultaneously correct in David Rudder's brilliant calypso Engine Room : If you iron good you is king. Needless to say there is more rhythm in a steelband than provided by the iron section. All the instruments in a steel orchestra are, after all, percussion instruments, and every player fits into very clear rhythms. That is what makes feasible the co-ordination of so many players with neither scores nor conductor. But that is merely enabling; what makes it attractive for both players and their audience is that pans are not only rhythmic, they are as much melodic instruments. (Who would listen to 120 drummers banging away simultaneously on timpani or congas?) For the urge to drum was leavened by a profound aspiration to play complete melodies and not simply rhythmic backgrounds to the voice. Were it not for this simultaneously melodic impulse, pan would never have progressed beyond the initial five or six notes of a West African marimba or thumb piano.

MODERNITY AND MUSIC

It was quite recently that, while preparing a lecture on Caribbean music, I revisited at Marshall Berman's study of modernity All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; the experience of modernity. I had read the book several years before but recalled almost nothing about it other than its evocative title. As my talk was intended to offer in passing some explanation for what has always struck me as an indisputable fact that popular music for better or worse was the quintessential art form of the twentieth century (equalled only, perhaps, by film), I hoped Berman might have had something useful to say on the subject. What was it that made jazz seduce a generation of Europeans? How did the music of small, poor Jamaica enter the psyche of young people the world over, regardless of language? Why are there hundreds of full-time steelbandsan invention of ghetto dwellers in the tiny island of Trinidadto be found today in Switzerland? As it turned out, these questions are never asked in Berman's bookthey arent even raised. For most people modernity began as a European phenomenon related to developments such as the rise of humanism and individualism in the Renaissance, secularism in the Reformation, science in the Enlightenment, urbanisation in the Industrial Revolution, and so forth. But despite situating his study within a general Marxist framework of the growth of capitalism and its constantly revolutionising the means of production, Berman seeks to probe deeper into the psyche of the modern man. Hence he looks at the existential condition of modernity by concentrating on artistic works which he considers represent the varieties of modernism. So far so good. After all, what matters it the route someone takes to arrive at what is a universal existential

condition? The Japanese were no part of the European experience but who can deny their modernity? So the book focused largely on the likes of Marx, Goethe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Mandelstam. Analysing the modernism of underdevelopment Berman looked at St Petersberg and Pushkin. When he did glance at the Americas it was to consider the work of city planner Robert Moses. How, I marvelled, could a New Yorkan, as Berman is, write about the existential condition of modernity through the artistic works it has generated and mention jazz only in a passing reference to its irrelevance? From the triumphs of the abstract expressionists to the radical initiatives of Davis, Mingus and Monk in jazz. he says of the 1950s. The most exciting work of this era is marked by radical distance from any shared environment. The environment is not attacked, as it was in so many previous modernisms: it is simply not there. Monk would have shrugged. Writing about jazz, he once replied to a hostile music critic, is like dancing about architecture. It would have been no less difficult for Berman to analyse the modernity in the shriek of John Coleman's horn. Its a commonplace that little can be usefully written about a piece of non-lyrical music. The incommensurability of language and music is almost absolute, for music is self-referent in a way that even a tree or a rock isnt. Once someone asked Schumann about the meaning of a piece he'd just played. His reply was to play it again. And yet I think when Monk made his felicitous remark, he touched on an even more fundamental truth than the incommensurability of language and music. Rather, he was referring to the different ways of relating to the world which were developed by different civilisations, and the arts which have arisen from these world views. He refers specifically to jazz, but the term can be extrapolated without any loss of meaning to include Afro-American music in general. Thus it could embrace the many kinds of music developed by black people in the Americas, including R&B, reggae, samba, bossa nova, meringue, calypso, rhumba, and so forth. To some degree all these musical forms possess distinctive features in common, but the one I want to concentrate on here is their improvisatory character. Thus I want to focus on music that exists solely at the unique moment during which it is in the process of being created. In other words, what we must explore is the ontology of ephemera, precisely when all that is solid melts into air. Now there is a sense in which all music, improvised and scored music, only exists at the moment it sounds. The value of all music is inherently written in air. Beethovens Fifth Symphony only really exists, is only realised, while it is being performed. In that sense music cannot be written, it can only be played for scratchings on paper arent music, they are only instructions on how to make a particular piece of music. They are no more music than a recipe is food. (A stronger case can be made for the reality, albeit at a lower level, of those echoes of music which can persist in our minds sometimes infuriatingly.) Nevertheless, the gulf separating scored from improvised music can be in some ways greater than the similarity between them. For although all music, whether its improvised or an interpretation of what has been written, are equally temporal in how they are realised over a period of time, theres another way in which music engages with time, and here is where the improvised diverges from the written. This divergence arises out of the very different ways in which music engages with time: the transcription of music constitutes an attempt to deny time, or at best to

transcend it, whereas the improvisation of music seeks to outwit time. What does this mean? The invention of notation is usually thought to have been an outcome of the growing complexity of European music. As the separate voices gained greater freedom, more accurate means had to be found to indicate the way these voices were expected to blend, argue Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis Davis in The Music of Man: Notation came partly from the need of many people to work together, and music naturally reflected this social fact. Actually, it is not so natural at all. But be that as it may, once notation was able to accurately score music, the result, especially when it became inspired by the Romantic concept of the genius, was to facilitate the domination of the composer over the performers of European music. As Menuhin and Davis hint, the division between composer and performer widened. The latter became mere interpreters of the composition. This did not take place without a rearguard action on the part of musicians whose hearts are inclined to immediacy and transience. When for instance Beethoven wrote his 1806 violin concerto he dedicated it to virtuoso violinist Franz Clement, the musical director of the theatre where the concerto was carded for its maiden performance. Concerto par Clemenza pour Clement, punned Beethoven, asking Clement for a clemency that was not given. Clement didn't read the score before the concert. Then, after the first movement, he introduced some of his own ideas, played his own fantasia while horsing around with his violin, holding it backwards, upside down. Beethoven rededicated the concerto to a childhood friend. Although it was not necessary for it, notation simplified the creation of long, structurally complex works and allowed them to be performed far and widethis was before audio recordingand preserved them against the attrition of human memory. Sadly, just as notation encouraged the dominance of the score over the performer, Clement notwithstanding, so too it facilitated the suppression of living composers by dead ones. (It is worth investigating why this happened with music but not drama which is also written.) Bearing in mind what Monk said about writing about jazz, the virtues of scored musicstructure and permanencemight be likened to those of architecture, the mother of all arts to the Greeks. The dominant ideal of western literate culture calls for the creation of poetic and plastic forms that shall outlast bronze and break the tooth of time, says George Steiner in his elegiac essay In a Post Culture. There he also notes in passing that there is in non-western culture a long history of the production of complex, highly inventive artefacts in materials intended for almost immediate consumption or destruction. Thus, improvised musicwhich in the African case is often inseparable from dance and costume, the most transient of art formsdoesnt seek to break the tooth of time so much as to outwit it. The music clothes itself in temporality, it celebrates the transient uniqueness of the present. This moment is unique and its music will never be repeated, it says, the musician tapping his foot as the metronome in his head says: now, now, now, now. Such musical ephemerality is not ontologically compromised by the technology of audio recording, no more so than is dance or drama by video recording. They are all utterly dependent on the presence of living, mortal performers. How does such ephemerality seek to outwit time?

The answer has to do with the relationship between the musician and his audience. Whereas written music is manifest in the relationship between the composer and the musician who later interprets or translates his instructions, the moment of improvised music is created by the relationship between the musician and his audience. The first case is a form of power; the second is a kind of communion through which the solitude of the individual is transcended. Solitude is mortality. My skin is a castle in which I am imprisoned and where I am condemned to certain extinction. The moment I transcend my solitude, my mortality falls away. Such transcendence is achieved in many ways, the most intense being perhaps the experience of sexual love. The lover scales the walls of his solitude in the presence of the beloved, the here and now. Love insists upon making a comparable leap over death but, by definition, it cannot be a species leap, writes John Berger in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, because the beloved constitutes the most particular and differentiated image of which the human imagination is capable. Every hair of your head. Contrasting with the spatial uniqueness of such love is the temporal uniqueness of improvised music. The momentary fusion of a musician and his audience is intrinsic to the aesthetic Africans brought to the New World, and not only through improvisation. A call-response structure which involves both parties in the creation of the music removed the barriers between the two. So too did the dancing and hand-clapping which was associated with the music. The emphasis on rhythm and repetition, and the centrality of drums, also had the same effect. Consider how drums have been used to march men into war by helping them to transcend their terrified individuality, and you begin to understand the power of rhythm. But there is another dimension in that the de-emphasis of melodic structure in the music reduces the sense of a clear beginning, middle and end. It is circular; it just seems to go on and on until it stops; hence the common complaint about African music when Europeans hear it is that it is monotonous. On to this African aesthetic were grafted various European musical traditions of harmony and melody to create the popular music of the New World, although different societies accomplished this in different ways with different results. Two examples which must be excepted from the general practice of improvisationone from a largely studio music and the other from a highly orchestrated musicactually demonstrate the rule about the organic relationship between performer and audience. Take, first, the Jamaican dancehall music which inspired the American rap music with its staccato, non-melodic vocals. This arose partly out of an urge to close the gap between reggae superstars, and the partygoers who danced to their records but never had the money to see them in live performance. The nexus was built by the DJs who bantered in rhyme before, during and after the records were spinning, introducing the music, commenting on it, adding to its message, until the DJs themselves became the new stars of a new music. That relationship between the artist and his community has always been intimate in Trinidad where the practitioners of lyrical music, calypso, has always enjoyed a close rapport with the public which regularly sees them live, responds to their lyrics with encores or boos, letters to the editor or political releases or even new calypsoes. Indeed, to be considered great calypsonians must possess the difficult skill of being able to improvise new verses on the spot to whatever calypso they are singing, either for an

encore or to respond to some unforeseen occurrence such as, for instance, the arrival of a thundercloud. This could not apply to the other main musical form of Trinidad: the steelband. These grand percussion orchestras are common in Trinidad where the steel drum was invented in the Forties, and there are many possessing up to 120 players. Although steelbands are often heard at large functions, the contemporary raison dtre is to compete regularly in the performance of intricate music. No improvisation is possible then, and the players are highly orchestrated (by rote learningnot a line is scored). And yet, so deeply ingrained in the Trinidadian sensibility is the aesthetic of immediacy that these hugely popular events are as completely ephemeralised as any improvisation. New tunes are arranged for each band for each competitionyou wont hear last year's tune ever again (which is assisted by the absence of scores). And the competitionsnote that these are not concertsare conducted with all the fervour and partisanship and excitement and momentary uniqueness of a sporting event. The main annual steelband event today is the pre-Carnival Panorama competition when scores of bands participate in preliminary, semi-final and finals rounds over several days. It began in 1963 and was preceded by the Bomb competition which lasted until the Seventies. That competition took place just before daybreak on the first morning of Carnival (Mardi Gras) when bands competed in playing some piece of music that had never been heard before on steel drumsoften but not always classical music arranged to calypso tempo. Again the music was intricately orchestrated so improvisation was rare, but still the element of surprise characteristic of improvised music was so intrinsic to the competition that the bands rehearsed their tunes secretly in the weeks before, practising with their fingertips instead of mallets so the sound wouldn't carry. Some arrangers had different sections of the bands rehearse separately so even the payers never heard the entire tune until the morning when the bomb was dropped on unsuspecting rivals to blow them away. How does this aesthetic preoccupation with transience relate to modernity? Marx, whose quotation provided Berman with the title of his book, emphasised the transience of modernity: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Marx, of course, located the cause of this fluidity in the paring down of human relations to the cash nexus between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Others have found causes in the Renaissance rise of humanism and individualism, or in the Reformation spread of secularism, or in the growth of science and technology, or bureaucracy (as if the earliest systems of industrialised mass production weren't the mines and plantations of the New World). Berman, however, does not dwell on these matters; the experience he is trying to define is the existential condition, the fluidity of modern existence. Despite his metaphor of modernity as an unrelenting flow, Bermans analysis concentrates largely on spatial themesthe boulevards of Baudelaires Paris, the geometry of Pushkin's St Petersberg. Faust is likened to a developer. In his concluding section about New York, Berman is most personal, reliving his childhood experience of seeing the Bronx destroyed by an intersecting highway. As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked for the road, he writes, I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern life. Although circling it throughout his book Berman never arrives at the understanding that the modernity which brings him such anguish but which also offers

such possibility, is the condition which Georg Lukacs referred to as transcendental homelessness, the ontological base, according to Berger in the essay I quoted above, of modern sexual love. In traditional society home was the centre of the real, of everything which made sense, Berger argues: all the rest was chaos. Home was the centre of the world where the vertical line between the underworld below and the heavens above, crossed the horizontal line of geography. At home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both, writes Berger. At the same time one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. Emigration breaks that crossing of lines. To emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragmentsa condition which has come to be the norm today for most of mankind which has lost continuity with the dead and the gods alike, and the vertical line has been reduced to the solitary individuals biography which ends in extinction. To Berger, the irreversible loss of home has spawned, since the massive migrations of the nineteenth century, the modern centrality of romantic sexual love, the longing for the fusion of two displaced, rootless individuals. But the vast and largely forced migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was prefigured by the slave trade in Africans in which millions were uprooted from one continent to another, from a traditional to an industrial environment. Families were dispersed, nations dissolved, languages dissolved. For the African slaves the middle passage which uprooted them irrevocably shattered the crossing of the vertical and horizontal lines that constituted home. Their background was different to that of other people confronting attrition of modernity, however, and so too was their response. Whereas Europeans experienced modernity, both its freedom and solitude in terms of autonomous individuals who form a social contract, New World Africans experienced modernity, its racially-based slavery and its transcendence of tribal horizons, as an urge for collective liberation. They salvaged the shards of tradition and culture and collected anything else they could find in that holocaust, and out of that they created a culture that embraces all to collectively celebrate the unique beauty of the present. That is, the music of the Americas and indeed of the modern world.

BODY MUSIC TO SWEET PAN

THE BADJOHN ROOTS OF PAN One night in the late 1940s three youths barely out of their teens from John John visited a Queen Street club, called the Dorset. Unimpressed that this was the notorious gangster Boysie Singhs club, they began to get on bad, until Boysies henchman, one Gerald Miller, a tall, dark giant of 220 pounds known as Fire Kong decided to get rid of them... permanently. Boysie's biographer, Derek Bickerton, picks up the story: (Kong) ran into his room and came back with a revolver in each hand. The three dived for the stairs, but not quickly enough. Kong emptied both guns at them. The place was so full of smoke that you couldn't see, and perhaps this explains why all three survived. They survived, yes, but each carried away a bullet in some part of his body. Neville Bake Nose McLeod and Leo Lil Drums Pierre took theirs in the arm and

Winston Spree Simon got his in the leg, making him limp for the rest of his life. Still, they were rough and the organisation they had re-christened a few years before went on to become one of the most feared in Trinidad. Then, it was named after a Cary Grant and Dane Clarke war movie: Destination Tokyo. Almost every steelband had its fair share of badjohns, ignorant men who loved to fight or those who just never backed down. Tokyo, nestled at the foot of John John hill, had more than most. The way people used to behave as soon as they see the big T-flag running away for no reason, mothers grabbing up their children, like we used to eat people, recalls Wilfred Simon, Spree's nephew. It was embarrassing. Perhaps it was because many of them hustled small jobs across the railway tracks at the abattoir, just behind what is now the Central Market, slaughtering and skinning animals and cutting them up. It had real killing tools there, cutlass, axe, sharpening iron, stabbing knife, says Tokyo stalwart Carl Badgi Braithwaite. It used to have gambling there too, and you had to defend what you win. There was Dana, who burst a mans face in Caroni with a flambeau; stammering Mud Mouth who would axe down a door to get at an enemy; Gerard Braithwaite who invaded San Juan with two others and tore up their pay sheet and was killed by San Juan All Stars men; Big Bush who went by himself into Potential after a skirmish and was stabbed to death with a screwdriver. These men were rounded up by the PNM for protection whenever they went campaigning in hostile constituencies. The fellas were real touchy. Once a man threw an orange from Rising Sun to his friend in Tokyo. It hit another member of the band and no matter how he apologised he got licks. A time I get cut, I didnt even feel it and nobody knew who cut me but they held a fella looking like an Invaders man and make me beat him, recounts Aldwin Beejay George. If I didn't beat him they woulda beat me. Spree himself, the skipper, wasn't easy, and was known to slap up men whose playing wasnt up to mark. Once, a story goes, Spree got fed up with the bands progress and flung an iron into itwho get lash get lash. Rumour has it he made a jail for chasing Dewa, another Tokyo rogue, into Besson Street Police Station and slashing him there. His favourite tune, one of the first his rudimentary ping pongs could accommodate was the lavway Alan Ladd, this guns for hire. Pans in those days were simply for a one-handed rhythm, with men cuffing the du dups, pounding the baylays and the ping pongs, every man playing his own melody and singing. When Tokyo was joined by Savoys from Laventille and Crusaders from St Paul's Street, the bands chipped along to separate songs. The war in Europe had ended, but Lord Kitchener sang, I thought they were still fighting in Germany/When the man sound the bugle call/I say the war eh over at all. The war in Trinidad had now started. As the instruments grew in sophistication and the music became orchestrated, the rigour of discipline increased, partisan commitment deepened, and the traditional warfare escalated. Feuds erupted for many reasons. Some Renegades thieves took a bolt cutter from some Tokyo thievesremember pans were stolen from businessesand the two bands rioted for that. Usually it was over women though, such as when at a fete in Hotel de Paris on St Vincent Street, Toto from Tokyo jostled a Desperadoes girl and began a feud that dragged on for years and eventually prompted Eric Williams to set a make-work Crash Program out of which grew Special Works, DEWD, LID and, today, URP. Bands came out on many occasions: Carnival, Christmas, Discovery Day, and were liable to riot whenever they met, which was often because there were no fixed

routes for them to follow in the city. It was the thing to overtake another band by passing straight through, and this was always resisted by the big bands with bottles and stones, iron bolts, knives and cutlasses. The small bands ate humble pie. Like that Carnival Monday in 1946 when Invaders came down Charlotte Street. The band had just swung from Park Street when they saw the Cross of Lorraine emerge from Observatory Street behind them, blocking the route they had just come from. And then, suddenly, uncoiling itself in front from Duke Street corner was Tokyo. Hold on to your pans! shouted captain Ellie Mannette. Gerald Samson, one of the youths in the Woodbrook band recalls, From the time they pelt the first stone we run. O Lord, Invaderswhy you run? chanted Tokyo the next day, Tokyo coming back in town. Lord Blakie vowed the following year Never me again/To jump in a steelband in Port of Spain. And if in years to come Invaders developed a formidable team of fighters, and ran through their fair share of bands, it took three decadesuntil 1980before they entered Charlotte Street again. And as for Blakie, he did jump in a steelband again when he waved flag for San Juan All Stars and got caught up in the most infamous Carnival riot ever in 1959 when the Croisee band came into town playing Battle Cry, armed to the teeth with weapons stashed inside a tank. On Charlotte Street they met Desperadoes playing Noah's Ark, just as Tokyo came up behind them, cutting off any retreat. Is the only time Despers and Tokyo join up, says Beejay. But you cyar come in my bedroom to stone my brother's house. Gordon Street had Starlifts Greatest Show on Earth, when the boys from the hill started to riot. Desperadoes, San Juan All Stars, Destination Tokyo, Cito Velasquez Fruits and Flowers and Starlift were all destroyed, and several men hospitalised. San Juan All Stars had silver and blue pans and we had blue and silver pans, recalls Alan Greaves from Starlift. It was a harrowing experience, people running everywhere, bottle flying all over the place, man even pelting full bottle of rum, a woman on top ah elephant float bawling to come down. Bertie Marshalls Highlanders fought with San Juan All Stars in 1964, with Fascinators in 1965 and with Eastern Symphony in 1968. But the last big riot was the one between Casablanca and Tokyo on Carnival Monday, 1965 on Frederick Street. Tokyo was halfway around the corner of Duke and Frederick Streets; Casablanca was coming up and wanted to break through. Casablanca began pelting bottlesOld Oak was their sponsor and they had plenty bottles. The younger Tokyo men dashed up Duke Street where they found a crumbling building with loose bricks. They armed themselves and returned to destroy Blanca, mash up their pans. After that things simmered. The passions which had fuelled the warfare became increasingly channelled into musical rivalry. Tokyo even went on to win the Bomb trophytheir only first prizein 1968. I find it difficult 40 years afterwards to convey to the reader the senselessness of the steelband clashes, admitted George Goddard in his Forty Years In The Steelbands, written in his dying years before 1988. But would the movement have survived upper class prejudice and police hostility otherwise?

A CLEAR AND ROBUST SOUND

Several men are reputed to have accidentally hammered out the first few notes on a pan before World War II. Victor Tutie Wilson and Carlton Lord Hamburger Forde from Calvary Tamboo Bamboo Band in New Town noticed that paint cans gave different tones when pounded, according to George Goddard. Big Mack from Hell Yard told American anthropologist Steven Stuempfle that Hell Yard youths discovered it, and Prince Batson points specifically at Big Head Hamil. Anyway, Winston Spree Simon indisputably played his famous God Save The King on the ping pong for the Governor in 1946, so his John John band, which was called Destination Tokyo, is traditionally given the cake. Already urban bands were beating zinc or paint can tenor kittles or ping pongs, biscuit tin tenor booms or slap bass, two-note bass kittles or du dups from caustic soda drums. Additionally there were angle irons, shac shacs, bottle and spoons, and bugles. There weren't any of the skin drums whose Congo pulse and Yoruba beat had incited stickmen to war and called down the Orisha. But All Stars' Prince Batson has argued the Shango influence initially made east Port of Spain bands more rhythmic and less interested in melody and harmony than the western ones. One Tokyo youth, nicknamed Slap Bass after the instrument he played and tuned, eventually returned to the ancestral drum. His name was Andrew Beddoe and his rhythms in Tokyo's Ju Ju mas sent women into convulsions. At the time when Beddoe still played biscuit drum, pans were mainly beating out a rhythm. If you had six fellas with ping pongs, everybody beating a different tune in a different key, recalls Ocean from Tokyo. It didn't have no stylingwherever a tuner got a note, that's where he left it. The first styling was the Invaders styling. That is, Elliot Mannette. To appreciate the inventiveness of these men, you must realise that the clanging of ironsomething about its clear and robust soundhas always appealed to people. For centuries bells in Europe have clanged joyfully, marimbula thumb pianos in Africa tinkled hypnotically. But only in Trinidad was this inchoate pleasure shaped into a full orchestral ensemble, and much of this was done in Woodbrook where small bands proliferated like wild flowers: Green Eyes, Hit Paraders, Saigon (formerly Balalaika), Nightingales, Silver Stars. Many of these were college boy bands, students of QRC and St Mary's, youths less combative than the east Port of Spain panmen. And in the centre was Ellie Mannette whose role, perhaps because he was an expert tuner and fitter, was pivotal. His band, like Sprees, had lineage. Calvary Tamboo Bamboo had metamorphosed into Alexander's Ragtime Band down at the Big Yard on Picton Street in the thirties. In 1939 it was indisputably the first steelband and that prompted the formation of Oval Boys which eventually became (after the Raymond Massy movie Night Invaders played at the London Theatre (now Astor) the great Invaders. John Buddy Williams, the leading bandleader of the time, visited the yard often, as did barrister and amateur violinist Lennox Pierre. Choreographer Beryl McBurnie invited the band to perform at her Little Carib Theatre. And Ellie Mannette, who played in Britain

with the famous Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo), was Invaders tuner and leader. He sank the face of the pan, pounding it inwards, as opposed to outwards like all other pans of the time. He made a full chromatic scale, creating the universally popular Ellie styling with its large F-sharp in the centre. His pans gave Invaders their unique sound and today are still the choice of international virtuoso Andy Narrel. It was a very mellow tone. Nobody else had pans with such a rich sound, says former Invaders double seconds player Ray Hollman, one of the most innovative steelband arrangers. Other pans had a more metallic sound; Ellies was lush, a fatter, smoother sound, and it was sweeter. Invaders wasnt only Ellie Mannette. There were master players such as Kelvin Dove, Ellie's brother Vernon Birdie Mannette and the one and only, the great Emmanuel Riley, Invaders' star player who was originally from Green Eyes, also known as Cobo Jack. He was the leading player at the time, his style was so advanced it was a marvel, the solos he could improvise without knowing chords, recalls Hollman. Othelllo Mollineux used to come to Invaders to play, Shadow would come from Symphonettes in Benares Street, Dovegood players all, but Cobo Jack was the best. As a boy I dreamed to play like Jack. Taspo was created to perform at the 1951 Festival of Britain under the leadership of Lieutenant Joseph Griffiths who made them tune pans to encompass the entire range of an orchestra. The band was comprised of Orman Patsy Haynes from Casablanca, Boots Davidson from Syncopaters, Theo Stephens from Southern All Stars, Andrew de la Bastide from Hill 60, Dudley Smith from Rising Sun, Winston Spree Simon from Fascinators, Sonny Roach from Sun Valley, Belgrave Bonaparte from Southern Symphony, Granville Sealey from Tripoli, Ellie Mannette of Invaders and Anthony Williams of North Stars. Sealey didnt go to England, didn't want to leave his new wife who would have had no means of support in his absence. Sonny Roach of Sun Valley, from Bournes Road near Rupert King's Orisha compound was chosen in his stead. Roach was the first island wide ping pong solo champ, but he fell ill in Martinique and returned home. And young Tony Williams represented North Stars, a breakaway from Sun Valley. He invented the oil drum bassthey were biscuit drum tune booms before. And when he returned from the trip he became captain of North Stars, which was unrivaled in the 1950s and 60s for the classics. More importantly, Tony Williams was an innovator: he put the bass on wheels, allowing bassmen to play three pans at a time; he organized the bands orchestral formation; and when every tuner had a personal style of note placing, he invented the spider web pan of fifths which thirty years after has become the standard. In this country of several races, of an extreme individualism, Tony Williams, a kinda dougla fella, fashioned from his African heart an instrument for everyone, and an ensemble larger than any other in the world of popular music. Sun Valleys progeny wasnt limited to North Stars, which in turn spawned West Side. Sonny Roachs band also gave birth to Cross Roads. South of the Western Main Road Tripoli in turn brought forth Crossfire and Blue Stars (now Power Stars). Further west in Point Cumana was born Boys Town, winners of the first Steelband Festival, and Spellbound. Near Tony Williams lived Emmanuel Eamon Thorpe who grew up in the band room of the Police Barracks on Long Circular Road, and Thorpe's Crossfire became one

of the best road bands of the period, capable of taking masqueraders and even panmen away from other bands and carrying them into St James like a gang of pied pipers. Crossfire emerged from Indian Johnnys yard, but in 1957 it shifted base. In its new location in St James a three-year-old boy hung out of the window looking on, and that year Eamon Thorpe, who was a welder, had to make a special stand for the infant to play pan. His name was Len Boogsie Sharpe. Meanwhile, the Woodbrook bands hadn't remained still. Saigon, Nightingales and Hit Paraders, finding themselves squeezed out by Invaders, held a meeting chaired by Albert Philo James after the 1956 Carnival. The three bands was catching they tail, recalls Saigon man Ernest Greaves. So we decided to come together. And on October 22, 1956 was created Starlift. At first the band stayed close to Invaders but eventually it grew strong enough to stand on its own. It drew members from all over, including Ray Hollman, Herschel Puckerin, Pelham Goddard, Desmond Waithe and Boogsie Sharpe. Indeed the band which dominated the late sixties and early seventies with its jazzy arrangements had so much talent that the younger members had to branch off and form Phase II and Third World. Not surprisingly Starlift was the first band to play its own composition for Panorama, Hollmans 1972 Pan On The Move, thus completing the invention of pan by shaping a music for its voice. And thus the genius of Africa became Trinidadian.

THE SAGA OF SOUTH PAN

Who knows why the butcher named Billy left John John and its Destination Tokyo to seek work at the abattoir at King's Wharf in San Fernando in 1945? Perhaps, according to Donald Dan Seon, he was fleeing the law. Whatever the reason, he formed what might be South's first steelbandPearl Harbour. That was near Mucurapo Street where the prostitutes and gamblers gathered, so the men were both provided with cash and relieved of it right on the spot. Here Billy landed with his ping pong to mesmerise the youths in the district with versions of Mary Had A Little Lamb and This Gun For Hiretwo of Spree Simons repertoire. Meadow, Dollar, Tall Boy, Cross Eye, Black Fred, Panther, Preddie, and South's first panwoman, Vida were leading members of Pearl Harbour. Alas for Billy, hed also brought along the John John bands infamous touchiness and, according to Seon, as a result was killed by a blow in the head from a rival steelbandman. Contrariwise, Emile Zola Williams names Royal Air Force from King's Wharf, a band of butchers and fishermen, as South's first steelband. But, he emphasises, the fellas on the wharf didnt really know about panthey was just making noise beating iron, drinking rum with one or two jamette and having a good time. It was another iron band, one called The Snow, whose members Zola taught to play pans and formed Free French. And when Port of Spain panmen began sinking the pan inwards, he went up north with a cooking oil drum to learn the technique. He went directly to one of the masters, Neville Jules, and asked, I want you to fix up a pan for me. Boy, I going out, replied a reluctant Jules.

O Gawd, pressed Zola. I go pay you. But Jules was adamant he didn't want to help. So Zola went looking for his partner from La Cour Harpe, another All Stars man. Why the fock you come here asking for people! was the response he got, but he persisted until he discovered his friend was in St James by Scorpion Hunte. He followed the trail to Scorpions yard and eventually got the pan he wanted. Around that time Bataannamed after the Robert Taylor movie of the same namewas formed in Champs billiard saloon. But, recalls Donald Seon who was one of its members, Our stay there was short, as it was impossible for our band to function properly in a billiard saloon. Bataan skipper Herman Teddy Clark was a badjohn in the South tradition, less ignorant and more sporting, and he organized races along the Coffee. As his band was located near Free French, the two squabbled regularly. Resentment arose not only from the fact that the principal figures forming the core of the band dressed immaculately, in everyday life, but were also the pride of the opposite sex, wrote Seon. But Free French men considered Bataan just a bunch of hooligans and Free French the true saga boys. We were so sharp we used to wear six handkerchiefsone in each pants pocket, one in the shirt pocket and one on the collar, says Claude Byron, formerly of Free French. Teddy used to feel he was the baddest. Once he and Screebo Malone went to fight, but it had a lady, Miss Myra, a midwife, she was big and strong. They coulda be she grandchildren, but when it had fight shed run in the middle and grab both of them, saying, Allyuh want to fight? Well fight me now. Because the hooligan stigma was less prohibitive than up North, South middleclass children sometimes joined the bands. Indeed, once a youthwearing a mask, of coursewas observed by Seon in a band to sing We are not working anywhere to the lavway We en wukkin noway. Generously, he was allowed to remain once he didnt take the life out of the band. And when he removed his mask to consume some oriental delicacy made in the true sanitary fashion, in other words, a six-cents roti, he turned out to be none other than a schoolmasters son. Bataan also had footballers Chicken Blackman, Coolie Shearwood and Golab Belgrove, although a barefoot match against Usine Ste Madeleine Village team resulted in a 26-0 loss for Bataan. There were of course shows and competitions of music also. As early as 1946 San Fernando Mayor and cinema magnate Timothy Roodal contracted Pearl Harbour to perform at the Gaiety Theatre. The boys weren't too good, Seon reports, and were billed as a supporting act to Madame Olinde, the most captivating belly dancer to grace our shores since the sensuous Anacanoa and her troupe of one midget who happened to be a comedian, one contortionist (the boneless man), Lord Coffee the calypsonian, and Madame Butterfly. Informally, the early South bands held more exclusively musical competitions in the seclusion of the Marabella seaside near the slipway where chip chips were gathered to strengthen San Fernandian backs. Rival bands marched to a spot known as the iron because of the broken trainlines protruding out of the sea or because of the area's popularity for lovers. Ambitious, the South also challenged the North, Free French versus Casablanca and Invaders. Orman Patsy Haynes and Ellie Mannette humbled the southerners,

though. Still, enthusiasm ran high and bands proliferated: Southern Marines of Marabella, Black Knights of San Fernando, Ste Madeleine Steel Orchestra. Then Destroyers appeared on the Coffee, Gondoliers in Mucurapo Street, Hilltop from upper Hillside, and Rogues Regiment. By 1950 Free French had produced at least one major panman, Theodore Black James Stephens, who was selected for the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) tour of Britain. By 1954 when Black James had moved to Southern All Stars when they won the second Steelband Festival. It was his famous solo for the band's Anna which swept panmen off their feet and became a standard for all players to aspire to. It took ten years for Southern Marines captain Milton Lyons to repeat this achievement by running off with the ping pong solo Festival prize. But it was deeper South in La Brea where the path breaking southern innovators emerged. Southern Symphony was formed by the great Belgrave Bonaparte who was, like Black James, a Taspo man and who introduced the practice of playing with three sticks for fuller chords. The band became the resident band at Normandie Hotel and were invited to tour Europe with the result that thirty two years before Peter Minshall they played at the 1960 Rome Olympics. The importance of Southern Symphony is suggested by the band's influence on Ebonites and its progeny Harmonites up north, and on Cavaliers in San Fernando, bands which changed the sound of steelband by winning Panorama almost every time between 1965 and 1975 with pans tuned by Southern Symphonys Alan Gervais. Meanwhile back in San Fernando, Teddy Clarke from the now-defunct Bataan passed through Mon Repos to go home. Often hed hear some boys in Skinner Street knocking iron and one day he brought some old Bataan pans for them. Better they remain downstairs and beat pan than knock about and get into trouble, reasoned old man Lalsingh, and thus was born Seabees, named after the film Fighting Seabees. Seabees tuner and arranger Nerlin Taitt went on to win ping pong solo at the second Steelband Festival in 1956, after which he went on a tour to Jamaica with Lord Melody. They were stranded and the panman formed a ban called Vintaitt and the Comics. It's saidthough not by Jamaicansthat he had a major input in the development of reggae, argues Angus Lalsingh whose brother Steve assumed leadership of Seabees until he was tragically killed in a motoring accident. Another Lalsingh brother, Kenrick, replaced Steve but Seabees eventually went under, leaving many talented panmen, including one Milton Wire Austin, without a base. Times were changing, bands were folding up and new ones rising out of their ashes: Antillean All Stars Orchestrathe Coffee bandcame out of Bataan and Destroyers. Another old band, Gondoliers, also gave birth but died in the process. They had been sponsored by Guinness but in 1960 the company shifted support to a breakaway faction led by Lennox Bobby Mohammed and managed by his father Zainool. The sponsors decision was based on a play-off at Woodford Square with the new band calling itself the Cavaliers. Guinness Cavaliers went on to win Panorama in 1965, placed second in 1966 and won again in 1967the same year they came third in Steelband Festival playing Revelation from Beyond and Gallopade composed by Mohammed, the first locallywritten festival pieces. At the time of Cavaliers first Panorama victory, some youths in a football team based in the Fonrose and Clair Streets decided to form a steelband. They asked former

Seabees member Wire Austin to help them and he agreed, thus giving birth to ten-times Southern Panorama winner Fonclaire. With such a rich tradition, why then are southerners letting steelband gradually disappear?

EAST SIDE STORY

In Arima the rough and tumble iron band called itself Vigilantes and limed by the Dial, whereas the more easygoing one at Cocorite Street was Atomic. Arimian iron bands used large, heavy tar drums, among others, which the youths carried on their heads while others did the beating. Boysie Watson see them and say I go bring some pan for you, recalls former captain of Melodians Frank Bernard: He went up to the base in Wallerfieldit was war timeand bring some small drums and they; end up making kittle drum , du dup. Red Vernon tuned them and made ping pongs I don't know where he learnand after the war they competed against Tombstone up in Sangre Grande. Then, one Christmas season, Some fellas went one way to parang, another set went another way, recalls Bernard. And thus it was that in Arima, to create the enduring Melodians, Atomic had to split. Meanwhile, in Dinsley Village the Dead End Kids iron band came out from the Thomas yard where the bamboo bands used to originate. Mark Zorro Thomas, always armed, Z shaved on his skull, led me like Snatcher Guy who wore his cap backwards, Giant Waithe, Penco Best, Snooze Skeete and Shango John. Next door Mother Geralds Orisha shrine, whose November feast drew devotees from all over the country, including master drummer Andrew Beddoe from Destination Tokyo. He came over and tune a ping pong and start to play the Shango songs on it, recalls Zorros nephew Kenrick Thomas. Every;body was amazed and Snatcher began learning ping pong. They changed their name to Boom Town That was a current picture and the name lent itself to more violence, explains Thomas. With the Tacarigua Orphanage nearby, Boom Town had access to a pool of musiciansbands used bugles in those days. That instrument caused a lot of fights; it used to excite people, especially when sun hot and they drink rum, explains Thomas. It was a call to war. Unfortunately, in 1948 Boom Town carried their buglers on an Easter Monday excursion to Manzanilla, where they met Red Army from Port of Spain, perhaps the most belligerent steelband ever. Red Army, for instance, visited British Guiana in 1946the first band to travel abroadwhen they were known as Russian Symphony, and fought more Guianese than they played for. In Manzanilla they carried the same behaviour. They pounce on the boys and beat them up, Thomas recounts. They mash up the pans and take their bugles. Dishevelled, Boom Town fled home, closed the gate at Five Rivers level crossing and bombarded with bottles and stones the train carrying Red Army back to Port of Spain. Snooze and Ladd Wiltshire were arrested for that ambush, and Boom Town changed its name to Delta Rhythm Boys and shifted its energies into making music and not war.

Tacarigua only had Boom Town, which became Delta Rhythm Boys, then Symphony Stars, then Midland Syncopaters, then Midlanders Metronome. Arouca had Wake Islandwhich might have been the band Jit Samaroos older brothers played for. Carlos Rose hadnt yet migrated from Fyzabad to St Johns Road to nurture Flamingos, Exoduss progenitor, but in Tunapuna there were already Boys Town (later Sunland) on Green Street, the Zigilee brothers Nob Hill on Maingot Road, Toros Frenchmans Creek on Back Street, and Madman Jordans Stalingrad. Madman's madness, it seems, was to have loved steelband with a ferocity and a generosity which had him sowing bands like wildflowers wherever he went, including in Venezuela. But where the Tunapuna scene was hottest from earliest was up Sapodilla Street in Hells Kitchen. You got dice, wappie, Mastife and them, Pess, Lance, Mantoreal sagga boys, Domni changing his clothes four times a dayliming with their jamettes by Sapodilla Street, beating iron and jocking their waist, recalls Cyril Goddard who was then a schoolboy. That was Hell Kitchen. Those older men attracted Goddard into the iron band underworld, but the first band he actually joined was the younger Times Square. A Chinee fella named Hing we used to pitch in he yardhe got a pan what had about eight notes, says Goddard. I don't know how he got it but he knew I was in the steelband thing and I got it from him. It was the first time I see one, but I couldn't carry it home, though. On VE Day Goddards ping pong drew crowds to Times Square, including some Hell's Kitchen badjohns, and GenieBhadase Maharajs bodyguard, who played bass kittlewas stabbed by Joe Murray. Hells Kitchen eventually dissolved with police assistance, and Sullivan was formed in an effort to shake off the bands reputation. Times Square, tainted with the same brush, moved from Auzonville Road to St Vincent Street and became Zone 20, which in turn became North Star and then Nightingales, two of whose members, the Headley brothers, were the first panmen to go abroad to study music. In the late 1940s, however, it was still North Star when they challenged Casablanca to a competition. The town band arrived in the afternoon and paraded through Tunapuna, bugles blowing. Goddards parents, getting wind that their son planned to beat ping pong in the competition, hid his clothes. He borrowed from a friend and went to Palladium. When Patsy Haynes started to beat Surrender I was shocked, recalls Goddard. My knees were shaking when North Star came to beat, and I was their only ping pong man. But after we played people began throwing money on the stage. Later that night, however, after he got home his father locked the doors and windows of the house and beat the youth mercilessly with a stick until he was unconscious. From then, concludes Goddard, I turn bad. The main band in the east, however, was in San Juan. Barataria had Corregidores, and Croisee people had formed Black Swan in Backchain Street. But when Wellington Blues Bostock from Red Army fled Port of Spain after a two year gaol for the 1948 riot with Casablanca, the ancestor of the great San Juan bands was created. We used o beat in the river and one day we were trying to get a name, recalls Harold Belfast. Night meet us and we still didn't have a name, then Blues look up in the sky and come up with Starlight Syncopators.

The band moved from Mission Street to Prizgar Road, then up by the train line. To get to the band some of the players had to cross the river, so the band was renamed Red River after a John Wayne movie. And a breach in Red River, which was subsequently healed, gave birth to one of the greatest JOuvert bands, the San Juan All Stars which, after their famous 1959 riot with Desperadoes and Destination Tokyo became known as, perhaps undeservedly, the most ignorant band. Efforts to change that image led to the creation of East Side Symphony and then Potential1992 Pan Ramajay winnersbut those were birth attended by much bitterness and blood. Ebonites, on the other hand, chose another route to get away from the violence they stayed out of Carnival for their first six years. The band was an extension of City Syncopators, itself a peaceful arm of the Casablanca warriors. Residents from the Basilon Street area had moved into the planning in Morvant. Already there were Leningrad, Comets and City Stars, but the newcomers maintained ties with their progenitor until they broke away as a band in their own right. Every Carnival the band used to give the players a little raise, and the year they didnt we got some old pans and Victor Chungi Rudder formed the band, recalls Elton Lopez. After reading an Ebony magazine, Ken Alexander, flicking through a Bible noticed the word ebonites. He suggested the name and the other youths accepted it. Their first time on the road, however, playing Bobby Soxers on Coronation Day of 1952, brought down the unreasoning wrath of Renegades. They mash up the band, break man hand with baseball bat, recalls Alexander. So, influenced by Southern Symphony, which was the Normandie Hotel house band, Ebonites concentrated on their stage side, playing Latin music for parties, ranking and even outdoing the best brass bands. By 1953 the band was sponsored by RCA to produce the album Spread Joy. We play from cha cha cha to calypso, bolero to fox trot, the band never play the same tune twice in a fete except by request, says Jojo Reece. We were the first band to have a section with cymbals, six of them; people wanted to know what happeningit was Dance of the Hours. The only reason we never won Festival was because we were too busy playing at parties. One year we came first at Roxy and the adjudicator say if we even play God Save The Queen we win, but we dropped out because it had no money in that. Alas, if money made them, it also broke them in 1965 when Ebonites captain Knolly Bobb decided to get new pans from Cavaliers. The South band had begun to change the sound of steelband by using 24 Alan Gervais-tuned bass pans instead of the usual six for maximum power. The players resisted the change and Bobb went ahead, taking some youths from Caledonia Road who used to fall in with Ebonites, and they secured funding from Joseph Charles. Thus was born Solo Harmonites, which was better funded and eventually drew the younger players such as Owen Serrette away from Ebonites. Harmonites then went on to win Panorama four times between 68 and 74, and to come third twice, after which they were placed in the East Zone and never won again. But maybe Exodus 1992 victory has changed the regions blight and given a chance to the many contenders from Morvants Harmonites to Sangre Grandes Cordettes.

THE STEEL PULSE OF PORT OF SPAIN

For Carnival 1946, the first after World War II, Kitchener composed The Steelband: Port of Spain nearly catch afire When the bands were crossing the Dry River Zigilee, master of the ping pong Had people jumping wild in the town... Zigilee, the master to Kitch, had been beating pan from before the war in Hell Yard. Born Carlton Barrow in 1926, Zigilee used to hang around the Hell Yard bamboo band, where there was stickfighting, and there he witnessed its transition in Port of Spain to iron. They moved very slowly, the bamboo bands, and take an hour to go two hundred yards, and even then they had two rhythmsa moving rhythm and one when the band was stationary and the fuller could stoop down and get a two-note rhythm on the ground, he says. And when Orderly began beating an old tin some time in the latter half of the 1930s, the band sounded different. If he left it, it sounded flat, and so it was that the large boom bamboo had been eclipsed by the kittle drum. Already; iron was indispensable and within weeks the Hell Yard band would abandon bamboo. Hell Yard became the Cross of Lorraine, and when this name began to confuse people with Casablanca's Cross of Lorraine insignia, they switched to the Trinidad All Stars, led by Prince Batson and with pans tuned by the great Neville Jules, a steelband innovator second to none but, perhaps, Ellie Mannette. Although they stole dustbins and ran from police like everyone else during and after the War, and were fighters to the last man, All Stars subsequently avoided the steelband riots with an iron discipline instilled by Batson who set up an internal MP force that kept members in line. When the fellas get drunk and liable to fight and throw powder in people face, we had a picket in the centre of the band where they had to stay until they revive, recalls flagman Hugh Sage Peschier, so called after the famous badjohn Sagiator. By the time Kitchener had composed The Steelband, however, Zigilee was not in Hell Yard band, but in Bar 20: Black James, Fisheye and Barker Bar 20 leading kittle beaters Well they sure made us understand The kettle is the foundation of the band Rudolf Fisheye Olliverre, after whose family the band was also known as the Olliverre Band, remained to become one of All Stars most famous ping pong men, but Zigilee had been shunted unto another track since 1940. It was the Sunday of the Siparia Fete and the band was heading for the train station, chipping down Charlotte Street to a rhythm that swept along all the people from the market, when the police made a raid, and grabbed Zigilee, who was 14 at the time, and Chicken, and carried them to the Besson Street station. Bambam Head and some other thieves had been caught housebreaking the night before, and the police threw the two youths in the cell despite the pleas of the more hardened criminals to let the lil fellas off. The following Friday Zigilee was brought

before the Juvenile Court and put on a three-year bond for being in a procession of over 20 persons. Last week Zigilee, now a mild-mannered old man with an infectious laugh, recounted, After that my mother put restriction on me: no more Hell Yard. So I formed Bar 20 in Bath Street. And that was the battalion that took on the police. Two brothels had opened on Bath Street for the American soldiers, attracting men and women out for a hustle, and what was their band? Bar 20, which they turned into one of the early fighting machines of the steelband movement that drew police attention like a magnet. So when after the war Ancil Boyce, the bands captain, fell into the Dry River and died, his funeral drew hundreds of villains to the Lapeyrouse Cemetery, all drunk, sporting the jackets theyd stolen and dyed black for the occasion. Back in Bath Street with spirits high they decided to hit the road. Waving flag up front was Yvonne Bubulups Smith who was later immortalised in several calypsoes for, among other things, beating a policeman. And she was chanting, When police come, dont run! They went across Park Street, turned left at Charlotte Street, down to Duke Street, and there, at the corner of Belgrave Street and Quarry Street, the police foolishly attacked. As Zigilee sums it up, They get a good cutarse. Immediately everyone went into hiding all over the country to evade reprisals, but four days later Zigilee returned home, right into police, down to CID office where Bitterman sat with a swollen eye and Geronimo with a burst mouth. At the trial the line-up was named one by one, the sentences alternatingsix months, probation, six months, probation, six months... I was in a six months spot, so I try to exchange but I couldnt, says Zigs with a smile. Fortunately the pattern change with me because I was beating pan when they was beating police and the music never stop. With all the robust menthats what they were called in those daysbehind bars, the police declared war on the band, especially on the panmen they knew Bitterman, Pops, Battersby and Zigilee. Between 14 and 19 I had 23 convictions throwing missiles, disorderly behaviour, fighting, calculates Zigs. If bottle pelt anywhere they blame we, so I had to run west and stay with Sonny Roach and Sufferers in St James for two or three years. By the time he was able to return to east Port of Spain it was to join another band, one formed long before by Oscar Bogart Pile and named Casablanca. Born in 1922 in New Town Oscar Pile used to sneak out and peep through the cocoyea of the bamboo tent at the bottom of Woodford Street where kalinda stick was fought and Dame Lorraine danced, and when he moved to Oxford Street this continued. He decided in 1936 to form a band, Merry Boys, with his young friends Art de Couteau, Kendal Mason, George Forde and Arnold Agard, following what they'd seen the Gonzales Second Eleven band playing. Gonzales had its bamboo band too, the Gonzales Rhythm Band, whose members drew on the traditions of Shango drumming in places like Tanti Willies yard, and some men like Musso Rat Roach and Killey Yearwood, who limed up in the Lime Grove, were beating pans by the mid-1930s. This was what Merry Boys started off beating. Like the Hell Yard band the Merry Boys paraded nights up and down the Dry River where the police jeep couldn't reach, and when the war ended and bands were choosing new names from the movies, they chose the name appropriate to Piles Bogart alias: Casablanca.

Casablanca was one of those great bands of the time which, like Invaders, never won a Panorama. Great for music and, after being joined by the Bar 20 rogues, not at all backward in warfare, they managed to riot with every other major band except City Syncopators and Renegades, their progeny. As what happened with Bar 20, Blanca's reputation for rowdiness attracted close marking by the police, especially after a riot with Rising Sun from Belmont around 1947. Consequently, Philmore Boots Davidson, one of Blanca's top ping pong men, tired of police harassment and worn down by the pleas of his middle class relatives, left the band to form the fraternal but peaceful City Syncopators. Renegades was another band which had a close relationship with Blanca, although according to their public relations officer Andy Duncan, the band actually was created by a split in the Ohio Cassanovas in Basilon Street. But many Blanca men, such as the infamous Steven Gold Teeth Nicholson, moved from Blanca to Renegades and cemented a relationship that precluded rioting with one another. Orman Patsy Haynes from Blanca, and Boots Davidson from Synco were to play together again in the 1951 Taspo, alongside another former Blanca man, Andrew Pan De Labastide. De Labastide had been in Casablanca much earlier, and by 1945 had left for the simple reason that he was from the Clifton Hill area. One day when he was going down to Oxford Street he met Hill 60 chipping in the same direction, and a youth who wanted a rest asked De Labastide to hold his pitch oil tin. Hill 60 had a rhythm I liked, a fast shuffle like Casablanca's, he explains. So by the time I arrived by my band, I was too involved playing for Hill 60. This band had only recently been called into existence by Henry Patcheye Pachot, a youths who love of drumming had made him one of the master Shango drummers. On VJ Day, just months before, Patcheye had stolen a biscuit drum from Destination Tokyo, which Spree Simon got to find out without doing anything about it. Married to the rhythm, Patcheye continued playing biscuit drum long after they were superseded by the pan he never learnt to play, shifting instead, Tokyos like Andrew Beddoe, to percussion. Hill 60 collapsed like many other great bands when their best players went on tour and never returned, and instead the hill band that started slowly but grew into prominence was from Rose Hill tamboo bamboo band, which gave birth to the more youthful Laventille band known as Dead End Kids during the War and thereafter as the Desperadoes.

INVADERS, KING OF THE IRON MEN

They've never won a Panorama, never a music festival, yet Invaders steel orchestra might still be classified as one of the greatest steelbands. For sure their former leader Ellie Mannette, who has lived in the US since 1967, is the greatest pan tuner. Ever. It started as a group of boys who lived in Woodbrook across the road from the Oval whose facilities they used. Francis Peacock Wickham, Kelvin Dove, Conrad Cocoa Hunte, Irvine Taylor, the Mannette brothers Elliot, Oswald and Vernon, informally called themselves the Oval Boys and limed in the little plot of land between

the houses under a breadfruit tree where they'd beat a rhythm on tin cans, taking their cue from Alexander's Ragtime Band up Woodford Street, the first steelband. Until one day during World War II, when they won a competition at the Oval, outplaying their mentors. Alexander's Ragtime Band came second and the Hell Yard Band third. Pans those days had three, four notes and was background rhythm. It wasn't no tune you playing, you couldn't play none. Only Tutie (Victor Wilson) from Alexanders Ragtime Band could play half a tune, recalls Wickham. Otherwise they never left the yard until Oscar Pile from Casablanca took them to play in San Fernando, which became a weekly excursion. Already the band had become the most innovative one, and had introduced rubberised sticks, concave playing surfaces and possibly the larger pans from 35-gallon oil drums. And on the night of VJ Day when the War finally ended and steelbands took to the streets, many of them under movie names, Oval Boys, on Wickhams suggestion, metamorphosed into Night Invaders, later shortened to just Invaders. Still, the first Carnival they tried to invade Port of Spain in 1950 saw them repulsed by Spree Simons Destination Tokyo from John John. Invaders had gone to Park Street, turned down Charlotte Street, across Duke Street and there, just as they reached George Street they saw the Ju Ju warriors and their big T flag. Hold on to your pans! shouted Mannette, recalled Gerald Samson, one of the Invaders youths. From the time they pelt the first stone we run. Tokyo, it seems, had some quarrel with Tripoli from Mucurapo and to the John John men west band was west band, although Invaders might also have been resented by Tokyo men. By then Ellie, the oldest of the Mannette brothers, had taken over tuning from Ossie. He was working in the foundry at the time and had developed a special feel for moods and capacity of iron, and thus made some of his pivotal innovations. But his special genius wasn't so much technical as intuitive, it was an ear that allowed him to tune the sweetest sounding pans ever known. His design thus became the first styling of pans, and he was invited to join the Taspo more for his tuning abilities than his playing. The Woodbrook band was also resented because they were supported by many middle-class Trinidadians such as barristers Lennox Pierre, Ellis Clarke and Bruce Procope, and dancer Beryl McBurnie. Invaders, for instance, played at McBurnies embryonic Little Carib Theatre around the corner, and was part of the theatres opening ceremony in 1948. Minister of Health Norman Tang from Murray Street helped bail them out when the boys were arrested. In 1946, however, they were still to young to fight anyone. I see Mus Mus hit a fella with a flambeau and a cart catch afire, and they start to beat people, says Wickham. We run in a friendly society for refuge; we was little fellas and couldnt fight big John John men. They take Ellie panthe barracudaand hang it from a tree in John John and tell him come for it. He didnt, but they began to fight back as they grew up and were joined by fearless men from the former Alexanders Ragtime Band and other steelbands, men such as the Blackhead brothers and Lenny Russell. Wickham, Cocoa Hunte and the three Mannette brothers learned to handle themselves in a scrimmage, and even young Vernon Birdie Mannette took to walking with a razor. But it was captain Stanley Ponehead

Hunte who pulverised men such as the dreaded Gold Teeth from Renegades and Bird from Red Army, and helped to make Invaders a band to be reckoned with. One Mannette was soon removed from the scene for 12 years after, along with six men from the band, he beat an American serviceman up Chancellor Hill and raped his girlfriend. Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley, Invaders lead tenor player, formerly of Green Eyes, barely escaped the hangmans noose after being charged with the murder of another panman. He moved over to Desperadoes, whose pans he and Ellie used to help tune and who had helped raise funds for his legal defence. Invaders even rioted for years with their erstwhile friends, Casablanca, when Zigilee and Carlton Blackhead began a fight over Muriel Little One Granger and Augustus One Man Mark and Steven Gold Teeth Nicholson joined to beat Blackhead. But Invaders real claim to fame came from its sound, which was recorded as early as JOuvert 1950. The Mannette pans were the best by farand still are, many people would swear. The players, starting with Cobo Jack and Carlton Maifan Drayton, both originally from Green Eyes, were masters. Birdie Mannette was also a good player, as were Kelvin Dove, Carl Victor and Francis Wickham. Younger players included the brilliant Ray Hollman, Othello Mollineux and Anthony Haffers Hadeed. They ask me to come backI left years before Ellie but I cyar play under no arranger: it have notes in front of me, let me explore the pan, says Victor of the band's early improvisational style. We used to play by ear, go through the melody and then we revving. It left them at a disadvantage for the pre-rehearsed competitions, moreso because they were far out of Port of Spain where they werent welcome. Instead the;y concentrated on JOuvert, which the Woodbrook middle class supported in their numbers. And there was Ellie. Although his tenors were better than anyone elses in volume, range and timbre, and his cellos sounded like pipe organs, every JOuvert morning Ellie put on his cork hat and joined the rhythm section alongside Drayton, Wickham and Oswald Nicker Best. Strange that some of the bands best players preferred the iron section, but remember Ellie worked at the foundry. Me and Ellie used to heat the ironsit had good brakes thenand beat them down the scale. We used to tune the pans to C, so the irons had to start there, recalls Wickham. When we practice you could jump up with the rhythm section alone; what we was playing was making sense, not just keeping a beat. You had to co-ordinate with the man next to you, because the iron is an instrument, not just a thing to keep time. And as David Rudder put it so succinctly, when your iron good you is king.

THE FIRST WHITE BOY STEELBAND

Perhaps it was because they werent truly considered white French creole; or maybe it was because they owned many of the rumshops and dry goods stores; but either way, the Portuguese in Trinidad often had an affinity with grassroots culture, producing calypsonians such as Lord Executor (Philip Garcia) and Atilla the Hun (Raymond Quevedo), literary figures such as Alfred Mendez and populist politicians such as Albert Gomes. The first local records were made by Sa Gomes, another Portuguese.

Whatever the reason, Dixiland steel orchestra, the first white boy steelband, the one which more than any other paved the way for the acceptance of pan amongst the upper classes, was also the inspiration of a Potogee. It began in 1946 in Scott-Bushe Street, Cobotown, where an 11-year-old Ernest Ferreira, the son of a Madeiran immigrant, used to hear the bugles and rhythms drifting on the night breeze from bands as far away as Belmont and as near as Sackville Street where Red Army was based. It was Alfred Sack Mayers from Red Army who gave the little Ferreira his first ping pong. Ken Duvals father had a hardware store at which Jules worked, and Duval was Ferreiras friend, so old man Duval took the intrepid Ferreira to the barrack yard where Jules lived for the ping pong. Duval carried it home and some days later Ferreira collected it, and hid it in a crocus bag to carry it home where he secreted it under the house. There he would practice playing, using two turkey wings so as to make no noise, until one Sunday his father asked over lunch whether he wasn't afraid of scorpions under the house. Well, move that thing to the annex, said Ferreira senior who'd discovered his sons clandestine playing. It was after that that he formed with some friends Boys from Iwojima, named after the movie about a battle over the Pacific island Iwojima. Their members included Everard Leung, Wilson Owen, Victor Gonzales, Bert Akow, Andre de Jesus, so already there were a significant Chinese presence, for they too had that affinity with grassroots culture. Boys from Iwojima after a few months changed its name to Melody Makers, and that lasted until 1950 when one day Ferreira heard in a Queen Street barber shop some wild jazz on the radio. The music reminded him of what his boys were playing, for it was a hodge podge, with instruments tuned in different styles from different bands, so he renamed his band after the music: Dixieland. Although Ferreiras parents weren't too keen, they allowed the boy and his friends to play pan; the school they went to, St Marys, was different. Often on Fridays Ferreira was given a lecture by Fr Valdez or Fr Ward about how college boys shouldn't be involved in steelband. They tried to persuade him to join Fr Maybens band and play the violin. In his Sea Scout troop, he was kept down and couldn't become a Tenderfoot. Classmates and neighbours shunned him, referring to him as the boy from behind Duke Street. I used to come home for lunch, and some days Id be crying I was so uptight, recalls Ferreira. But there were others who were attracted to the idea, one of them being 14-year-old Curtis Pierre from Henry Street. Pierre also had some Portuguese on his fathers side, and his mother, part Spanish, part Carib, was a sister of the chantwell known as the Duke of Marlborough, George Adilla. And whereas Ferreira had been inspired by a vision of all Trinidadians playing pan, Pierre was plain rebellious. His first pan he got from a classmate whod been given the instrument by his gardener but whose parents didn't want him to keep it. Pierre's parents didn't want him to keep it either, his mother didn't care if the king had one, but either they were less insistent or he was more so. Id heard of St Marys boys going to Cobotown after school to beat pan, recalls Pierre. I didn't know them but talk spread in college that I had a pan and they came to me and said, Come we go beat pan. He too was lectured by the Dean of Discipline who said it wasn't good for the school nor his family for Pierre to be associating with that class of people; but the

youngster continued nevertheless, getting a Casablanca pan and eventually buying for $13 damaged and repaired Ellie Mannette pan named Fairy. Generally, however, they had their pans tuned by Alvin Yankee Boy Benjamin from Renegades. Our love for pan grew with the pan. The first time we tuned two biscuit drum tune booms we went up the road with them alone, says Pierre. Once we were playing Just say I love her and it needed a G sharp, so we put it in the pan: it was like if wed discovered a new note, it was a Columbus mood. In 1950 they came on the road for the first time, and the band grew as boys such as Everard Leon, Trevor Smith and Lance and Alan de Montbrun joined. And by 1951 they had about 30 players and were sponsored $600, T-shirts and four cases of Jeffreys Beer: old man de Montbrun worked at Grell and Co, agents for Jeffreys Beer, and hed arranged to help out the boys. That was the year the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) left for Britain, and the Saturday before Dixieland played on stage with the revolutionary band. It was Pierre's first day at work but he sneaked off to perform at Globe theatre, hiding behind his pan so he wouldn't be recognised. It was the first time Id heard triple cellos and 6-bass Boots was on bassand my pores raised to hear God Save the King, says Pierre. Four years later hed be picked for Taspo II, which was unfortunately aborted, and it was Ferreira who carried the Taspo example further. Yankee Boy had left Trinidad and Dixieland pans were now tuned by Percival Thomas from Katzenjammers (formerly Helzapoppin), and to Ferreiras design he tuned the first double second. After that, the pair invented the double tenor. I was inspired by the innovations of Taspo, so I looked at the symphony orchestra and saw it had first and second violins. We had 17-note tenor pans, so I thought to expand on it, says Ferreira. We tacked two together at the top and bottom to get the full scale. Theyd never been ostracised by more working class panmen who were more surprised than anything else, such as the Discovery Day they met Casablanca on the road. They put down their pans and surround we, says Ferreira. They come in the band saying What! White boys beating pan and thing! From then on we were accepted, says Ferreira. Pierre, however, has a different version of the meeting with Casablanca. It was in 1952 and Dixieland was in front the Red House with Blanca coming up, he recalls. Oscar Pile always say he never forget a boy jump out with a piece of iron and say, Nobody cyar pass! He just hugged me up and laughed. I loved Blanca, so there was never any hostility. The band was doing well by then. They played for Alcoa Co, then at the Country Club, and middle class society began to hire them for house parties. Ironically, they were banned from the Portuguese Association after Big Sack from Belmont, a badjohn, wanted to enter a fete there where the band was playing and when turned away in his drunken state he stoned the place from across the road. We didn't mind, though, says Ferreira. We was on the rise. High society, on the other hand, was on the descent insofar as they had to come down from the trucks on which they played mas to chip on the road with Dixieland. Lil Aristeguieta, who later married bandleader Edmund Hart, flew their flag. And doors continued to open: they were one of the first steelbands on local radio, on Frank Pardo and Sam Ghany's Hi Neighbour show. They'd moved to Sackville Street in the yard of band member Rolf Moyou, and ever so often a young academic married to Moyous sister would look down from his room on their practice sessions and occasionally given

them advice. He drove a Buick and worked for the Caribbean Commission: his name was Eric Williams.

CASABLANCA, THE GREATEST

If Desperadoes, with its eight Panorama victories, is definitely one of the top steelbands today, without doubt the greatest in steelbands early years was one which has never won a Panorama, but yet still was the greatest for music on the road, for music on the stage and for warfare. It began on upper Oxford Street as Merry Boysa group of youngsters who limed by 42 Steps and used to follow the Gonzales Tamboo Bamboo band. Kendolph Cokey Mason, Arnold Agard, Cecil Osbourne, Orman Patsy Haynes and others were under the leadership of Oscar Pile when they went off to form Merry Boys around 1940 after dustbin and paint pan orchestras took over the city. Like all youth they adored the cinema and especially, in Piles case, the Humphrey Bogart movies North Star, Passage to Marseilles, The Maltese Falcon, Sahara, but most of all the one whose sonorous name they gave to the band in 1945 for VJ Day: Casablanca. Thereafter, the band whose insignia was the double Cross of Lorraine would become known as one of the most combative bands ever, having rioted with almost every other major steelband in the Forties and Fifties. In the earlies, however, when they were young, they ran. We did coward, we used to runas you hear a pan fall, we gone! recalls Augustus One Man Mark, who served three terms as Casablanca captain. Sometimes an accidenta little cord might burstand the pan drop: man gone! Then we keep a meeting and say, none of that: all for one and one for all. Soon after its formation Casablanca was also joined by several former Bar 20 fighters, older men such as Zigilee, Pops, Batman, Battersby, Bitterman, Big Barker and Ossie Campbell. James Batman Anderson, for instance, was known to beat an entire van of policementhey didnt have guns. In those days the younger boys were kept separate from the violence by the older hands. Cocoa water and one-eye-jack not for you, Ethelbert TB Brown recalls being warned by One Man, who became a fearsome Blanca warrior. So when Carlton Zigilee Barrow from Casablanca and Carlton Blackhead from Invaders fought over Muriel Little One Granger around 1948, it escalated into a feud between the two bands that dragged on for years and prompted the formation of the first steelband association in 1950. I did finish with that, Zigilee used to say of the fight with his rival. But Gold Teeth, he was a warmonger. When I think the thing done, every day he beating somebody and the war just continue, continue, continue. Around that a more peaceable group went off in the opposite direction under the great Philmore Boots Davidson to form City Syncopaters. But rioting does not a good band make, and Blancas importance came from the music they played. To start with, part of the bands power was its aggressive, driving rhythm and its martial buglers. But Blanca was more musical than that and, significantly, three of the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) playersand Taspo represented the cream of Trinidads panmencame originally from Casablanca: Ormond Patsy Haynes, Philmore Boots Davidson and Andrew Pan De La Bastide.

From early on when panmen were now learning simple lavways and Latin American tunes, Casablanca had already realised the importance of learning proper music. Bootss family was respectable, his sister was a pianist and she taught him music. Additionally, on Sunday mornings a group of them including Patsy Haynes, TB Brown and Arthur de Coteau went for music lessons at a pianist named Simmonds. Sometimes they went by saxophonist Sonny Denner too. And when they heard one of the brass bands play a nice tune at a dance, the boys would memorise it orally. It was a mouth bandyou humming your tune just like if you playing it on pan, recalls One Man. Sometimes I have a little side with me and we outside and we singing different parts we go play on the pan and we eh stopping because if you stop you go forget. We sing until we go in the panyard. Folklorist and singer Edric Connor lived nearby in Belmont and he took an interest in the band, and when the first island wide steelband competition came around in the Savannah in 1948, he encouraged Casablanca to enter with Chopins Nocturne in E Flat Minor and Bells of St Marys. Art de Coteau tuned the iron especially for the bells, and Casablanca won, causing their neighbours Trinidad All Stars to take the classics seriously. It wasnt enough for de Coteau. He was ambitious and he established contact with a German musician living in St Augustine, Prof Katz, and they arranged to hold a steelband and piano recitalthe first ever. They also included tenor singer Victor Soverall, so the bands tuner Randolph Croppy Simmonds tuned a special small high tenor pan for Patsy Haynes to balance Soveralls voice. And when, after months of rehearsals, the show was put on, the Victoria Institute was sold outat $25 a ticket! If you hear ovation! recalls TB Brown, the second tenor to Patsy Haynes. They lift we up and carry we down the road in the rain. Blanca was able to change the sound of steelbands when they brought Alan Gervais from Southern Symphony in La Brea to tune for them. Bands used to tune their pans to different notes: Invaders to D, North Stars to G sharp. I liked E flat because the background pans sound sweet and although the band was small it sounded big, recalls One Man. In those days a bands power was not only its ability to fight, but its volume. Concert pitch was C, but those notes were light and easily put out of tune by hot sun. Some bands carried water to cool the tenors and Hilanders Bertie Marshall would invent the canopy to shelter the pans. Blancas solution was to get Gervais to tune pans that could withstand the hot sun. It all came from the fellas early habit of liming all over Trinidad, especially Thursdays, when rumshops closed half day and water lock off. The first time we went to Point we went Fyzabad to dance for New Years, says One Man. Next thing we end up in Point Fortin, spend about a month there. They used to get used cork hats from the Point Fortin Fire Station for their mas. And in the early Sixties, when Blanca wanted a new tuner, One Man brought Alan Gervais up and he would give the band that rich bass sound which all leading bands used from 1965 on. And if Casablanca is no longer the force it was, the band isnt dead yet and still has the potential to come back, having given birth a few years ago to a healthy baby, the Maraval-based pan-round-the-neck Blanca 47.

THE HILL BOYS

Perhaps Pat Bishop was awarded the Trinity Cross for her efforts with the Lydian Singers. It couldnt be for working with the band which has won eight Panoramasmore than any other: they have always known how to help themselves, even before they were Desperadoes and were just a rag tag bunch of delinquent youths who called themselves during the war Dead End Kids or Young Destroyers or simply Laventille Boys. The leader was Wilbert Be-eh Pacheco, and the Dead End Kids included fighters like Ivan Brains Bourne, Winston Talkative Harrison, Donald Jit Steadman, Brooks Banfield, Carlton Copperhead Thompson and Rudolph Crabby Edwards. And even though around 1946 they took, like every other steelband, a movie name (Desperados from a Glen Ford and William Holden movie) they werent too good on the pans. Rather, inspired by Talkative, who came to be known as Speaker, and Brains, they concentrated on mas. As one of steelbands greatest rioters, Desperadoes were naturally good with war mas such as To Hell and Back, Sands of Iwo Jima, Morocco. Their head sailors were famous for introducing the crab in 1952. But their innovation was the historical bands which moved steelbands away from the traditional sailor mas and into the Band of the Year competition: Land of the Zulu, Realm of Incas, Snowden, Primitive Man and Extracts from the Animal Kingdom, and the famous 1959 Noahs Ark which smashed San Juan All Stars Battle Cry. It was a wise move. Those Forties and Fifties were a time when steelband was disliked by respectable folk, and Desperadoes concentration on mas allowed them a close relationship with traditional mas makers from the hill such as the Bowen family. So the band always managed to enjoy the support of the Laventille community, bringing out its massive head mas. All them time Laventille people did support we police couldnt come ask Laventille people to say they going to get information, never, recalls Crabby. Thats why long time if they hold you, you not sure to get bail. Thus the band which became the most closely-knit community band ever planted those seeds way back. And useful it was too, because Laventille was where steelbands from all over east Port of Spain felt safe to parade in defiance of the police. Destination Tokyo, Casablanca, Bar 20, Hill 60, Crusadersthey used to parade up through Laventille all the way down to Morvant or Gonzales, running when the black maria came or sometimes chasing the police off. We used to have some drums filled with bottle for police because they used to harass we so we used to pelt bottle at them too, recalls Crabby. Primarily concerned with mas, the hill boys didnt completely ignore pan and when Spree Simon came playing his ping pong up the hill, Reynold Sing-co John used to listen in envy. Sing-co, who practically spent all his waking hours with a pan, decided to try to tune. He used a stone in those days and for many years he was Despers tuner with Charlie Baker McLean, their main player. Still, when the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) was picked in 1951, and Carl Bumpy Nose Greenidge chosen, he couldnt leave his job. I felt hurt, recalls then Despers skipper Brooks Banfield. Like they really had something against Laventille people. That community spirit would make Desperadoes the band that converted Special Works unemployment relief into a steelband program, that would have a community centre built for the bandall under the direction of George Yeates. He was a good fighter and an audacious delinquent: Yeates would plan an attack down to the smallest detail, and wasnt afraid to manufacture bombs for it. If they wanted

to steal a bale of sugar, hed plan how to take the entire truck. But he was chosen to lead for his intelligence and education: he was the only Laventille youth going to college in those days. And he did wonders. He cooled down the feud with Tokyo and later with Renegades; he brought Special Works to the hill; he got the community centre built; and he got sponsors for the band from the first, Coca-Cola, right down to the present West Indian Tobacco Co. And most importantly he got Rudolph Charles. In the late Fifties Charles was part of a popular and talented small band that came out at Christmas and was supported by all the youth. It was called Spike Jones. According to Aldwyn Cochrain, when the older Desperadoes decided it was time they concentrated on pan, Speaker sent a message to the youth: join Desperadoes or well beat you up and mash up your pans. The Charles family was a respected one on the hill. Rudolphs father had been a senior prison officer and thus had met most of the Desperadoes in gaol, and even after he was long dead some respect was inherited by the young Rudolph. Besides, he was like Yeates before him intelligent, self-confident, capable of dealing with the outside world and soon he was being groomed to lead. Rudolph Charles got Ellie and Birdie Mannette from Invaders to tune for Despers, and after them he got Invaders star player, Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley, to join the band. Despers had helped raise funds to pay for Cobo Jacks defence when he was charged with murder, and in the early Sixties Cobo Jack began to tune for the hill boys. And although he never played on stage for Desperadoes, he also taught them how to play, so that in 1966 the band won the triple title: Panorama, Bomb and Best Beating Band. Pianist and arranger Beverly Griffith was leaving Trinidad and they needed an arranger. Roy Cape had brought Clive Bradley for their Panorama arrangements, but the band needed a Festival arranger too, so again Speaker Harrison made a suggestion to Rudolph Charles. Speaker had grown up in the orphanage and he recalled the shy Raymond Artie Shaw, another orphan whod gone on to become an extremely gifted musician in the Police Band. Shaw had never had anything to do with steelband he didnt like the noise in the early period, and he feared the violence in the middle period so when Rudolph asked him to come up the hill Shaw thought, No, I not going with them fellas at all. Emory Gill, Despers drummer, who was also in the police band, asked him one day, When you going up? Unwilling to say no, Shaw replied, I eh have no money to go. So Gill trapped him by offering to pay. Thats the man allyuh say so good? said Robbie Greenidge when Shaw tried to arrange for Despers but knew nothing about pan. So Rudolph stepped in, explained the structure of a steelband, how the pans were played, and they set to work. On the night of the competition a tenor fell and was put out of tune; Robbie Greenidge didnt show; and Shaw was certain theyd lost. But Rudolph tuned the pan quickly behind Queens Hall and Shaw allowed a newcomer, Dougla Kenny, to take Greenidges part. That Sixty Seven Desperadoes won the Champ of Champs Prime Ministers Trophy, and since then the band has gone on to amass eight Panoramas, three straight Festivals and a Humming Bird gold. Maybe a Trinity Cross is next.

THE CHINESE CONNECTION

Everyone is familiar with the enormous contribution the Chinese have made to culture, and names such as Carlysle Chang in art and mas, Steven Lee Heung in mas, Joyce Wong Sang in Best Village and Ellis Chow Lin On in soca spring easily to mind. Less well-known, however, is the Chinese role in steelband, which happens to be barely less fundamental, starting with men such as Reynold Singco John. Singco, whose Chinese name was Assing, was one of that early group of Dead End Kids that became Desperadoes, and Singco was the bands first tuner in the Forties. Likewise, Highlanders, one of the most innovative second-generation bands, was founded by Kim Loy Wong, although they were primarily a mas band and only became a force in pan when they joined with Bertie Marshalls Armed Forces. There were also steelbands whose membership was largely Chinese, beginning with Starland on St Vincent Street by Empire Theatre, a fairly good band that was assisted by Ellie Mannette, who gave them pans. Early members included Selwyn and Beverly Griffith. Roy Chin was one of their captains. But it was Zone Starswhich another Starland captain, George Whitey Lynch, helped outthat got the reputation as the Chinese band. They were, however, a group of mainly Chinese table tennis players whose club, the Valiants, practised upstairs the Kuomintang Association in Charlotte Street. The club included Petal Lee Loy, womens table tennis champ at the time, and Hamil Achim, the male champ. It was Hamils immigrant father who, as chairman of the moribund Kuomintang Association, had allowed the youths to play table tennis on the third floor of the Associations headquarters. And it was Hamil who decided one day to bring out a steelband. Petal Lee Loy didnt play pan but Kenneth Lee Hoy, whom she later married, did, along with some of her five brothers, especially Valentino. At the time my parents didnt know, recalls Valentino Lee Loy. When the band was going through the Savannah Id give somebody to hold my pan so I could look like I just supporting the band. Zone Stars from Charlotte Street and Starland from St Vincent Street, according to Valentino Lee Loy, had lower-class Chinese, and the more respectable Orientals were in Dixieland and its forerunner, Melody Makers. Rolf Moyou, for instance, Eric Williamss brother-in-law, was there, as were Wilson Owen, and even, briefly, Kim Loy Wong. Moyouwhose father was an immigrant Chinese, the lifetime president of the Chinese Society, but whose mother was second generation and mixed with creoleas a little boy followed Poland, a small band from Sackville Street that fed into Red Army. And when Melody Makers was formed, Moyou, who went to QRC but played marbles and flew kites in the Cobo Town area with Ernest Ferreira and the other boys, joined. At the time there were only Moyou, Malcolm Woo and Wakyong Chu Foon (brother of artist Pat) in the band, but when they came on the road and started to bring out mas, things changed, perhaps because the race has always been keen on the art of masquerade and has produced not only Carlysle Chang but Aldwyn Chow Lin On, the founder of Sangre Grandes Cordettes who also built Peter Minshalls first half-dozen kings. Even Kim Loy Wongs Hilanders started mainly as a mas band. So it was Dixielands mas that drew the Chinese in their numbers. Our supporters were 90 per cent Chinese, says Ernest Ferreira, Dixielands founder. When you saw the masqueraders, Malcolm Woo and the Allums and all them, it was plenty

Chinese with helmet on their head. Akam Long Wai from Belmont helped us with our mas and he brought a lot of Chinese to the band. Dixieland, the 1961 Festival winner, was the first college boy band and they paved the way for a host of other Invaders-assisted middle-class steelbands, the most famous being Silver Stars, which was even more Chinese in origin. If Zone Stars started out of the Valiants table tennis club, Silver Stars grew out of the extended family-lime of the Chans, the Youngs and the Kwong Sings, that eventually grew to include college boys from Cobo Town, Newtown and Woodbrook. We used to have small get-togethers on weekends and would play records and dance, or wed play cardsthe loser had to buy watermelon for everybody. Then we decided to play music, so we bought harmonicas, big ones, small ones, recalls Ronnie Chan. After that we decided to play pan. Chans father was a Chinese immigrant who was very involved in Chinese culturehe made the papier-mache dragon head for Double Ten dragon dances. The girls built the dragons body and sewed on its bells, but they also went on to play in the first all-female steelband, Girl Pat, while Ronnie, his twin brother Ray, and cousin Peter Kwong Sing formed Silver Stars, which became in 1963 the only steelband ever to win Band of the Year. By the time Silver Stars emerged in the mid-fifties, the steelband movement was attracting middle-class youth of all races, not just Portuguese and Chinese. Still, when they were treated to a small dose of the repression other steelbands regularly received, and the police raided the band and arrested its members while they were practising at the Halfhides house, it was a Chinese lawyer, Lennox Wong, who made sure not only to get them off the charges but to win damages from the police. Coming from an ambitious, upwardly-mobile community, most of the Chinese boys left the steelband movement a few years after they entered it, going abroad to study, settling down and marrying, or focusing more of their energies into their jobs. Many retained links with the steelband movement, however. Rolf Moyou became Eric Williams adviser on steelband; Aldwyn Chow Lin On was briefly acting president of Pan Trinbago; and his brother Ellis became manager of Charlies Roots, just as Dixie Stars pannist George Ng Wai continued playing for many years abroad and is now the manager of his son Joeys band Second Imij. Ronnie Chan, now the managing director of Scotiabank, took 20 St Francois Girls College pannists to the banks annual general meeting in Canada.

ALL STARS SHINE FORTH

This year Trinidad All Stars plans to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, which takes the band back to 1935 and makes it the oldest band in the country. According to historian of the band Macdonald Jerry Serrant, 1935 was chosen as the time around which the first bits of iron began to be included in the bottle-andspoon bamboo bands that came out for JOuvert throughout Port of Spain. And although the earliest report of iron in the bands is in a February 1937 Port of Spain Gazette which refers to the accompaniment of noises by tin pans, two Carnivals before that, in 1935, the Trinidad Guardian mentions the music provided by the strangest instruments...

nutmeg graters, bottles, spoons and other unorthodox instruments were pressed into service. Serrant admits that the first full-fledged steelband was the Newtown band Alexanders Ragtime Band which hit the streets in 1939, a few months after the movie of the same name played in Port of Spain. Were not trying to say we were the first steelband or anything so, he explains. Its just that thats where our roots began. And whether there was iron in 1935 or not, it cannot be doubted that All Stars is the steelband with the deepest roots that reach back to the days of the USS Bad Behaviour sailor band that emerged out of Hell Yard where All Stars is now based. With over 200 members it was the largest ships crew (not fancy) black-and-white sailor band in town and theyd go by St Joseph Road where the coal carts left their black dust, and the white-suited sailors would roll on the ground. In addition to being the home of USS Bad Behaviour, Hell Yard was one of those areas that served poor people as a combination of community and sports centre, culture, recreation and gambling club, cricket and football field, mas camp and eventually, panyard. There would be fellas gambling seven eleven, liming, roasting a breadfruit. Some youths might be pitching marbles. Depending on the season there might be a football or a cricket match. And the leader of it all was the famous Herbert Sagiator Drayton. The Drayton brothersHerbert, Cecil, Steven, Leonard, Ralphwere all sportsmen, but Herbert Sagiator was the oldest and he trained all the youths who frequented Hell Yard in self-defence, especially in wrestling, and for it he was idolised by the younger ones. And one who learned most from him and eventually took over was Hamilton Thomas, better known as Big Head Hamil. It was in 1937 that Sagiator was stabbed up by the younger Eric Stowe over a jamette called Livvy, and he left Hell Yard to play historical mas in Belmont. Jerry Serrant argues that the fight between Sagiator and Stowe was also a generational conflict, but whether or not this is so, it certainly paved the way for the younger generations musical revolution that was around the corner. First, Lulie brought out the band USS Virginia in 1938, then Edward Waj Raymond took over in 1939. And that was the year the 16 or 17-strong Alexanders Ragtime Band left its Newtown yard on JOuvert morning to steal the hearts of young people throughout Port of Spain and change the cultural history of the world. That morning the fellas were looking at the ole mas passing down Charlotte Street when some friends came running: Allyuh come! Look a band coming up Park Street beating pan! Elmore Bully Alleyne recalls, We eh pay them no mind at all, so we stand up, me and Hamil and Eddy Rab--we didnt move. When they nearly reach by the Rosary the people come back and they call we, so we run up. When we reach we see the fella with the flag and it was really a pan band. It was the first time ever a pan band land in town it was real amazing. They wasnt playing no tune at all. Hamil asked Police, one of the players in the band whom he knew, What allyuh do to tune them pan? Police explained that it wasnt difficult, just heat the pan and pound it until you got notes. Well, after that when Carnival, Hamil had we all in Belmont, on top of the hill, stealing pan, recalls Bully. And from then they created Second Fiddle, the first steelband to come out of Hell Yard, with men such as Brassy, the Stowe brothers, Sonny Jones and others. (Orderly, another Hell Yard limer, broke away to go by the Mafumbo calenda yard, where he opened the short-lived band Missing Ball.)

They were unlucky. In 1940 the band was going to the railway station to go Siparia Fete, drawing a large crowd down Charlotte Street, when the police raided and held an 11-year old boy named Carlton Barrow. He was convicted and put on probation and as a result he left the band to form one nearer his home on Bath Street. His nickname was Zigilee and the band he formed was called Bar 20. Then in 1941, when the Government stopped Carnival, Second Fiddle took a chance to make a turn on the streets. The police made a raid and held Jitterbug on George Street, after which Hamil concentrated his energies on the bands self-defence, and captaincy fell to Rudolf Fisheye Olliverre, who renamed them Cross of Lorraine. By then the great Neville Jules had joined the band and was to become their tuner, arranger and captainthe true heir of Sagiator and Hamil. Building on the discipline forged from the days of Sagiator and Big Head Hamil, the band changed its name after the Second World War to Trinidad All Stars after Vats Rudder, formerly of Casablanca, heard them and found they all played like stars. But that wasnt quite true. Jules wasnt too keen on the improvisational ramajay style of, for instance, Invaders. He preferred to orchestrate every note of a tune. At one time when the band was based in the garret of the Maple Leaf Club, Jules made them practice using their fingers, so other bands couldnt copy his arrangements. And when the job of tuning all the pans as well as arranging all the music became too big, he turned captaincy over to Prince Batson, a man who insisted on a rigorous discipline in the band, for although he wasnt a fighter himself he made sure to surround himself with the toughest men such as Claytis Ali, better known as the calypsonian Dougla, and Hugo Big Jeff Peschier. You had to search people pocket, look for knife with people on the road, who into the gamblers you try to get them out of the band, and then I called on the fellas who had a reputation, recalls Batson. I was a weakling but with a strongman side and I was obeyed. Batson kept Trinidad All Stars out of the first Steelband Association because that organisation was formed to stop steelband rioting and All Stars never rioted; so they never got a representative on the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) that went to England in 1951. Still, although the band would win four Panorama crowns, its in classical music that Juless tuning genius and orchestral talent, and Batsons organisational discipline flowered, in the classical music that they brought on the road, that they played in their biennial Classical Jewels concerts, and that won them the Steelband Festival title five times, more than any other band.

I LOVE YOU, RAJABUT ON PAN

On the strength of Lennox Bobby Mohammed, Jit Samaroo and Amin Mohammed alone, the Indian community could claim to have made a tremendous contribution to steelband. Bobby Mohammeds Cavaliers changed the sound of steelband in the midsixties. And Jit, with six Panorama victories, is the most successful steelband arranger in history, having carried Renegades from obscurity to the steelband second only to Desperadoes in Panorama first prizes.

Amin Mohammed took Exodus out of Gay Flamingoes and made of it the bestmanaged steelband in the country and progenitor of the annual Pan Ramajay. Then there are the many lesser-known Indian panmen and steelband supporters whose contribution to the steelband movement has been significant--men such as, for example, Buddy Ramsumair, younger brother of Charlie Ramsumair, the now-weekly journalist. The family lived in Martineau Land off Park Street. Their father, a mechanic, gave Carlton Zigilee Barrow a brake hub for Bar 20s iron section. Although he gave Buddy a good licking when the boy formed his first band, Jay Hawks, the youngster went on to make his career in steelband, studying music in London, where he teaches pan at 11 schools. Or there was Lawrence Lutchman, Starlift guitar and cello panman, who also brought out Hosay in St James. Through him the Starlift playersincluding the young Len Boogsie Sharpe participated in the Hosay. Later, when Starlifts surfeit of talent overflowed to form two new bands in 1973, it was Lutchman who was one of the main men in the Third World breakaway faction. It was Sharpes Phase II, however, which translated the tassa experience into his 1986 Panorama arrangement on I Music, rolling the tenors like the martial Hosay rhythms. It wasnt the first time it had been done. Bobby Mohammed used a tassa side at Panorama in the early Seventies. Born in 1942 in Siparia, by the time he was seven, Mohammed had learnt piano by ear from hearing his mother play. In secondary school he learnt the guitar and later played for the teenage combo Crystals. Nerlin Taitt of Seabees in San Fernando--ping pong solo winner of the 1958 steelband festivalarranged for Bobbys cousins band in Fyzabad, Rhythm Stars, and used to come around the Mohammed household. Taitt lived two streets away and Bobby's cousin brought him over to the Mohammeds. That was late 1957 when two days later Taitt brought a tenor for Bobby to accompany and they began playing together. It was Bobbys brother Selwyn began playing the pan first; Bobby backed him up on piano. Around then Zaid Toscanini Mohammed from Melody Makers, a year or two older, used to come an play on a table tennis board below Bobby's house and on hearing Bobby playing piano, he too brought a tenor to accompany him. Bobby gave the chords of I can't stop loving you and Tosca took them back to the band. It was a tune with a lot of complex chords, and Bobby took a knock on the tenor on the road that Carnival of 1958. One day neighbour Cyril Stoute who played tenor for Gondoliers asked Mohammeds father if the band could practice under the house. Hilton Mohammed, Bobby's father, agreed and Gondoliers moved in, and Selwyn and 18-year-old Bobby began to play cello and arrange for the band. Tosca had suggested Bobby form a band and he even tuned a double guitar pan for him, but when Gondoliers moved in, Tosca went on to form a band in Pleasantville, a new college boys' band named Trinidad Maestros assisted by Steve Lalsingh of the former Seabees. Lalsingh tuned the pans and was made captain. And when Gondoliers moved from the Mohammeds residence a year later, and the Mohammeds formed Cavaliers, Steve Lalsingh tuned the pans and some of the Maestros rhythm men helped the new band outthe band which would win Panorama in 1965 and 1967 with the sweetness of Mohammeds arrangements and the power of his bass section. Bobby's father managed them, got the drums, organised them, arranged sponsorship. Tosca joined the band to become Bobbys right hand man. He tuned for

True Tones from Princes Town and brought some of them into Cavaliers, along with some younger members of Melody Makers. Mohammed experimented with African drums in 1969, but was edged out by Harmonites, and in 1970 he suffered a mental breakdown. By the time he came to incorporate tassa in his1972 Panorama arrangement, both he and the band were in decline. The tassa players hadn't rehearsed with the band and they merely kept up a deafening rhythm, drowning out the panmen. Cavaliers were knocked out in the preliminaries and Mohammed and the baton passed that year to the leader of the Samaroo Kids Steel Orchestra, Jit Samaroo, who began arranging for Renegades. The Samaroo family band, now the Samaroo Jets, is perhaps the most travelled steelband, and their repertoire is wide. In addition to the standard pop-kaiso-classical music, in 1982 they won the only Religious Music Festival andto show that the culture mixes in both directionsthe Hindi Nidhi steelband chutney competition a few years later. (Surprisingly, the second runners-up were the Laventille Sound Specialists). And no wonder, given Samaroos pan apprenticeship in the original Tunapuna Scherzando. Born in 1950 in Lopinot, Samaroo had his musical roots in parang, which he would play on a seven-dollar cuatro. He wanted to learn to play the trumpet next but couldnt afford it, so he turned to pan and in 1964 joined that early Scherzando which used to be called Boys Towna band that straddled both Afro- and Indo-Trinidad. The Tunapuna bands pans had been donated by Pt Cumanas Boys Town, winners of the first steelband festival. But it attracted both African and Indian boys. We didnt have no racism in Monte Grande, Tunapuna and a lot of Indians joined the band, recalls Michael Hamilton. There were fellas like David Toolsie, Ramdass Sammy, and Lal Jagroop, in whose yard the band was located. People used to say, Look at Slim and them Indians but the band wasnt Indian, not in their repertoire. For that, Ramdass Sammy, Asgar Ali and others had formed the Saraswatie Steel Orchestra, which played at Indian weddings and other functions, but they all played in Boys Town for Carnival. When we played carols at Christmas, both Indians and Africans came out to jump with us in Monte Grande, recalls Hamilton. When Jit came to learn pan he offered to teach me cuatro. He was a born panman and in a week he could play like anybody else. Boys Town became Scherzando. When UWI lecturer Landig White joined the band they began to go places, securing the sponsorship of Lever Brothers and changing their name to Canboulay although Samaroo and Hamilton went on to play with Johannesburg Fascinators. Meanwhile, Sammy from the Saraswatie Steel Orchestra formed the Tunapuna All Stars which he captained and which also specialised in Indian music. The band then changed its name to the Pasea East Indian Steel Orchestra. Then, when they got sponsorship from Turban Brand, changed to Starland and began entering conventional Panorama competitions. The sponsorship eventually dried up, however, and by the mid -Seventies Starland expired. About eight of the younger fellas such as Lalsingh Rambaran and Billy Lutchman decided to form back the old Tunapuna All Stars, taking the old name back, says manager Sam Ranjitsingh. They only had about two or three Indian tunes and after I joined in 1978 I influenced them back to Indian music--we couldnt compete with the other conventional bands like Desperadoes, but for Indian music we are top of the line.

They were assisted , in conventional arrangements, by Michael Cupidore, the tuner and arranger for Humming Birds Pan Groove and he brought the entire team to play with his St James band every Panorama for over 12 years. But it was Starland player George Rampersad who arranged Indian music for the Tunapuna All Stars (he now teaches pan in Denmark) and made them the main Indian steelband in the country, performing film music, chutney, and religious bhajans at functions, weddings and chutney shows. And to show sceptics like Sat Maharaj how fruitful is that blend of Indian music and pan, the most recent Indian hit I Love You, Raja from the film Raja is performed on a synthesiser--set to pan mode.

WHEN TOKYO RULED THE HILL

They gave a great performance, and their elimination from the Panorama semifinals must have deeply hurt Tokyo Steel Orchestra and indeed all the people of John John. Actually, neither of the two great community bands, Desperadoes and Tokyo, was very good in the music department in the earlies. The hill boys climbed out of that by the Sixties, but Tokyo is still rooting around for a Panorama or a Festival first prize. It wasnt always so. When, during the wartime Carnival prohibition, the John John band would take a chance and parade up the hill, joining up with a smaller section from St Pauls Street, keeping an eye out for the police, the Despers boysthey called themselves Dead End Kids in those dayslooked on enviously. Even as late as 1951, when the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) was formed to play at the Festival of Britain, John Johns Winston Spree Simon was part of that team, to which no Desperado was invited. They were better than the hill boys and they had more tradition, for the John John band reached all the way back into the bamboo days when people played Jouvert in old clothes, chanting and waving bits of bush in the air, and a few youths had introduced dustbin covers, old pans, anything they could put their hands on. At that time it didnt have no rubber on stick, recalls Ralph Clarke. We used to go up in the mang and cut them little guava stick to beat with. Those were the days when Spree Simon would be under a mango tree experimentinglike Ellie Mannette in Woodbrook and Neville Jules in Hell Yardwith the notes which could be put on a pan. Then the war ended, first in Europe. They give us VE day, they say band on the road, says Clarke, recalling the ideas being tossed around for the bands new name. He suggested the film name Destination Tokyo, for that was the next target for a holiday when the band could hit the streets, and thus the John John band acquired the name it still has today. The John John band wasnt the only John John band, though. There were other bands, small offshoots, which happily coexisted with their mother band. Down by the river behind the Besson Street police station some Tokyo youths formed River Lady, although come Carnival youd find them beating in Tokyo. Down there a Tokyo stage side used to practice too, Tropical Harmony. River Lady left the aquatic environment and around 1950 moved to the yard of Alan Mottley where they acquired the name Fascinators. They sounded all right, and had

at least one member, Cecil Jinx Gordon, who played piano and was musically literate. And then Spree, who had moved in with a girlfriend nearby, joined them. Spree Simon was really in Fascinators when he went to England, but most people thought it was Tokyo he represented. We didnt mind, recalls Mottley. And he come up a Christmas time and make style on we, says Tokyo veteran Aldwyn George. Around a Carnival time we ignore him, we pass him straight. He jump in the band and start to cry and hug up people. And Tokyo and Fascinators remained close for as long as the latter existed, the smaller band following the bigger around town every Carnival. George also tells of yet another breakaway from Tokyo, which was prompted when the older Tokyo men were unwilling to share with the youths the money theyd received for playing at Carnival. They say, Let we give them some pan and throw them out and let them make their own money, recalls George. We say, Yesgive us the pans. We went up Picton Hill and opened a band named Casanova. Carlton Questel was the captain. The following Discovery holiday, however, Tokyo was refused a police permit to play on the streets because of the bands penchant for rioting, so when the young Casanovas came down the road with their permit, The older fellas just take the pans from we and gonewe have the permit but them beating the pan, says George. Casanovas didnt last a year. It was the first little outing we had and they take we pans, so we join back up with them. It was all one John John, all one band, all one love that will never roll over and dieTokyo.

THE BAND THEY COULDNT BAN

Today its interesting to think that Karl Marx might have raised an eyebrow to learn that the vanguard of the steelband movement in the Forties was a band called Red Army. Even the solicitor Lennox Pierre didnt notice, despite being the guiding force behind the 1950 steelbands association and having been a socialist since he formed the Workers Freedom Movement in the 1940s. Many years later when the OWTU sponsored the San Fernando steelband Free French in 1971, perhaps it was with Pierres blessing for he was by then advisor to the union. But in 1945 when the bunch of well-dressed young men who limed around Green Corner and controlled the whores, decided to form a steelband, who was to foresee the role that would be thrust upon them? They was selling all kinda flags and bunting, so we say let we go in town and see what happening, recalls Mack Kinsale, one of the bands stalwarts of that day the boys went down Frederick Street to lime. And we come across this Russian flagwe say this is a good looking flag because of the hammer and the sickle, so we say we will give the name Red Army. That was just before VE Day in 1945 when everyone was expecting the war to over and celebrations to begin, so Kinsale and his partners went back to their yard on Woodford Street and started to paint their pans red and yellow. They stencilled the hammer and sickle on their T-shirts and thats how they hit the streets on VE Day, May 8 and on VJ Day, August 15, 1945.

Communism was just a word to them, one whose meaning they never considered, far less adhered to. Tomahawk and grass cutter, is how Wellington Blues Bostock referred to the hammer and sickle when interviewed by anthropologist Steve Stuempfle. They werent even the average unemployed scrunters who formed steelbands in those days. Rather, Kinsale, his brother Teddy and their friends Wellington Blues Bostock, Lenny Bad Good Russell, captain Kenneth Diego Allen, second captain Leonard Morris and others, were Port of Spains saga boyssnappy dressers living well off the women who serviced the American soldiers. So if St James Sun Valley won the first island-wide steelband competition in 1946, elbowing Red Army into second place, the saga boys of Green Corner won the best dressed competition. And yet despite their dandyism, when they came out in 1946 on that first Carnival after the four-year wartime ban, passing along Queen Street, the ageing Albert Richards, grandfather of trade unionism in Trinidad took them for the real McCoy. The ancient proletarian struggler, founder of the Trinidad Workingmens Association in the previous century, was living out his last days quietly as a druggist on the corner of Nelson and Queen Streets, when he saw the band coming down the road in front his establishment, Red Army emblazoned on their T-shirts, bearing a huge picture of Stalin. He ran out in front them and told them to stop and lower the banner. And he pinned paper moneytwenty dollar notes, ten dollar notes, five dollar notesall around the portrait of the Soviet leader. Every Carnival allyuh must pass here, demanded Richards. Make here your first stop. Even the younger socialist John Poon, whose father sold cigarettes on Prince Street, used to visit the boys in their panyard at Blues barracks on the same street. But Poon hadnt a chance to introduce them to his ideology, however, before the band left those cramped quarters to settle by Kinsale on St Paul Street. If they were innocent of ideology, they had one thing in common with their namesake: for all their sharp looks, these saga boys were fightersthey had to be to control and defend their many womenand their band became embroiled in riots with almost every other fighting band except Invaders. Kinsale blames it on other bands enviousness, but whatever the reason Red Army couldnt go on the road without a fight breaking out. Why, they even got into a fight when they went on tour in British Guyana in December 1946 as the first steelband ever to leave Trinidad, and ended up spending Old Years Night in the Georgetown jail, Breakdam. Soon, their notoriety became itself criminal: a bottle could hardly fall in Port of Spain, far less bus a head, but Red Army was blamed for it. Kinsale bitterly remember, for instance, being arrested and taken to court for fights when he was nowhere around: You know how much time I get lock up and me eh know what going on? Lord Melody sang: Who dead? Canan, Canan Barrow/Canan Barrow went to town and a Red Army badjohn lick him down. The band was even once prohibited from going on the road for Discovery Day, and they were obliged to change their name to Lucky Jordan and reapply for police permission. And yet Kinsale was never convicted for all the charges laid against him, for again unlike other scrunting panmen and badjohns, those Red Army boys were able to retain a lawyerEdgar Gaston-Johnson, the best.

But mere combativeness does not a communist make, and the Red Army earned its name before they went Guyana, towards the close of 1946 when Butler was agitating down south and dock workers were on strike up north. The workers were threatening licks for anyone who attempted to break the strike, so the police had Black Marias moving around to collect strike breakers and ferry them to the docks. And where better to find strong out-of-work men than in the panyards? But I had my bigger brothers working stevedore, recalls Kinsale. So I tell the fellas, That is unjust, I have my brothers working on the wharf and to go and break strikewe eh so suffering, we could hold out on that. So when the police come by us we tell them we eh going. From then on at least some police began thinking that perhaps the band really was communist, and perhaps it was this what made the white man from C Lloyd Trestrail to approach them in 1948 at the Grand Stand in the Savannah with ideas of sedition. It was perhaps their moment of apotheosis, for the band faded away in a year or twos time, having nurtured virtuoso players such as Alfred Sack Mayers and Rudy Two Lef Smith and having given birth to the Merry Makers. This band is a nice band, I like it, the white man from Trestrail came up and said to the boys. Dont say I fast and I dont want my name to go back, but what it is allyuh playing for? It was the Sunday night before Carnival and Red Army was waiting with eleven other top steelbands to compete at the Jaycees Carnival show. They answered the man they were competing for a trophy, a challenge cup. A cup? And no money? exclaimed the instigator. Look, watch that crowd there in the Grand Standthem people making tons of money. Get on to the same man who organise this thing and tell him allyou would like to get some cash. So the leading Red Army boys called the other captains aroundEllie Mannette from Invaders, Sonny Roach from Sun Valley, Neville Jules from All Stars, the big boys of the steelband worldand argued they should call for prize money and appearance fees or boycott. They didnt pull it off, though. For many panmen of those days the pleasure of playing was its own reward, and besides perhaps the youths were flattered by the enthusiasm of the upper class audience. Some just turned away from the Red Army boys, others accused them of running from competition. So they took up their pans and walked away, never gaining from the prize money which was eventually given that night. It was the first attempt to organise panmen to fight for their collective interests and yes, Marx might have raised an eyebrow but Lenin would surely have smiled.

DEEP SOUTH PAN

It might seem strange that our main pan-on-the-road festival should take place in Point Fortins Borough Day celebrations, quite down in that distant outpost. But it isnt really, not if you know the long history of pan in the deep south and the seminal contribution it made to the steelband movement, starting even further south than Point during the early years of the war, around 1942, after schoolboy Franklyn Roberts visited his older brother, who was apprenticed to a tailor in Charlotte Street, Port of Spain. Liming around the town with a friend, Roberts somehow got his hands on the small one-hand ping pong from a band on Nelson Street which he eventually took home

proudly to Buenos Aires, where other young boys would gather round for a knock whenever he played it. So they formed the small Starlight steelband, and after Carnival was resumed in 1946, after the end of the war, the band developed a reputation for Ju Ju mas. We had a little band in Erin with Peter Vin Courtney, but they never had mas in Erin, so we joined Starlight, recalls their lead tenor player, George St Louis. But the major centre was Point Fortin. In Point proper, steelband started on Adventure Road a bit later than in Buenos Aires around the end of the war. It was partly due to the influence of Casablancas Philmore Boots Davidson, whose mother had a house in Canaan Road so the Point youths called their band Casablanca too, but under James Bumpy Neversons captaincy the name was changed to Morning Stars. There wasnt as much violence and anti-social stigma about steelband down south as in Port of Spain, but there was a touch of it. And in 46 we retaliate when we give two police a good licking and then disperse, recalls Carl Assing Mollineaux from Morning Stars. That happen Carnival Tuesday night and they never hold nobody, but after that they decide who they ketch well ketch. These two bands mightnt ring any bells in the ears of northerners, but Starlight produced Leo Coker, one of todays top tuners. And as for Morning Stars, that band was responsible for Alan Gervais and Earl Rodney. I met Alan in Morning Stars. We had an informal band on Guava Road, Pointjust little boys mimicking the elders with milk cup, recalls Rodney. I went to thief a pan from Morning Star and James (Neverson) catch me. He run me down and tell my mother but she tell him I was a real pan jumbie, so he invite me to join the band. Gervais and Rodney, the two talented youths in the band, were already beginning to shine, but they needed Neversons polishing. We was going to play in a competition and we wanted to practiceAlan and Earl was small and they just stand up by the dam, recalls Morning Stars member Stephen Hagley. Bumpy, Rupert Gomes and I went there and Bumpy say, Boy, we have to play and allyou sitting down by the dam? and Rupert hit two of them a lash and they came back so we could practice. They lost the competition to the band from Buenos Aires, but Gervais and Rodney formed Tropical Harmony in 1951, and immediately their talents began to mature. Allie Gervais, Alans brother, played guitar and when we were practising at their home in Egypt Village he told us we werent forming complete chords, which should be at least three notes, recalls Vincent Lasse, who was a young member of Tropical Harmony. We used to attempt tunes like Stardust, which required serious chords, so Allie made a device to join two sticks together. Unlike, say, Siparia where a more Hispanic culture with less Carnival atmosphere inhibited the spread of pan, Point has always been African. Thus, in addition to Morning Stars there were several other early steelbands in the area, most notably an unnamed band in Cassava Alley, La Brea, led by Ginger King, another one down by Sobo Beach led by one Marcus, and the Cocoa Boys from Parilon. It was the latter whose visits to La Brea inspired a group of youngsters to start beating milk tins and anything else metal. Block and Belgrave Bonaparte and their cousin Avilla and I used to beat milk cup. I was about 13 and I used to have a car fender what I pound out notes on with a hammer, recalls Ashton John. Despite that humble beginning, however, the Bonaparte brothers came from a musical family, their father had a band, and the youngsters

eventually formed the steelband that would change pan music, led by Belgrave Bonaparte and with pans tuned by his brother Carlton Block Bonaparte. It was Belgrave who gave us the name, says John of the great bands martinet leader, arranger and tunera man who ranks alongside Neville Jules, Ellie Mannette and Tony Williams. He wanted to play all them hard tune, Vienna Waltz and Blue Danube, so he call the band the Southern Symphony. Hard tunes required hard work, and Belgrave, who now lives in the Bahamas, was a harsh taskmaster not above giving a few cuffs to sloppy players. You could fight me, you could jook me, John recalls him saying, but dont fuck up my music. It also required good players, and Belgrave poached the best from other bands the area. We was scared George (St Louis) would leave us to join them, recalls Franklyn Roberts of Starlights leading tenor player. St Louis didnt join Southern Symphony but Belgrave inveigled Rodney and Gervais to join them for festival competitions. Belgrave got Casablancas virtuoso Kenny Hart to play with them while he visited Point. He got Ivan Skull Henrywho subsequently formed Arima Melodiansto join them while hiding in La Brea from the police. And, more permanently, he recruited a 13-year-old Lincoln Noel from Sobo Village whose precocious talent was well-known. I used to hear them practising and one day I get a pan from Block Bonaparte in exchange for a birdcage and going back home through the bush I start to play, recalls Noel. I used to play by myself at the back of the house and one day they send and call me because they were hearing about me. Noel joined Southern Symphony, toured the world with them and eventually became one of the great tuners. It was he who modified Tony Williams Fourths and Fifths design to complete what is now the standard tenor pan. Primarily a stage side, Southern Symphony was sponsored by Esso from the early Fifties, and later in the decade they migrated to Port of Spain to become the house band for the Hotel Normandie. Their circuit of oil company staff clubs was taken over by Gervais and Rodneys Tropical Harmony. And when in 1959 Southern Symphony left Trinidad, Tropical Harmony left behind the schoolboy players in Rhapsody and moved up north to shake up the steelband world. For just as it was Belgrave Bonaparte who introduced panmen to more interesting chord changes in the 50s, so too it was Alan Gervais who showed tuners how to make a living from their craft as he moved from Casablanca to Cavaliers to Harmonites, tuning long-lasting pans with the speed of a conveyor belt, while the arrangements of his friend Earl Rodney won Harmonites three Panorama trophies.

SAGA OF A FLAGWOMAN
The death of Yvonne Smith, known far and wide as Bubulups, was sadly ignominious, starting with the onset of her illness on January 1, 1993, and ending when her abandoned corpse was finally laid to rest a year later on January 6, 1994 at what used to be the paupers cemetery in St James, after 39 days of shuttling between funeral homes. Bubulups always said that if she took to bed she wouldn't get up again, and it turned out to be true. When her companion of 24 years, Eugene Tepoo Bristo, a

panman from Tokyo steelband, first took her to the General Hospital, she spilled out of a wheelchair and was unable to rise. Although shed lost weight she wouldnt have displaced much less than 250 pounds, and the hospital attendant laughed at this beached whale on the floor. In my day he woulda be crying, she fumed afterwards in impotent rage, for in her day she was the most notorious, most brave danger jamette in Trinidad. But in 1993 it was all she could do was to return her dilapidated two-room shack in Clifton Street, John John, where she remained bleeding from her vagina for several months, emerging from bed mainly to for Tepoo to sponge her down in the front room. In October she spent two weeks in hospital but there was no one to donate blood: Tepoo was too old, and her friends were alcoholics. And on November 29 she died at home of abdominal malignancy and anaemia, according to the death certificate. She was 69 years of age. Born on May 2, 1924, Yvonne Smith grew up on Duncan Street. As a child she attended a school on Duke Street. Her father, Pinhead Smith wasn't wealthy, but the family was respectable enough. They had a parlour on St Vincent Street by the law courts, and there was a piano at home on which Yvonne played. She was an ordinary girl but always miserable, always big and she didn't take nothing from nobody, recalls Wellington Blues Bostock, one of the men who went to school with her and later enjoyed the pleasures she sold on the streets. A wilful and uncompromising child, she probably chafed against the taunts about her size. She had been separated from her mother, Ethel Charles, as a child and must have also resented that. And whereas one half-brother, Selwyn Charles, rose to become a parliamentary representative, Bubulups found herself pushed towards a different eminence. Is I break she out in life, admits George Blackman. He used to ride his bicycle past her house every day and look in the window where she practised piano. She was about 14 and I was about 16 and we loved one another, so she jumped through the window and we went Carenage to sleep. From that first liaison she became pregnant and fled or was chased away from her respectable family, just as happened to her younger friend Jean-in-town Clarke. I met her on Prince Street when I came out as a young girl on the street: I had a child and my father tell me where I catch my cold go and blow my nose; I had nobody to help me out, recalls Jean-in-town. I stand up on George Street looking for friends the first night and both of us became friends. Similarly, Bubulups had gone years before to live with friends in Charlotte Street when she was put out of her home. Blackman, then a stevedore and Admiral for Hill 60 steelband, remained living with his mother, who took her grand-daughter Hermia away from Bubulups the day she was born. Hermia Blackman grew up a stranger to Bubulups, her mother, even after, through coincidence, they lived next door, much as Bubulups had grown up a stranger to her own mother. Hermia would also follow her mother into the demi-monde and is at present facing trial for a murder in a rumshop. Perhaps Bubulups, barely a teenager, felt she couldnt afford a child on her own; perhaps she knew a daughter would have no place in the life she was about to enter; but whatever means decent society used to compel Bubulups to surrender her baby must have wounded her to the bone. And she didn't take nothing from nobody. She went on the streets for company; she had alot of young girlfriends, and young girls like money, says Blackman, who remained involved with Bubulups for several years after Hermia was born. He didn't attempt to pull her out of the world shed

entered, thoughmaybe by then she wouldnt have accepted his help. Instead she joined the world of steelband badjohns and saga boys. For some time she hung out in the Big Yard on George Street where a devil band came out, and by the early Forties she was wining and waving flag for Bar 20 steelband, leading them into battle like an enormous, brown Joan of Arc. Bubulups with a flag in she hand, goes one calypso, possibly by Spoiler, beggin the police don't stop the band. Even the most fearless men, such as Carlton Zigilee Barrow from Bar 20, found it daunting to keep up with Bubulups when she led them into battle. When she was in front with the flag your stones was cold but it was a woman in front so you had to go, he admits. When the police come, dont run, she told the band when they paraded the streets illegally after the funeral of Bar 20 skipper Ancil Boyce, and they went on to beat a handful of policemen and smash their squad car on Quarry Street. The subsequent police retaliation destroyed Bar 20. At least twice she was sentenced to gaol, apart from the routine police harassment she experienced as a whore sitting by a gateway in George Street. Police used to give we a hard time on the road, says her younger friend and colleague Jean-in-town, although eventually they left Bubulups alone. Once they take all of we to court. The police say she was sitting on a box and Bups tell them they have to be explicit: Am I selling chataigne, peewah or pommecythere? The whole court start to laugh and the magistrate dismiss the case. On another occasion Jean-in-town told the magistrate, I did now come out to work and as I pull down my panty to pee the police come with torchlight. I hold the police hand and say let we go drink two Guinness. Again the court laughed and the case was dismissed. This harassment made Jean-in-town move to the clubs along the Gaza Strip on Wrightson Road, west of Port of Spain. Perhaps her decision was influenced by her involvement with the Renegades captain, Stephen Goldteeth Nicholson, who was the bouncer at a club in the Strip. But Bubulups remained in town. One term in gaol was for a licking she put on a policeman who had chucked her. After that, when reinforcements were brought to arrest her she had to be carried by several of them, screaming and kicking and naked because she'd ripped off her clothes. That was down Carenage Bay at a St Peter's Day fete, during the war when she was still in Bar 20. According to Clem Belloram, then a child living in the district, it started when the band went to the festival in honour of St Peter, patron saint of fishermen. As expected, the rum was flowing and Bubulups got into an argument with someone. She began to fight and it spread into an all-out battle between those supporting the whore and those supporting her opponent, until the police arrived and one officer named Alfred Gilkes attempted to tackle Bubulups. She hit him some coconut and spread him out, recalls Belloram. She drop him but you know Alfred Gilkes with he little boxing tactics cant handle Bubulups to get her in the van cause he had to hit her a punch. I think he hit her a punch in her breast and knock her down. That was the only way you coulda get her to carry. Yeah. She was heavy. All now she would have been still fighting. Im telling you. You couldnt carry her nowhere. I could remember that as a little fella. It was during the war, yes, about 1945. Bubulups darling, why you beat the officer? sang one calypsonian after the incident: Six months hard labour.

Some time before shed befriended a young calypsonian fresh out of the countryside, Aldwyn Roberts, better known as Lord Kitchener, but by the time he sang about Zigilee and Bar 20 in The beat of the steelband in 1946, the band was dead and Bubulups had moved on. She was now flying flag for Red Army of Prince Street, a band of pimps if there ever was one. She was one of the first flagwomen and all of them was jamettes, says Blues Bostock, a veteran of that band. The liming spots in the wee hours were Tanti's Tea Shop on George Street and Luther's Tea Shop on Prince Street, where all- night bake and saltfish and coffee would be on sale and Kitchener, Spoiler and other calypsonians would be talking and trying out their latest songs. Bubulups remained friends with Kitchener until her death. When Red Army, cleaning up its act, metamorphosed into the Merry Makers by shedding its more unsavoury members, and fell under the patronage of a different type of dancer, Beryl McBurnie, the founder of the Little Carib Theatre, Bubulups moved on to Trinidad All Stars where she met Mayfield, a stripper and one of the greatest winers in the country. The two waved flag for All Stars. Although many of the whores found acceptance in the world of the outcast steelband men, it wasnt an easy world. Once a panman broke her arm with blows. He got 18 months for that. As for Jean-in-town, she was disfigured for life when a man stabbed her. One night I was liming with some Renegades panmen with some of the other girls and we went in this place on Park Street to buy some food, recalls Jean-in-town. This little boy who did just like to harass me come pushin money in my face. I spit in he face. Then when I comin out of the place later, somebody bawl Look out! and I throw my hand to cover my face. Until her death many years after she had left the streets, Bubulups remained close to Mayfield, as to all her friends of her days, remarking often that one didn't find friends like them again. The hardship and promiscuous intimacy of their lives must have indeed forged firm bonds of friendship. So although she gave up Hermia as a newborn to George Blackmans mother, she always advised Jean-in-town to save her money for her child, not for any man. But to her friends, Bubulups was generous whenever she had money. Despite Bubulupss complete immersion in the underworld, she maintained a very clear-cut code of ethics. For one, she abhorred dishonesty, and would never, for instance, pick a client's pocket as whores routinely did to supplement their meagre earnings. Jeanin-town, for instance, admits that, I never really like sex and thing, you know. I used to more rob man. Bubulups was never in that. And despite her battles with the police, she'd not let one be unfairly beaten. She saved my life years ago, recalls former Police Commissioner Randolph Burroughs. That was when he was a constable on the beat. She used to sit and open she legs under Big Man club on Prince Street. Ruby Rab was there too, and I was pursuing a chap for pick pocketing. The rogue darted into the Lucky Jordan club, a hangout for some of the country's worst criminals, and when the young policeman dashed in after him, someone locked the door behind him. Bubulups knew the danger and she and Ruby Rab began pounding on the door, bawling Murder! They killing the man! Ring the police! Burroughs recounts. Police didn't have revolvers but I put my hand in my pocket and pretend I have a gun until reinforcements from Besson Street arrived.

Bubulups's formidable wilfulness and, ironically, her self-respect were what got her into the most despised profession, and there in the gutter she defended her dignity with all the belligerence and moral rectitude she could summon. Later, after shed left the streets for good, she'd exaggerate to her Clifton Street neighbour, Velma Denbow, that shed always earned a fair amount of money, always had nice clothesas if to justify the life shed lived. According to Denbow, Bubulups always recalled to her how good it felt to always have food in her kitchen and new clothes on her backa rose-tinted memory at best. She also impressed upon Denbow how ladylike she always had been, even when on the streets, which was certainly a lie. Social commentators could not accommodate the contradiction between her abrasive vulgarity and her strong sense of dignity, and Bubulups was merely considered to be the biggest whore in Trinidad, scorned in calypsoes by Lord Melody, Lord Blakie, Roaring Lion, Kitchener, all the way down to the Mighty Chalkdusts 1992 Trinidad ent change in which he names the prostitutes as the standard of middle class corruption: Trinidad ent change Just re-arrange Prostitutes like Jean and Dinah Bubullups and Bengal Tiger They now Mrs Clarke And Drs Doris Mark In Federation Park. Perhaps when Kitchener celebrated flagwomen in his calypso of the same name, this first flagwoman felt a surge of pride, but its unlikely. By then shed already forsaken the streets and Carnival for good. More likely she felt stung on hearing in 1946 Kitchs gloating Ding Dong Dell with its unspoken rhyme, pussy in the well: Well the Yankee leave them sad All them girls in Trinidad And the course is getting hard Port of Spain to Fyzabad Ding Dong Dell The girls in the town they catching hell Ding Dong Dell Starvation in town, they must rebel Bubulups and Elaine Pow Every night they making row Well the thing is not the same They gone in the poker game Small and wiry Tipoo Bristo was a butcher who played tenor for Tokyo when he met her one night in 1969 on George Street. From the first night we liked one another, he says. I told her I don't want her to make no fares again, I going to mind her. She moved in with him and became progressively reclusive. Once she went to look on at Carnival and tripped somewhere along Prince Street; she never left the neighbourhood again. Eventually she hardly left Tipoos shack, not even to go to the nearby standpipe for water. After she died, squabbling broke out between Tipoo and the estranged Hermia, who lived a few steps away along a rocky dirt path. Hermia, surprisingly, stole the framed photograph Tipoo had of himself and Bubulups. The death certificate also disappeared and the corpse remained in Nellas Funeral Home for 32 days, after which it

was returned to Tipoo, who slept with Bubulups for a last night on the same bed. The following day he tried to get the Co-operative Funeral Home to take her corpse but hadnt the money. Eventually Yvonne Bubulups Smith was laid to rest on January 6, 1994, about two in the afternoon, after a funeral service sponsored by Clark and Battoos Funeral Home. Her last rites were attended by a handful of mourners, none of whom included the steelband pioneers such as Blues Bostock working next door to the funeral home in the Pan Trinbago office. Flowers were donated by La Tropicale Flower Shop. At the St James cemetery the coffin was lifted with great difficulty out of the hearse, because she had been a big woman; and George Blackman was the only man there to pay his last respects.

THE MASTER CARVER

It is debatable whether it was Lewisito Cito Velasquezs greatest band, but Flowers and Fruit was certainly the perfect choice for Leighton James's sculpture Day of Glory. And it was Citos first band. Formerly, he made costumes for Old St Joseph Roads Fascinators, the kings of fancy sailor mas, although he didn't play in the band himself, opting instead to play dragon mas. In 57, for instance, he was Lucifers Crown Prince in Legislators From Hell. Fifty Eight, however, saw him in his section of Fascinators, walking as always from his home in Barataria into Port of Spain to join the band, and they didn't even send up a dudup to bring us in, he complains. Fascinatorss Looking To Retrospect incorporated selections from previous portrayals but were edged out by the velvet-suited sailors and short-skirted majorettes of Starlifts Nursery Rhymes. Thus Cito decided to launch his own fancy sailor band in 1959. Little flowers and little fruits? scoffed Noble Alexis from Fascinators, but Citos idea was grander. His family were all craftsmen. Who couldnt paint could carve. During World War II when imports were severely restricted they operated a toy factory making dolls from papier mache. Whiting was used for smooth surfaces, like polyfiller. When dolls were once again imported, the Velasquez family began making and repairing statues which adorn churches throughout the region. Still, the design for Flowers and Fruits was contained in a single drawing for which Cito paid $1.50. I had to take it up by the panyard during practice, then carry it down to the mas camp, he recalls. And from that picture he built gigantic fruit headpieces of startling realism: melons to make your mouth water, tamarinds to cut your teeth, sliced paw paws with gri-gri for the black seeds. According to one of the several judges a cut watermelon looked so real he began feeling thirsty, one newspaper would report on Ash Wednesday.) A born winner, the band was near destroyed just before competition, and only managed to limp into fourth place. But in a way it embodied the human condition where defeat can be as heroic as victory, as in the nobility of Mannie Dookie rather than the achievement of Hasely Crawford.

And if George Baileys Relics Of Egypt won Band of the Year, Flowers and Fruit was resurrected three years later, on Independence Day 1962, to decorate Port of Spain from Duke Street to Independence Square. James's tableau of this band is 17 by four feet and contains 180 figures: about 60 fancy sailors carrying 30 flowers and 30 fruit and about 30 panmen. Then there are men pushing and pulling the racks; there are supporters of the band; ordinary sailors; majorettes; firemen; onlookers; strays from other bands; casual pedestrians and vendors. Each figure stands about five inches tall, children smaller and fancy sailors with their headpieces larger; and every one is minutely carved, every finger on every hand, every muff on every bare-headed sagga boy, all out of teak. Teak is the best for carving. Other woods are difficult when you cut against the grain, they flake easilyteak too, if you're crude, but it stands up better, says James. It was the first time fancy sailors abandoned plain white uniforms, and James's figures are painted in all their resplendent detail, every individual bearing his own combination of colours, stripes, stars, diamonds. It was the first time fancy sailors were colours other than white, recalls James. Cito wanted to use white velvet but the stores didn't have enoughpeople tried as far as San Fernando to get, and they complainedso he said buy any colour, Carnival is colour. Well, even those who'd got the white changed it. Nobody wanted to be left out of that extravagance. In Jamess recreation, not only the masqueraders but also the bystanders are individual in their detail: the print dress of the little girl whose brother is buying a press, the paunch on the Three Card hustler, the pedal-pushers on the woman hugging a sailor, the ubiquitous white T-shirts. More important than detail, however, is the movement in the figures, the tension in their immobility, which emerges from the play of muscles against the force of gravitythe arch of an instep, the pivot of a shoulder. The pan pushers strain at the racks; a sailor leans against a tree; the snowball seller reaches forward, arm outstretched, to collect his money. Charlie Chaplin alone stands cross-legged with an unnatural stiffness, because such was the style of the original character. A majorette's shoe has fallen off, it rests on the pavement. Balancing on one foot, she is slightly stooped, reaching to pick it up. A woman at the exhibition see that and say, look she shoe drop off, and try to put it back on, says James with a sigh. Some people just have no imagination. Such people would miss everything, because imagination is whats required to see the genius of Jamess epic masterpiecea hybrid midway between sculpture and mural, reminiscent of Pieter Bruegels boisterous peasant fiestas. The Day Of Glory is not merely a realistic tableau about a particular band; rather, in its static inner harmony it mediates between the eternal, like all great works of plastic art, and the ephemeral. And this it does by focusing on a particular band at a precise momentthe instant before it was destroyed. Thus the tableaux directs the imagination inexorably towards the as yet unsuspected future. In the steelband clash which will take place on Charlotte Street in front the Colonial Hospital, and will destroy Flowers and Fruits, 37 panmen will be injured. Ambulances will be used to carry panmen from San Juan back home. Cito's band will lose five floats, most of its headpieces, and many pans will be destroyed. As yet in Jamess tableau, none of this has happened, though. Only one San Juan All Stars man is throwing a bottle, while another flees from a Desperadoes man. Only the

bands flagman is off balance. Nothing else even hints at the unfolding debacle which nevertheless colours everything. It is a hot afternoon of February 10, 1959, around 2.30: Carnival Tuesday. Crawling up Charlotte Street are the Desperadoes, playing Noahs Ark. The band is large, so much so that at the back you can't tell it's Desperadoes. Lower down the street are Ebonites, Destination Tokyo and, behind them all but moving rapidly, Battle Cry portrayed by San Juan All Stars with Lord Blakie, who sang after a steelband clash years ago never me again/to jump up in a steelband in Port of Spain, is flying their flag. And today they have a tank full of bottles, cutlasses, truncheons, bolts. Cutting in from Gordon Street is Starlifts Greatest Show On Earth, and emerging from New Street is Flowers and Fruits. Behind them is the small St James band Crossroads. Citos masqueraders have tramped all the way from Barataria: huge bouquets of flowers, a cornucopia of fruits, and the most colourful sailors, firemen and majorettes, whisking away the supporters from Fascinators camp. Their music is Lord Carusos Run the Gunslingers, and their steelband is Rhapsody. Formerly, Cito captained Black Swan steelband and, after that he played for Corregidores, but this year Corregidores are already portraying Alphabet, so Cito has Rhapsody from First Street jamming for Flowers and Fruits. One man from Alphabet, portraying M for Mango, has broken off his M to join Cito's band. Downtown, Flowers and Fruit was a sensation, the crowd jostled to see them. Although they number no more than 200, their headpieces spread them out. Up Henry Street they chipped, across New Street and now, in James's sculpture, they are halfway into Charlotte Street. With the band is a Midnight Robber; at the back a Jab Jab cracks his whip. Also theres an Indian possibly looking for his tribe, suggests Jamesand a police-and-fowl-thief character. San Juan All Stars, wearing green fatigues and red wind-breakers, have already smashed through Irwin MacWilliams and is barging up Charlotte Street. Destination Tokyo has sent Ebonites into Belmont out of harms way, and has opened up to let San Juan All Stars pass through, overtake Flowers and Fruits and meet Desperadoes. Then Destination Tokyo closes ranks. People are as yet unconcerned; things are still normal, as far as Carnival can be normal, in that split second. An onlooker lights a cigarette, cupping the flame in his hands. One peddler is selling roast corn and another. A Windmill vendor looks at the band. An all-white sailor from another band leans with one hand against a tree and appears to take a leak, although, having drunk too much, he's actually pouring away a beer. In the poignancy of the moment, its doomed innocence, the fancy sailors are portraying their mas and dancing their elaborate choreography; Rhapsody is playing their music. The first section was the steelband. If I bringing out a band I must have music, says James. Then ideas came. It was similar to the steelbandyou do something without ever knowing where it will reach. In beginning with the steelband, already James's immanent humour had begun to emerge: unseen by everyone but a little boy in short pants, a rack has run over a struggling man's foot. And James amplified this, because even normal Carnival isn't just gay abandon: a sweet and soft drink vendor is picking at a sore on her leg. A pickpocket is plying his trade on an unsuspecting pedestrian, and a policeman has spotted him. He will never be caught, however, because already a San Juan All Stars soldier is throwing a bottle. A shepherd from Noahs Ark with his crook is chasing another soldier

from Battle Cry. The flagman for Flowers and Fruits, one leg askance, is about to fall. One of the most infamous steelband clashes has begun.

RETURN OF THE MUFFMAN

Its a mark of his stature that when Pan Trinbago North Zone passed around a hat last Saturday to build Anthony Williams a soundproof workroom, nearly $1,500 was collected. And yet this is but a drop, because the fund has a target of $90,000, a fitting tribute to the man who is perhaps the greatest all-round panman ever. After all, its Tony Muffman Williamss Fourths and Fifths arrangement of notes which has become the standard design on most pans. It was also he who created the modern steelband ensemble by putting pans on wheels. And in addition to his seminal technical innovations, he was also one of the greatest arrangers when he worked with North Stars, the band he captained for 20 years. And still that doesnt exhaust his contribution to the steelband movement. Born in 1931, he grew up in the same spot on Nepaul Street, St James, where he now lives. But it was up in Kandahar, north of the Western Main Road, that Williams first heard pan and it was there he took root and blossomed as a steelband man. Towards the end of the war he tramped around Bombay Street with an unnamed steelband of five or six boys, joining up with Harlem Nightingales in Guthrie Street for that first 1946 Carnival, moving on that same year to Nob Hill and then Sonny Roachs Sun Valleywinners of the first island-wide steelband competition. Already Williamss innovativeness was apparent, and already it was overlooked. When the war was over the Americans had a lot of drums that they dumped down Mucurapo, so I went there with a friend and we rolled out two drums and we started to tune those drums, but Nightingale didnt want them, recalls Williams. They found that they were too large, heavy, because they were accustomed to the small ping pong--they used to hold it up in one hand and play Mary had a Little Lamb and some simple calypsoes. Within two or three years everyone was using oil drums for their ping pongs, but Williams had moved ahead by inventing the tenor boom. By then hed left Sun Valley for the breakaway Northern Stars led by Roy Harper, and was the youngest member of the famous Trinidad All Stars Percussion Orchestra (Taspo). I introduced the oil drum to the tenor boom because it had a biscuit drum there, he explains. The biscuit drum was too thin and it used to sound like galvanise. All of the Taspo youths were tuners in addition to being virtuoso players: Sonny Roach, Ellie Mannette, Spree Simon, Dudley Smith, Boots Davidson, Andrew De La Bastide, Belgrave Bonaparte, Theo Stephens, Patsy Haynes, Sterling Betancourt. And only fournot including Williamswere official tuners for the band. In those days, and for long after, Ellie Mannette from Invaders tuned the sweetest pans by far. But it was Tony who discovered how to put the octave within a note so that when you hit it what you hear is really a harmony. An octave of a note, you see, is the same note but higher: a man and a woman, for instance, naturally sing an octave apart. In Taspo I was tuning a tenor boom...I was working on two Cs, a middle-C and the octave C fit below, he recalls of whats now standard practice for all tuners. I heard the sound of the octave C in the lower Cit produced a brilliance in tone that was

different, so I realise the octave must be inside the note for it to sound true and clear. I told the members in Taspo about itnobody really said anything about it. Although they had long known that you didnt place any note next to any other note, different tuners in those days had different stylings. For every note on the outside circle, Williams was placing its octave on the inside circle. He didnt stop there, though, but pushed the logic of his discovery to its conclusion. The ping pong had developed from a tenor kittle beat that was a major chord So, Do, Me he explains. That is C, F, A, so I counted the semitones from C to F and found six. I counted from F to A and found it was five, so I put B flat there and kept skipping six semitones all the way around. Without knowing it I had discovered the cycle of fifths. Six semitones equal four tones; eight semitones equal five tones. Describing this innovation as ingenious, Swedish physicist Ulf Kronman, author of Steel Pan Tuning, concludes: In this way the harmonics of the octave, the fifth and the fourth, will surround each note and help up the harmonic spectrum of the tone. Taspo returned from England in 1952 and the following year Roy Harper left North Stars. Surprisingly, in light of his subsequent accomplishments, Williams tried to avoid leading the band. I didnt want to take it over because I used to see the hard work Roy had, he admits. Whenever we had to play out, Roy still in his old clothes. When we dressed, come to play, Roy still there pounding pan, blending panI didnt want that kind of hard work, I wanted to be able to go and play and just be a performer. The band prevailed and Williams became captain, arranger and tuner for North Starsthe vehicle for both his apotheosis and his downfall. Still, he continued experimenting, trying to put on the road the beautiful orchestration of the Taspo stage side. The stage side had developed chromatically, (conductor) Griffith introduced the chromatic (scale) to steelband in Taspo, he made all the pans chromatic, says Williams. But the road band wasnt chromatic because they couldnt bring a bass, three drums, to bring a chromatic pan. I wanted to bring the chromatic steelband on the road so I started with the bass and put wheels onto the drums. If the Fifties was his decade of invention, the Sixties crowned him as a captain and arranger, and his band went on to win the Festival in 1962, Panorama in 1963 and 1964, Festival again in 1966. But perhaps North Stars great moment was in 1969 when they held its famous Ivory and Steel concert with world-renowned concert pianist Winnifred Atwell. It was the decade of the Seventies which laid Williams low, starting with the collapse of the band. Someone had been sabotaging it, mashing up the pans and the drums, so I resigned, he says. Thirteen of the bands twenty stage-side players left for the UK and Williams wrote Pan American World Airways cancelling their 15-year sponsorship contract: There is a saying that all good things must come to an end. I think the time has come for Pan Am North Stars to disband immediately and terminate our contract. And fate had more in store for him. The following year the police stopped the greatest tuner from practising his craft at his home in Nepaul Street because it was creating a nuisance! He began tuning for Valley Harps at the Princes Building, all the while experimenting with a larger, 29-inch pan hed made himself of sheet steel. In 1979 the Princes Building was destroyed in a fire and with it went Williamss experimental 36-note pans on which hed tuned 30 notes already. And the great man

succumbed to what some have termed pan tabanca, a mental breakdown from which he is yet to recover. We hope that making him comfortable, building a room to do his research and tuning, would help bring him back, says Keith Simpson, Pan Trinbago North Zone Treasurer. After all, he was the ultimate panman and he still has a lot to offer.

A SOFT TOUCH ON THE IRON

Once again the Pan Ramajay competition, which starts next weekend, will break new ground. This time it isn't in the nature of the competition, however, nor its venue; rather, it's in the bands, in particular one bandthe all-female In Focus, the first female band to enter the competition. We wanted to make a statement to the steelband world that women can play good pan too, but differently, explains leader of In Focus, Alison Dyer. Women have a different touch, softer and smoother, more elegant. In Focus isnt the first female steelband, though. There were Trendsetters and the National Secretaries Association Vibrations in which In Focus player Jennifer Cape was a member. We dont play as aggressively, says Cape. Not that women in pan are new. Gemma Worrell played for Desperadoes and Savoys in the Sixties. Before her Norma Callendar played ping pong with Hill 60. And before them both was Daisy James w ho began in 1944 when at six years old she saw her brother Fitzroy with a pan. Both brothers Ancil Sonny James and Fitzroy Gaga James were founding members of Casablanca and when Gaga brought this small, hand-held instrument home, Daisy was enthralled. I stood watching him play and when he went out I tried it, she recalls. She had to dodge her mother to play but big brother Sonny knew and one day, without their mother knowing, he took her to the panyard where to her great surprise she saw some white people, probably tourists, and other panmen such as Art de Couteau and Patsy Haynes. She'd never known there was such a thing as a steelband, that the instrument her brother had brought home was meant to be played in an ensemble. Sonny told her to play and she did, but when the rest of the band fell inpan in those days just repeated simple rhythmic counter-melodiesDaisy froze. I was amazed and shocked, she says. Sonny said, No, continue playingthe band answering you. The tourists gave her money, which her brother appropriated. And then she returned home before her mother discovered where she'd gone, beginning a hide-andseek she'd play for many years to avoid blows with broomstick or pot spoon. Even when the more peaceable players broke away from Casablanca after a riot with Rising Sun, and formed City Syncopaters under the James's house in Quarry Street, the band was out of bounds for Daisy. A school principal had refused to admit her younger sister to enter the school on account of her brothers Sonny and Fitzroy being panmen, so what would have happened if it was known that Daisy played too? The band would be in the road where I couldnt go, and I had to just sit on the steps with my ping pong and try to follow what they were playing. She also played with the short-lived Starlighters, but that band collapsed after some Desperadoes men stole their pans. The threat of her mother's wrath continued

unabated until 1956 when the People's National Movement was led to power by Dr Eric Williams. Daisy was in a social group called Hilltoppers that used to hold parties and organise concerts and they'd planned a show which the Education Minister John Donaldson Snr was to open with a speech. He was late, the crowd started to become rowdy, and the organiser called on Daisy who was in the audience with her parents to entertain the crowd. I improvised 'Somewhere over the rainbow' and got a standing ovation and Donaldson afterwards thanked me, she recalls. After that my mother allowed me to play. The tradition of Daisy James lives on in the In Focus pannists who all play for conventional bands as well. This tradition comprised just a few isolated women in the 1950s and 1960s, and increased dramatically in the 1970s with the newly-formed UWI Birdsong leading the way. It was then that Scrunter felt prompted to sing Woman on the Bass. But there's another more exclusively female tradition which began in 1951 when the irrepressible Hazel Henley got together with Pat Maurice and other friends to start Girl Pat: the first all-female steelband. Like many middle-class women in those days, and like many members of In Focus today, Henley and Maurice had piano lessons. Whereas Maurice, the daughter of a judge, was a dancer with Beryl McBurnies Little Carib, however, Henley as a child had been born in the US where she developed rickets and didn't walk until she was six and visited her mother's homeland, St Vincent. The Caribbean sun more than healed her and one day in her jubilation at becoming mobile, she shamed her staunch Anglican family by showing them how she could wine to a passing Salvation Army band. All Henley's aunts were musical and sang in the church choir and Henley was given classical piano lessons. She too began to sing in the Trinity choir and became a teacher in St Agnes primary school. But she preferred to jam calypso and began playing piano at the Little Carib where Maurice danced and the Invaders played pan. And in August 1951, at the start of the school vacation, she suggested to Maurice, Let we beat pan, na. You think we could do it? queried her friend. Yes, reassured Henley: It's just like piano and have the same four parts. So they went by Invaders to buy a nine dollar Ellie Mannette pan, and taking it home they wrote the notes in chalk and began teaching themselves to play. Soon others fell intwo of the three Forde sisters, Elie Robertson, Jean Ewing, Irma Waldron, Celia Didier, Joan Rolston, Norma Braithwaite. And the band was formed in the Henley living room because, after all, decent girls werent allowed to play in a panyard. Robertson, for instance, had brothers in Dem Boys from Belmont but she couldnt play there. We were all friends, their parents knew mine, so it was all right, explains Henley. We played softly, we were in my housenot a panyardand we couldn't go in the road because the pans were too heavy. Even so the more snooty classically-trained girls were disdainful, and when Henley invited Lennox Pierres sisters to join they turned up their noses. Indeed, the idea of decent girls forming a steelband was so offensive to some that a detective was sent to check it out. Of course nothing came of itwhat could? And soon the band began to play at parties, at the US base in Chaguaramas, in the Little Carib. They visited Guyana in 1951the same year the band was formedand Jamaica in 1952. And they would have travelled more if the Education Department hadnt refused to allow them the leave.

They also accompanied La Petite Musical once, but when Henley attempted to show the choir's director Olive Walke how to play pan she found the older woman unteachable. She was too stiff, recalls Henley. Despite being house bound, the band enjoyed a close relationship with the Invaders. One of the Woodbrook bands star tenors, Kelvin Dove, tuned Girl Pats pans. And at Carnival the Mannette band passed by the Henley house on Picton Street to take the girls out for JOuvert. Come in the band, they cyar do you nothing, the Invaders would call out to the girls, but they left them by Richmond Street just in case. Being musically trained Henley was often asked for help in arranging some tune or other, but there was a slight resentment too. Once at a Roxy competition where they played a castillian, one Casablanca man swore, I could stand competition from another man but not from a woman. Even their long-time friend and supporter Ellie Mannette, who used to drop by the house to hear Girl Pat practising, got resentful of Henleys greater musical knowledge. One afternoon he heard them playing an Invaders tune and getting right a note hed been having trouble with. Like you playing my music, shouted Mannette from the road outside. Hazel what's that note? Play it again. It was a minor note and Henley played it again but she didnt say what it was, thinking he would know about those things. Mannette, perhaps feeling insulted at her not responding, left and never returned. Soon after, in March 1953, Henleys mother died. The tragedy happened around the same time the girls were beginning to pair off with boyfriends and husbands, and Girl Pat found itself unable to continue. If two or three left it hurt us, says Henley, because we couldnt be a band without all of the others.

THE PIONEER WHO SOUGHT MUSICAL REVENGE

The steelband movement, particularly in Arima, lost one of its firmest pillars on June 26 when Frank Bernard died of heart failure at age 63. Known affectionately as Skip Bernard, the fourth of eleven children, captained Melodians Steel Orchestra, Arimas oldest surviving band, from 1961 until his death. He didnt enter the pan world with Melodians, which was formed in 1953, however, but with an earlier band called Atomic. Atomic was at first just a group of fellas sitting under a mango tree on Cocorite Street, beating tar drums on rollers, recalled Skip in an interview last year. The fellas used to put the drum on their head and another one would beat it. Its Boysie Watson who see them and say he go bring pans for them. He went up in the American base and bring back some small drums and they ended up making kettle drums and du dups. Watson drove trucks for the Americans and used to tell the youths when to come and steal drums from the rubbish dump on the US base at Wallerfield. It still required dodging the servicemen, so they also lifted drums from neighbours yards. Skip wasnt in Atomic in the days during and immediately after World War II, but Vernon Papite Andrews used to hang around the yard then situated by where Melodians panyard is today. I was a little fella about fourteen, so Reds Vernon had to ask my mother if I could play with the band, says Papite.

The band had members like Rugged Tommy, a badjohn who played bugle for them; Knolly Quasimodo James, who cuffed the biscuit drum bass with his bare fist until it burst; and Red Vernon who was distinguished from Black Vernon Papite by his mixed blood and who tuned the pans. And they played for both Carnival and Christmas, tramping with their heavy pans as far as Tamana, Cumuto, Valencia and Sangre Grande to serenade. When we leave for parang we didnt come back for a week, recalls Papite. People used to say when we come back we tired and could only give them the remnants. There was one other band at the time in Arima, the more belligerent Vigilantes, but they limed up by the Dial, so it was to Atomic that Skip gravitated after the war to cuff biscuit drum, and even so it was only after his younger brother Charles Charlo Bernard had joined. I was about six years old and Id pass by River Road and see Reds Vernon tuning pans, says Charlo. I start collecting condensed milk tins and I pounded them until I got noteswe didnt know about sharps, just the scale they taught us in school: do, ra, me, fa. Reds see me playing little tune on the condensed milk tins and ask my father for me to come practice. They used to lift me on a box to play panping pong. Charlo was at Arima Boys Government school and when his teachers saw him in Atomic they invited him to play in the school concert. My class always used to come first, he says. When the band went beating in town Yankees used to be throwing money all around me, coins all in my pan. My old man used to take it up and push it in my pocket. Alas, Atomic eventually split. It was Christmas time when Atomic mash up some fellas went one way and parang, another set went another way, says Mikey Bernard. Some fellas take the rest so we raised a band by Aleongs Bakery. It didn't last but out of its brief life Bakery Boys and another band called Harlem Boys gave birth to the Melodians in 1953 in Bellamy Lane, next door to the Bernards house, in a bamboo and cocorite roof tent, under the expert guidance of Ivan Skull Henry who, like Frank Bernard, was honoured in recent years by the Arima Borough Council. Born in 1921, Skull was a veteran of several bands, starting in the Thirties with his brief involvement with Alexanders Ragtime Band. Then he moved to Mission to Moscow (which later became Savoys) for VJ Day, 1945. He got into a fight in a fete, however, cut a few people and was fined $180 by a magistrate. I couldnt find the money so I broke warrant and went La Brea to work at the Pitch Lake, he explains. In La Brea he played bass in the Bonaparte brothers Southern Symphony, one of the great pioneer bands, and even captained the band while Belgrave Bonaparte went to England with the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo), and continued after Bonaparte, on returning home, got into a fight and spent eighteen months in jail. The police had tracked Skull to La Brea, however, so he returned to Port of Spain to pay the fine and play with Trinidad All Stars. I only stayed one month therelife was too hard, he says of that period. To live in Port of Spain you have to have a good job, be a good thief or a good gambler. Years before Skull had hidden out in Arima, again breaking warrant for a gambling fine of $15, so when he decided he couldn't take the hard life in Port of Spain he fled to Malabar where for two years he brought a small unnamed steelband and a Ju Ju mas.

Now, pan had never been as developed in the east as in Port of Spain. Atomic had to enter a competition in Monarch cinema, Tunapuna, to realise that Invaders were wrapping their sticks with rubber. And when Skull landed up by Green Street, Arima, he became involved in modernising Crossfire, a country band still cuffing biscuit tins when town bands were already playing three-bass. Then he was invited to lead a rejuvenated Baker Boys. That band was in the process of splitting, some players trying to pull it into Caspar, another new Arima band, and the Bernard brothers and the four Brown brothers said no. They brought the pans down to Bellamy Street where Frank Bernard and Cyril Snatcher Guy constructed a tent. Skull donated to the new band a name he'd seen in a magazine and had carried in his head since his Southern Symphony days, lending it briefly to a La Brea band which had barely lasted two months: Melodians. After I modernise Crossfire and tune three-bass, cellos, guitars, seconds, tenorsthey was a set of coloured boys and they decide they didn't want any black people in the band, says Skull. I and four others left, and I came with revenge in my heart and raised Melodians Steel Orchestra.

SWEDES HAVE A GO AT TUNING

No one would ask a violinist how he made such lovely music from that wooden box. But people think pan is just an old iron drum, says Ulf Kronman, the Swedish author of Steel Pan Tuning: A Handbook for Steel Pan Making and Tuning. The book is intended to increase peoples respect for the instrument. How far weve come from the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) days when that band went to the Festival of Britain with instruments which were deliberately left unpainted and rusty the better to surprise the Europeans at the sounds they produced. Published by the National Music Museum in Sweden, whose Director Kirster Malm set up Trinidads folklore archives in the early 1970s, Kronmans Steel Pan Tuning is something of a grab bag: part practical tutor, part description, part theory, part speculation. A tuner would laugh at what Ive written, hed say I dont work like that, admits Kronman. But to explain it I had to separate things he would do simultaneously. Indeed, the author admits that no one could read his book and with that alone learn what takes five to ten years to master in Trinidad. People shouldnt worry that Ive publicized the secret so the Japanese can take it, he says. That would be like reading the rules of cricket at home and expecting to become Vivian Richards. Indeed, Kronman has not been able to tune very good pans himself because the craft is largely intuitive and can only be learnt with long years of practice, aided by discussions with more experienced tuners. The first practical section of the book describes choosing the drum, sinking it, marking the notes, backing and grooving them, levelling the drum, cutting the skirt, tempering it in fire, tuning it, boring holes for hanging it, fine tuning, finishing, blending, and making sticks. And though it cannot teach you to tune a pan, the book brings out the remarkable achievements of those men who invented the craft of tuning which is nothing less than the making of the steel pan.

Sinking the face of the drum with a hammer or a shot put, marking and pounding up sections to form convex bulges (backing) are technical jobs that stretch and change the molecular structure of the steel. This is why different drums with different kinds of steel require different treatment. Pans with higher notes require deeper sinking than those with lower notes: a modern tenor goes nine inches down where as a bass no more than five inches. The notes vary in size, the higher the tone the smaller the note. And none of this admits precise measurement. Pounding the notes up into soft bulges creates tensions within the steel and enables it to vibrate. Then outlining the notes with a groove of softened metal allows the vibrations of one note to be separated as much as possible from another. The hammering during the sinking and the backing has made the surface of the pan stretched and soft, explains Kronman in his book. The grooving and the backing has also forced local tensions into the metal. Before tuning the pan has to be hardened and the tensions have to be removed. This is done by first heating the metal and then cooling it. After this tempering comes the task easiest to describe and most difficult to do: actual tuningcoarse tuning to soften the metal and put in the right pitch; fine tuning, when pitch and timbre are adjusted; and blending when the pans, having been chromed, are tuned and blended with the sound of the other instruments of the band. And yet although Steel Pan Tuning cant teach this, it still manages to effectively convey the complexity of what two heroic generations of Trinidadian tuners have wroughtmen such as Ellie Mannette of Invaders, Tony Williams of North Stars, Neville Jules of All Stars, Lincoln Noel and Alan Gervais and many others who contributed to the invention of the instrument, the expansion of its range, clarifying its sound, changing its timbre, making it easier to tune, more durable and louder. These men through a process of obsessive research and experimentation and brilliant intuition produced an instrument whose ability to generate musical notes still defeats scientists. The reason has to do with what is known as partial overtones. Every note you hear on an instrument, say a guitar, is composed of the fundamental notetake a C tone for exampleand several other different overtones known as partials. The partials are what allow us to identify the particular timbre of the notethat is, what kind of instrument is playing the Cand its brightness. If you tune a guitar you tighten or slacken the string and in so doing you adjust the tone, say to C. And all the rest, the dozen-odd partial overtones, come automatically and indeed can be explained by a simple mathematical formula. But the pan note has to be tuned to get separately the fundamental note and its partials. As a matter of fact, the discovery that this could be done was the accomplishment of specific tunersmainly Tony Williams and Bertie Marshall. How it is actually done has to be rediscovered anew by every tuner on every pan. The tuner taps this part of the note, taps that part, trying to get a particular sound, moving the fundamental, shifting first the octave partial (that is the same note only higher, the way a man and a woman could sing the same note but an octave apart), then the various overtones, moving one up, pulling another down, until they marry at the right spot. Thats why every note on every pan is an experiment, says Gerard Clark, Starlifts tuner. Its also why the world of tuners is full of anecdotes of how difficult notes were tuned in the zaniest ways, of the tuner who lost his temper after days of failure with a note and flung his hammer at the pan only for it to hit the note and knock it right in tune.

If the octave partial is five Hertz off, all the other partials become distorted, explains Kronman. The overtones dont support one another and the pan sounds like old time bands. The importance of partial overtones is indicated by the fact that small speakers such as those in telephones and portable transistor radios, cannot give you low fundamental notes, but because they do produce the appropriate overtones you hear the correct soundeven though its main part doesnt exist. The fundamental is the outline, the partials the chiaroscuro. The greatness of Tony Williams is, first, to discover the octave in the note, and then to design the Spider Web pan which has become more or less the Fourths and Fifths tenor pan design (modified by Lincoln Noel) used by all tuners today. This arrangement of notes has made tuning easier by making adjacent notes and their partials support one another. Previously, notes were placed in arbitrary order. An early primer on pan making, written by Highlanders leader Kim Loy Wong, recommended that the tuner trade the notes place with another...if for example you cannot get middle C on the Ping Pong to go below D, then let it stay D and see if you can get D two sections to the right of it. And yet tuning is still an art. What might work for one tuner wouldnt with another. How one man might tickle the fundamental towards its octave (the latter is usually tuned first) is unique, and the next time around even the same tuner might do it quite differently. Tuners can hardly have the time to sink the drums, which is also a physically demanding task, but every tuner wishes he could as knowing how that was done might be the clue to how he could simultaneously stalk the note and its elusive partials. The long and continuing travail of pan makers is to master that art, and part of it is to sharpen the ear sufficiently that it could distinguish the components of a notethe fundamental and its partials. Since the late 1950s when Physics professor Roger Kade at UWI, Mona, unsuccessfully attempted to understand the acoustics of pan notes, science has been baffled. CARIRI began large experimental project on methods of sinking the pan face, but it was discontinued and its interim results are unpublished And here is the heart of Kronmans bookthe acoustical theory of the most significant acoustic instrument of this century. Kronmans still incomplete research follows two main clues. First is the fact that the pan note moves indifferent ways, vibrates along different waves, to produce the fundamental and its harmonics. With a stringed instrument its simple: the string vibrates to look like a wobbly snake slithering. With a drum its also simple, though less so because even if the drum face moves in crossing waves, the partial overtones are not harmonichence you cannot play a clear melody on a drum. (The face of the tabla is modified by a paste put on the centre so it can make simple notes whose overtones support the fundamental.) The pan note is much more complex. It moves along several different planes, like a boat which is rocking up and down, but also rocking left and right, and is additionally rising and falling. So if you put your finger on the centre of the note and tap it, you silence the fundamental and what youll hear is a higher pitch of the same noteits octave overtone. If, of course, its well-tuned. The second clue that Kronman pursued is the fact that the overtones follow a millisecond after the fundamental and, most strangely, ring after it. This is peculiar (although some Chinese gongs also do that) because the partials , being higher and vibrating faster, and thus dissipating more energy, generally fade away more rapidly.

Here Kronman conjectures that the stick holds the higher frequency partials quiet for the millisecond of contactwhich accords with what every tuner knows, that the wrapping of the rubber on the stick can make an important difference in how a note sounds. The physics is still incomplete. Kronman funds his own research, working one day per week at Swedens Royal Institute of Technology, observing whenever possible Rudy Two Lef Smith at work. He visits Trinidad every two years since 1979 when he first heard pan. And while hes doing that, down here tuners are still innovating, developing the instrument that has once again poured a vast river of music into the Grand and North Stands. And maybe Merchant can feel confident that pan is in a little less danger.

THE MAN FOR WHOM THE STEEL SINGS

Deep in West Virginia Universitys labyrinthine Creative Arts Centre, down two or three floors, you can oftimes hear a muffled clanging in the furthest, darkest corridor. It seeps out of a workroom thats well lit inside but crowded with racks of shiny steel drums. Shelves are covered with short-handled hammers, electronic equipment, lights. Behind glass doors are two sound-proofed cubicles where the noisiest hammering is done, even though everyone in the room wears ear plugs. This notes floating, its too wide, said Elliot Mannette as he tapped the glistening face of the steelpan before him. A rich tone rose lazily from the chrome, lingered in the air for a few moments, and then melted away. This is where some of the most beautiful steelpans in the world are made by the most famous panmaker in the world: Ellie Mannette, the Antonio Stradivari of steel. Mannette was giving the finishing touches to his latest invention, the Quaduet hed designed for virtuoso player Andy Narell: four pans which in all have a range of 46 notes. It was to be unveiled in a few hours time at Mannette's Golden Anniversary Celebration in July. Fifty years ago, he put fourteen notes on a sawed-off 55-gallon oil drum and thus initiated the dimensions of the most significant acoustic instrument invented this centurythe steelpan. It was a natural creativity which was responsible for that seminal act a half century ago, but it was also spurred by a clash between his band, the Woodbrook Invaders, and a notoriously violent rival steelband called Destination Tokyo, at Carnival. Mannette was already known for innovation. Born on November 17, 1927, he was the oldest of the three Mannette brothers Ellie, Ossie and Birdie, and had been knocking on old paint tins and dustbins since he saw the prototype steelband Alexanders Ragtime Band in the late-1930s. He encouraged his friends too, boys like Francis Peacock Wickham and Kelvin Dove, and the gang called themselves Oval Boys because they lived across the road from the Oval cricket club. In 1941 he first sank the face of the rudimentary pan into its modern concave shape when others hammered it upwards into a convex bulge. Then in 1944 he started the technique wrapping strips of rubbercut from a bicycle inner tubearound his pan sticks, when other boys were using broom handles whittled down and pounded soft. Already his pans had a reputation for their range of notes and their tone. So on that Carnival Monday in 1946, the first Carnival after the World War II hiatus, he was

playing a state-of-the-art ping pong. It was made from a 35-gallon olive oil tin can and called the Barracuda. (In those early days of rapid innovation outstanding pans were named.) So there he was: playing his Barracuda, tramping around Port of Spain with his young friends in the band now called the Invaders when, as they swung from Charlotte Street into Duke Street, they confronted another band led with a big T flag. It was the feared Destination Tokyo from the east Port of Spain ghetto. They played Ju Ju Warriors; we didnt play no maswe was just in town the night, recalls Francis Wickham back in Trinidad. Usually we never used to go in town; we used to go around Woodbrook alone. That year we went down in town and that was itthey eh want we in town, they mash we up flat...That time we was little, we didnt know nothing about no cutting up man. So we had to run. Mannette shouted, Hold on to your pans. He wasnt able to hold on to his, though, and Tokyo men triumphantly carried off the Barracuda as a trophy back to the John John ghetto where they strung it from a tree. Come and get it, they dared Mannette. Within a few short years Mannettes Invaders would develop the fighting ability to take on Tokyo or any other band in the country. They would maintain a five-year feud against Casablancaone of the top steelbands to major in both war and music. But before that, back in 1946, Mannette and his friends thought it wiser to allow Tokyo to keep the Barracuda. Out of that frustration I became determined to build another instrument bigger and badder than the last, Mannette recently told Kaethe George, Project Manager of the University Tuning Project. In my fathers backyard I spied a rusting 55-gallon barrel... With hindsight its an obvious step: the larger drum would have room for more notes; its harder steel would hold them longer. But in 1946 it took a radical leap of the imagination. How could such thick steel be tuned? Besides, Mannettes friends protested, the ping pongs made from 35-gallon drums were held aloft in one hand and played with the other handyou cant do that with a pan made from a larger, heavier 55-gallon drum. Mannette was one of the country's few scholarship students, but had dropped out of high school and secretly apprenticed as a machinist in an iron foundry. There hed learnt about the work-hardening and tempering and moving of steel. He saw the way bench fitters did things to steel with hammers. And his intuitive feel for the material was sharpened, until it responded like a lover and his pans sang more sweetly than anyone elses. So he pursued his idea of tuning the 55-gallon oil drum, working by himself on it under the bleachers in the Oval, until he put 14 notes and was able to play Brahmss Lullaby. And the world of culture gently shifted orbit. Soon the Invaders were famous for Mannettes sweet pan and when the great Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) was selected in 1951 to go to the Festival of Britain, Mannette was the bands designated tuner, even though ever member of that team of stars could tune. This genius was also a man of action, though. Wearing the cork hat which still sits in the Invaders bandroom today, Mannette led the Invaders into battle against all east Port of Spain rivals which sought to keep the west out of town. A master of all the instruments in a steelband, he sometimes played the mid-range cellos because he found it easiest to control the entire band from there. Other times he syncopated on the brake hub iron. But wherever he was he created the most powerful steelband to this day for both music on the streets and for warfare.

His note placement on the tenor pan with a large F# in the centre was the first design copied by other tuners, and if at present Mannette tunes along Anthony Williamss Fourths and Fifths design, there are many who will swear today a Mannette instrument is still the sweetest. How unlikely, then, that he should have found a base in the tiny university community in the AppalachiansMorgantown, a quiet picture postcard town in West Virginia with few black people. But WVU has one of the strongest departments of percussion studies in the US, and its dean Philip Faini has loved pan since 1969 when he passed through Trinidad en route to Brazil, and heard a steelband. Two decades later, Faini got Mannette to visit the university to tune a set of pans. He asked Mannette if hed ever considered settling. I worked on our Provost, who was both a cellist and a physicist, recalls Faini. I said it is like bringing Edison here, we have a chance to do it. For his part, Mannette had trained the US Navy steelband back in 1957, and had visited Puerto Rico to tune their pans. And hed lived in the US since 1967, spending the last few years travelling from state to state holding workshops and tuning pans. But he was tired of the road. He wanted a more sedentary life to pass his art to a younger generation, and Morgantown seemed comfortable. So in 1992 he accepted Fainis offer to became WVU's Artist in Residence, teaching music students how to play, orchestrate and tune the steelpan. In the five decades since Mannette first tuned that 55-gallon drum, the making of steelpans has been developed into a highly complex craft that still puzzles acoustic physics. There are only a few dozen master craftsmen, almost all of them living in Trinidad. But the only master tuner formally teaching students in a classroom setting is Mannette. And for that he's had to invent a language with his students. We want to get a darker tone from itIll pop it up here and make it longer, he said. He didn't look up from the pan on which he was working. Pop it up a little bit and shoot for the G. This is the last stage of fine-tuning, when the notes are adjusted for their volume and timbre, their brightness. It is the most delicate stage in the process, the one where the tuner's aesthetic is manifest. The pan has been builtits face strenuously hammered into a smooth concavity, its notes marked off and bubbled up; the side of the drum has been cut to the required length and the whole thing tempered in a fire. Next, the notes are tuned to give off the tones of the chromatic scale, and the instrument is chromed or painted. Only then is the pan fine-tuned. Trinidadians call this stage blending, because its when the many pans in a steelband are blended together for the best orchestral effect. Simple? It takes almost a decade to become a tuner. Mannette's most senior apprentice, Alan Coyle, has studied under him for over three years and is now able to begin to learn tuningso far he's only mastered the building of pans. Every note you hear on an instrument, say a guitar, is composed of the fundamental notetake a C for exampleand several other different overtones known as partials. These partials are what allow us to identify the particular timbre of the note that is, what kind of instrument is playing the Cand its brightness. And theyre so important to how a note sounds that when some very small speakers cannot play very deep bass notes, they play the partials alone and your ear reconstructs the whole note so you can hear it.

You don't tune the dozen-odd partials of a guitar notethey come automatically when you tighten or slacken the string to adjust the fundamental. Indeed, they can be explained by a simple mathematical formula. But each pan note has to be tuned to get its fundamental and its partials separately. Anthony Williams and Bertie Marshall made this discovery in the Fifties although how it's actually done has to be rediscovered anew by every tuner on every pan. He taps this part of the note, taps that part, trying to get a particular sound, moving the fundamental, shifting first the octave partial (that is the same note only higher, the way a man and a woman can sing the same note but an octave apart). He shifts the various overtones, nudging one up, pulling another downuntil they marry at the right spot. Im trying to get a darker sound here. I created some rings on this outer C and now Im having a problem taking it off, said Mannette. He dislikes the bright, ringing sound characteristic of pans tuned in Trinidad, going instead for a mellower tone. Glancing up at a young blonde woman, an apprentice tuner, he continued: Pop this angle and maybe put a harmonicyes, and get a second octave. The tonic will go down and we'll see if we can get a C out of it. The young woman gave him a smile and squeezed his shoulders before returning to what she was doing. She give me a hug to perk me up, he says. But it can't work I'm too tired. But he goes on anyway, concentrating completely on the note he's blending but describing every step he takes for the benefit of whoever cares to listen. He explains that one has to discover the temperament of the steel in every individual drum to know which partials it can take. And you dont hit the fundamental note as you used to long time. You can hit around it and change everythingthe note begins to relate, the overtones play with each other, demonstrates the maestro. And when the overtones play with each other it sings more. He tapped it gently with the stick and indeed it did sing.

ERIC'S IMPOSSIBLE LOVE

It was probably the Invaders who introduced Dr Eric Williams to steelband in 1948. Despite his rigorously British education and the metropolitan culture he acquired at Oxford, Williams loved Trinidad and Tobagos arts from earlyperhaps hed inherited this from his father, an ardent Dame Lorraine performer. The familys entertainment was bounded by the Police Band Concert in the Botanic Gardens on Sunday afternoons, the only form of music, that is to say, apart from Carnival, the Trinidad fete par excellence, to which I was exposed, wrote Williams in his autobiography Inward Hunger. So shortly after he returned to Trinidad in June 1948 he attended the formal opening of the Little Carib Theatre. And playing there was the band from around the corner, Invaders. He was always sympathetic to our causehe offered to guide us politically and he did, recalls Beryl McBurnie. And once McBurnie had launched the Little Carib, Williams realised its significance. He told me I didnt know the value of the work I was

doing, which was true, she says. I did it because I loved it but if you see the records he had of music of various countries. He loved music and he backed the Little Carib all the time. Other close associates of the Little Carib included HOB Wooding, Bruce Procope and Albert Gomes. Williams and Carlton Comma and Albert Gomes were very friendly in the beginning, recalls McBurnie. Gomes had championed folk culture. He defended the Shouter Baptists and the steelband movement in and out of Parliament, in the press and on the streets, and Williams took the cue. Lecturing on idealism and youth he turned to the steelband: If you let this movement die, then you drive a nail in the coffin of our aspirations. But Williams was still a reticent man. He lived in Rapsey Street, Maraval and his personal contact with the steelband movement was almost certainly through the family to which hed quickly grown attachedthe Moyous of 42 Sackville Street. And by the late Forties young Rolf Moyou had got an old pan from Sack Mayers in Merry Makers the Sackville Street steelband. Williams married Rolf Moyous sister Soy in 1950, the same year Rolf became involved in Dixielandthe first steelband of middle-class white and Chinese college boys. And when Dixieland hit the road for the first time in 1951, it was from the Moyou yard in Sackville Street. In years to come Williams would develop close relationships with certain panmen, especially George Yeates and Rudolph Charles from Desperadoes. But he kept that link to the steelband movement through Rolf Moyou, appointing him campaign manager in 1971 when he wanted to woo the movement away from Black Power. Besides those personal contacts, Williams also had a more formal relationship with the organised steelband movement which followed a separate trajectory and began in 1955, when President of the Trinidad and Tobago Steelbands Association Nathaniel Crichlow invited him to a meeting at the Good Samaritan Hall, Duke Street. Williams was a well-known lecturer on politics and history. In 1950 hed written in the Guardian a 40-part series on West Indian history. Then in 1954 he launched a blistering attack on colonialism through a series of lectures at the public library, starting in September and running up to May 1955. It was around that month that Williams accepted Crichlows invitation to the Steelbands Association meeting, and despite pouring rain, he got there early. Kenrick Thomas, captain of Tacariguas Midland Syncopators, arrived shortly after with another band member. The three men stared at one another without exchanging a word. What struck me was his dress, which I didnt expect to see in a steelband meeting. He was wearing a crash suit, recalls Thomas who, despite having read Williams articles in the Guardian, had never seen him in the flesh. He was sitting there smoking profusely. He had dark glasses and this hearing aidfirst time I see a man with a hearing aid. I didnt say anything to him, he didnt say anything to me or my friend, but I kept looking at him. Eventually George Goddard and a handful of panmen arrived late, followed by a bustling Crichlow. Thomas asked who the man in the suit was. You dont know that man? snapped Crichlow without even breaking stride. You should know that man! Crichlow started the meeting immediately, introduced Dr Eric Williams, emphasising his academic qualifications and his status, explaining that Dr Williams had been invited to assist the Association in revising its rules and drafting a constitution.

Introducing Dr Williams, Crichlow mentioned that he himself wouldnt like the Association to get involved in politics. Although Williams was already gathering strength to storm the political stage, it wasnt public yet and the steelbandsmen were still more dazzled by his education than yoked to his political leadership. At that time I was so fascinated with looking at Williams I didnt associate him with politics, recalls Thomas. I was just thinking about him academically. Then Williams spoke. First, he lambasted the 15 or so panmen there for their lateness. His time was very important to him, he buffed the stunned gathering. Then he corrected Crichlow: politics is in everything, you breathe politics, you eat politics, everybody should be involved in politics. And he ended the session with an invitation to meet a sub-committee at his home in Cornelio Street, Woodbrook. Thomas was on that sub-committee so he returned to Port of Spain the following Sunday, making his way to the study annexed behind Dr Williamss newly-purchased house. Williams was wearing short white pants and a merino and he spoke to the panmen about their constitution and other things. He suggested they could earn money from pan abroad, and he turned to a Chinese youth sitting on the back steps of the house to talk about his experience abroad. Although Evelyn Moyou had died two years before, her family remained close to Williams. The youth on the steps was Rolf Moyou whose band Dixieland had just returned from Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Closing the meeting, Dr Williams invited the panmen to return next week and bring along a representative of the all-female steelband Girl Pat which hed heard about. That meeting was not to take place, though, because on the day Goddard made the mistake of bringing along two influential Invaders supporters: Bruce Procope and Lennox Pierre. Before they took their seats, Williams got annoyed and said a lot of hard words, recounts Thomas. We didnt have no discussion, the meeting just broke up. Today Procope hardly remembers the incident, but doesnt think Williamss irritation was aimed at him as much as at Pierre. Both men were in political parties Procope in the mildly nationalist Caribbean National Labour Party with Ray HamelSmith and Telford Georges; Pierre in the communist West Indian Independence Party with John Rojas. And Williams had his own plans for the steelband movement which didnt include other politicians. Dr Eric Williams the politician had shown his teeth. And although he enjoyed many years of mutual support with both the steelband movement and individual panmen, their relationship, its ups and downs, was to the end determined by politics. Williams launched the Special Works Program around the Desperadoes and Tokyo, he twisted businessmens arms to sponsor steelbands, he pumped money into the movement. Desperadoes captain George Yeates was given a job in Whitehall; his successor Rudolph Charles had greater access to Williams than some Cabinet ministers. So Williams felt betrayed when the Black Power movement demonstrated that panmen wanted more: he scuttled the National Association of Trinidad and Tobago Steelbands when he couldnt sideline its leader George Goddard, and he orchestrated the creation of Pan Trinbago. In the end, after the 1971 elections, he dumped the steelband like any other politician, sighs Moyou, his brother-in-law, one-time campaign manager and steelband adviser.

A FISH BAND
Tonight at the Steelband Festival preliminaries, a fixed pattern will be followed. Every bands tune of choice will most likely be a faithfully rendered classic with what Pat Bishop referred as a flowing melodythat is, she explained in the last Festival brochure, the listener had to be able to whistle a part of it easily. The piece will also be technically challenging or, Sticks must be flying. And, finally, it will conclude with a long and charismatic codaend with a crash and a bang. But it wasnt always so. Not in the decade beginning in 1952 when steelbands were simply part of the Music Festival, which was adjudicated by foreign musicians. The first Music Festival was organised by the Trinidad Music Association in 1948 and although several vocal and instrumental categories were adjudicated by a Barbadian musical expert, Gerald Hudson, but there was no steelband. One had been sent to him at the Queens Park Hotel, but he hadnt been impressed. By 1952, however, things were different. By then the watershed Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) had made steelbands fully chromatic, capable of playing every note from tenor to bassalto pans and tenor booms had been invented to fill the gaps. So the next step was unavoidable participation in the Music Festival. A few TMA middle-class members were wary of the panmen, but English-born Helen May Johnstone, the founder and main inspiration of the Music Association, appreciated grassroots culture and she overruled their objections. It was even suggested a piano accompany the ping pong soloists, perhaps because pans weren't considered instruments capable of standing on their own, but pans werent yet tuned to concert pitch and couldnt blend properly with other instruments. A compromise was made: the preliminaries to be handled by the Steelbands Association, which knew how to deal with the masses. Eleven ping pong soloists played one selection of any type of music. Twenty bands played two of either a calypso, a mambo, a rhumba or a classic, plus the test piece, at the Cocorite Youth Centre. Most chose a mambo and a classic. Both solo and ensemble finalists included dark horses. Soloist finalists included three Taspo membersDudley Smith from Rising Sun, Belgrave Bonaparte from Southern Symphony and Patsy Haynes from Casablanca. There were also Carl Greenidge from Kentuckians and the unknown Hilton Jarvis of Central Casanovas in Santa Cruz. The ensemble finalists to move into the TMA leg of the competition were North Stars, Southern Symphony, Chicago, Trinidad All Stars, Free French and the surprise selectionBoys Town. The finals were held on March 10 at the Globe cinema, which was packed with Stiff highbrows and noisy pan enthusiasts according to the Trinidad Guardian . The adjudicator was a Welshman, Dr Sydney Northcote, the professor of singing, harmony, counterpoint and competition at the Guildhall School of Music. Red Army or some band was outside looking for another band, recalls Monica Johnstone, Mays daughter-in-law. There were some scary moments. But the show went ahead, each band playing a folk song test piece and a tune of choice. The big guns blazed away with their heavy classics: Free French chose Handels Largo, Southern Symphony chose Strausss The Blue Danube and Trinidad All Stars chose The Dream of Olwin.

The pans were sweet; the beaters capable; the music rich and varied; and the audience appreciative (too audibly so), reported the Guardian. And when the Globe stopped ringing and the applause died down, Northcote announced the winners: ping pong soloist Dudley Smith from Rising Sunno surprise there. The Welshman had been pleasantly surprised by the sound of pans. When I first saw steel instruments I wondered what kind of music they would make, he said after the competition. I was astonished that they could make such mellow sounds. But the adjudicator was less than satisfied with the top bands. He buffed Free French, for instance, for their variations of Largo. Why change the music? he asked. And he criticised others for playing too fast. Anthony Williams, whose North Stars placed last with Come Back To Seranto, explains that, In those days we used to learn the melody by ear, mainly from the radio or a record, and then we would put anything we want in the harmony. And the band Northcote gave the first place to was Boys Town, the fish band from Point Cumana. Today, the memory still brings a tear to 67- year-old Clem Bellerand who founded the band, tuned their pans, arranged their music and led the unknown Boys Town to victory against the Goliaths of that first steelband festival 16 days after his first son was born, a victory which precipitated a weeks festivities in the tiny fishing village of Point Cumana. Steelband had begun in Point Cumana earlysince Alexanders Ragtime Band came to the St Peters Day in Carenage in 1939. But Boys Town was only launched in 1951 after Bellerand led the youngest players out of the village band, Stardust, because the older members were exploiting them. It was a year before the festival when he named the new band after the Mickey Rooney film The Men from Boys Town. As the festival drew nearer, the test piece was played regularly on the radio for contestants. But Bellerand hadnt a radiohe had to rush across with the band to his wifes cousins house where there was a Rediffusion so they could hear the test piece. As for their tune of choice Bellerand decided on a ballad sung in an operatic style, You are my Hearts Delight which he liked but knew only vaguely. He sought out a villager who knew music, an old drunkard named Narsus Henry, and brought him from the rumshop to the panyard to sing it for the band. Long after his victory, Bellerand discovered that Henry hadnt remembered the entire tune and what Boys Town had played left out part of the chorus. But perhaps Northcote didnt know the whole thing either. And the point is what we played was well-played and it pleased Dr Northcote, Bellerand recalls proudly.

ALL STARS VERSUS ALL STARS

Even before Trinidad All Stars placed first in last Saturdays Pan is Beautiful VIII, the Duke Street band had already won more Steelband Festivals than any other. Their total of six Festival victories is twice that of the next runner up, Desperadoes. And at first it doesnt seem surprising, for All Stars have long been known as the classics band which kept form with its biennial Classical Jewels concerts. How surprising it is then, to discover that All Stars kept away from the Steelband Festival for nearly a decade and a halffrom the second Festival in 1954 until 1968

when they came firstall because of Neville Jules couldnt tolerate the adjudicators unpredictability in the early days of the Festival. It started in the first 1952 Festival with the upset victory of Point Cumanas Boys Town. Jules, who now lives in New York, was Trinidad All Stars main man at the time. He captained the band, selected their tunes, tuned their pans and arranged their music, and was bitterly disappointed when the Welsh adjudicator Dr Sydney Northcote placed them third. Northcote had criticised the bands which played classics for rearranging their pieces, but he hadnt said much about All Stars performance of Dream of Olwyn. When he condemn a lot of the bands and thing, he had one thing to say about we, something about crescendos was too hard or something like that, recalls Jules. Northcote had especially criticised the bands which had introduced solo parts into the classics, so Jules took note and planned for the next Festival. It wasnt difficult insofar as Jules was concerned. Hed always preferred orchestration to individual improvisation and would discourage men such as Claytis Alithe Mighty Douglafrom showing off his ping pong skills. Its a band you have, he says in explanation. And as the time drew nearer, he began drilling the band, finally not going down to the docks where he worked so he could remain all day in the yard to tune the pans to their finest. Everybody studying what this guy say two years before, so they eh want to do no soloing, recalls Jules. They doing a little thing, but nothing to talk about because they want to stay within the guidelines, because this man (Northcote) is a music man. Up come Mr Theo Stephens with Anna and he start to solo. Theodore Stephens, the leader of another constellationSouthern All Starshad begun pan as a prodigy. The first time he played with the older fellas in the San Fernando band Free French, he immediately became the main ping pong player. Even his disapproving parents had given in after theyd heard him play, and indeed, his godfather decided the boy obviously had a talent and deserved a better pan. Port of Spain was it and at that time Jules was it, so my godfather say he got to take this boy to town and see if we could get him a good pan, recalls Stephens. So myself, Zola (Williams) and my godfather and a friend went up for the day. So we went to him and after a little bit of style he decide to make it and he did. It was an eight-note pan and we brought the pan back in the night. Stephens went on to become the youngest member of the famous Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra, and he and the other youngster, Anthony Williams, learnt the most from the Taspo leader Lt Joseph Griffiths. But Stephens was the main soloist. After they returned from England Stephens left Free French to form his own steelband, Metronome, which he left in 1954 after a Barbados tour. I came back Christmas, and then we rest for a while, and then open Southern All Stars, he says. It was ten weeks before the Music Festival. One supporter of the band was also close to Merry Makers in Port of Spain, so he asked the town boys if the southerners could take a last minute rehearsal in their Cobotown panyard before going to the competition at the Globe cinema. Merry Makers captain, Alfred Sack Mayers, agreed. They came down the morning, they rest down their instrument in we pan tent and then we talk, ole talk. They went about, they went their way and they come back about four oclock the evening and they start to play this Anna, recalls Mayers. When we hear it I say these people win already.

There was tense moment when Southern All Stars arrived at the Roxy for the competition when the gatekeeper refused to allow Theo Stephenss mother in for free. As they argued outside, Theo Stephens insisting his band wasnt going to perform if his mother couldnt enter, the other stars arrived: Trinidad All Stars. And Neville Jules sided with the southerners. Yeah man, said Jules. If the damn man mother eh go in we eh beating no pan. She was let in and the bands played, Stephens unleashing his dazzling tune of choice, Anna. But Northcote had criticised Free French in 1952 for introducing variations into Handels Largo. And the second time around, in 1954, Stephens had taken Anna and given it a Latin kind of flavour around which he improvised his own counter melodies. After the performances that night, Jules was confident, at least for the band. As a ping pong soloist, he was less so. Hed started his test piece very stylishly, and the audience went wild, but their applause had put him off. He forgot what came next, got up and walked off. The adjudicator called him back and he started again, this time completing the piece successfully. And when the winners were announced, Jules was placed third. Dudley Smith of Belmonts Rising Sun, the ping pong solo winner in the 1952 Festival, was given first prize again, having played the same tune again: Beethoven's Minuet in G. Then the ensemble winners were announced. Here comes Sir Thomas Beecham himself, declared the adjudicator calling back Jules, and he complimented the Trinidad All Stars for their performance. Beecham, a conductor, was the founder of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1932 and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947, and it was a greatand appropriatecompliment to Jules. Ahhh! murmured the crowd as the players began to celebrate backstage. But the adjudicator was Dr Herbert Wiseman, for Northcote didnt adjudicate that year. Northcote adjudicated in 1952, 1956 and 1962, but in the second year steelbands performed in the Music Festival, 1954, the adjudicator was Wiseman. As the cheer began rising for the Trinidad All Stars, however, Wiseman interrupted it with words that still echo in Neville Jules memory. Wait! said Wiseman. More runs to come after lunch. And he gave the prize to Southern All Stars whose ping pong improvisations had dazzled him, thus prompting Neville Jules and the Trinidad All Stars to ignore the Steelband Festival for the next 14 years and create instead the Bomb Competition, until 1968 when the band got sponsorship from Catelli and re-entered the Festival fray to win their first of six Festival trophies.

BACK TO BATAAN
It was a glaring omission that last weeks Eighth City Day Anniversary in San Fernando focused mainly on business or urban planning, and left out the citys rich sporting and cultural tradition. Fortunately the Express was able to sit in on the reminiscing of Golab Belgrove and Horace Nickerdee Nicholson as they privately celebrated the citys cultural history while perusing Belgroves photograph archives in

his Fonrose Street home, evoking the men in those tiny black and white images of steelbands and Indian mas. Town had fancy sailor, but South was Indian mas, explained Nickerdee. But it was Belgrove who began playing Indian mas in 1949. You couldnt play Indian just so. The first time I play Black Indian I bounced up Walter Gomes, and he lambaste me in Red Indian language. I couldnt reply at all, recalled Belgrove. He say in Indian, Go on you dutty dogyou cyar understand. That Ash Wednesday Belgrove, copybook in hand, began visiting a specialist in the invented Indian languages, one Sampson in Moruga, cramming the language. I coulda talk Indian from the Coffee to the wharf and back again without repeating a passage twice, he boasted. The next Carnival, after months drinking honey and Paragoric to clear his throat, he met Gomes again. When I reach I start to bawl. You coulda hear me quite down by the Library, he reminisced. Mack Copeland, one of the great mas men who changed the face of Indian mas, had helped build the costume, and it was glorious, and he was looking for Gomes. When I bawl they get confused and I start to ramajay. Walter couldnt answer. I hit him the same thing: Go on, you dutty dog. And yet, most of the conversation between the big, dark dougla Belgrove and the small, grizzly Nicholson was about steelband, starting with the first in San Fernando Royal Air Force, a band of fishermen down by the Kings Wharf. Belgrove was nine years old and Nickerdee eight when they saw RAF come out for the 1940 New Years Day regatta. The former tamboo bamboo band was led by Tarzan Callender, and the little boys had always liked the band because they used to hold a spree after Carnival with free biscuits and sardines and sweetdrinks. Tarzan was a tall fella, a fisherman, Nickerdee said, laughing as he related Tarzans tradition of drinking rum, rowing his boat out to sea and lying down in it with a loud Tarzan-roar until he slept off the alcohol. It was in Nickerdees aunts yard that the elegant cuff boom player Rudolf Xaviera trade unionist who was shot in the 1937 Butler Riotsformed Coffee Streets first band, the short-lived Buckingham Boys, in 1942. But Nickerdees first band was The Snow, so named after the chilly upstairs room in gambling club on the lower Coffee. He joined The Snow in 1944, shortly before its leader Sline Pepe Davidwho Nickerdee called a minister of ignorancedestroyed all the pans one day in a rage. Pepes lover had a habit of using The Snows pans for soaking her dirty clothes, and one day the youths, fed up, emptied the washing on the ground. When he heard of it, Pepe was furious. He took an axe and destroyed all the pans he could find, while the youths fled and under the leadership of Emile Zola Williams formed a new band called Cross of Lorraine with those pans theyd slipped away with earlier. Cross of Lorraine changed to Free French, perhaps the greatest early San Fernando band, progenitor of Theo Stephens Southern All Stars. By then Nickerdee had moved on to Belgroves band, Bataan, which wasnt as good musically as Free French, but whose members were sharper dressers. Led by Herman Teddy Clarke, another badjohn, Bataan was formerly known simply as the Coffee Boys during the war, in the days when the most they could make was a quick illegal rounds of the back streets, running from the black maria. On VE (Victory in Europe) Day, however, when they were tramping down the Coffee, beating a rhythm, Three Blind Mice or Peppersauce Woman, they passed Globe Theatre, which had recently opened and was showing the film Bataan.

Some fella pick up this board with Bataan on it and he have it going down the road, holding it up in front the band, recalled Belgrove. Everybody start bawling Bataan! Bataan! and thats how the name stick. Next to Bataans panyard lived one Mr Forde, an OWTU man who helped many of Bataans members get jobs in the oil industry. He also organised them into a sports and cultural club, raising funds, holding competitions and playing football. Once we played Usine Ste Madeleinea team with several national players, said Belgrove, chuckling as he recalled that Sunday morning. Teddy was the captain of we side, Sonny Greenidge the goalie was looking prettyknee guard, elbow guard, everything. Well, we touch the ball 23 times in the game and we get 23 goals. Belgrove withdrew from steelband to concentrate on masBataan didnt play masbut in the sixties he jumped back into the fray when he organised the youths around Fonrose and Claire Streets to form Fonclaire steel orchestra, begging for pans from Southern All Stars and Silvertones. Such has been his involvement in the steelband movement that his two sons Darryl and Dwight are pannists, and his daughter, grandson and granddaughter play pan too. And even Belgrove himself is still part of the movement, managing the New Wave steel orchestra, for which hes trying to acquire a second-hand drum kit.

A MAN FOR ALL BANDS

Although the story that Winston Spree Simon invented pan is largely discredited today, the squabble between east and west over where pan originated has never been resolved. Perhaps it never will, but talking to Sonny Jones one gets an account which brings the two together by showing a link between the Hell Yard boys of Charlotte and Duke Streets, and the Alexanders Ragtime Band of Newtown. Born in October 1920, Jones was shuttled between an aunt in Oxford Street , and Ma Jones, the grandmother whose Duke Street house abutted Hell Yard. As a child he played football and cricket with the other children, racing jockeys in the East Dry River, liming on its steps. It wasnt concrete then, it was mud so your jockey used to stick on the side, he recalls. You used to see piece of hand and foot floating down from the hospital. The captain of Hell Yard was Walter Sagiator Drayton, a sportsman of note who trained the younger ones in wrestling and boxing, but among the youngsters the leader was Hamilton Big Head Hamil Thomas, a youth whose creative imagination was alloyed to an incorrigible waywardness. In other words, he was both inspired and ignorant. And according to Jones, Hamil was got the idea to tune small milk tins which could be held in a smoke herring box so simple songs could be played with palette sticks. Thats why I always say pan is a gift from God, surmises Jones. Hamil couldnt do that by himselfhe never used to go to school, but he get it through his mother who was always praying. Hamils inspired vision, as Jones recalls it, wasnt simply to begin knocking simple tunes on these milk tins. Rather, he saw it could go much further, and here Jones will tell you the story of Lenny Scaley Matthias by way of illustration. Scaley was the kind of youth who could never resist a joke, and he was good with it. A simple sentence and he could have everybody laughing at you. Well, like all the

others in the gang, Scaley was sceptical about it when in the mid-thirties Hamil said contemplatively when they were liming at their spot on Charlotte Street, that if the small tins could play a tune, then the bigger ones could do it too but better and louder. Nobody took Hamil on, they couldnt share his vision, and the talk drifted amiably on to other topics, football, cinema or whatever. With the timing of an expert Scaley waited until a lull in the conversation and he started poking fun at Hamils idea. The gang cracked up in laughter. And Hamil struck out at Scaley, knocking out a couple of his teeth. The friendship cooled for a while, but soon enough the all the youths in Hell Yard were knocking on caustic soda pans, and such was its popularity that youths from other parts of the town would lime there for a knock, youths such as Carlton Lord Humbugger Forde who lived in Newtown but worked as a messenger in the Cooperative Penny Bank. Our band didnt have no name, it wasnt a steelband yet, explains Jones. When it come out good Humbugger, Tutee and them fellas, Police and them, fellas from Belmont, one from Gonzales, they used to come in Hell Yard to play because no other where had pan. While the youths of Hell Yard were doing all this, the older ones had their own bacchanal in 1937, the year King George VI was crowned because Edward VIII had decided to abdicate and marry Miss Simpson, that same year Sagiator fought with Eric Stowe, whom he thought was horning him with his lady friend Lilly. Sagiator was a powerful man, and he bested Stowe easily, but Stowe wasnt one to take lash so, so he returned with a razor and sliced up Sagiator. It was around that time, 1938, that Sagiator decided he didnt want none of the noisy pans in the Hell Yard bamboo band. The people couldnt sing, explains Jones. Nobody would hear you because the pan was so loud, and Sarge say: no, the revellers cant sing the lavway. It was then that the Newtown youths broke away and decided to do their own thing, thus creating the famous Alexanders Ragtime Band. When we see them fellas coming up the road playing Run Yuh Run, Kaiser William, calypsonian Popo and he brother Puggy and them, when we hear them with thing we learn them on Carnival Monday 1939, we eh cry but that is all, confesses Jones. Hamil took to his bed and remained there until Ash Wednesday, coming out the Thursday to say with tears in his eyes, You see what I was telling allyou? Things moved on, the youths formed Second Fiddle, changing to Cross of Lorraine and in 1945 the great Trinidad All Stars, and Jones was them all the way. But he wasnt exclusively so, and preferred to move from band to band as the whim took him, starting with the band led by his cousin Ancil Boyce, Bar 20. These were the days when society saw panmen as outcasts, and Jones felt his fair share of the laws heavy hand, such as when, for instance, Bar 20 was going South on an excursion and police pulled them off the train in San Fernando and beat every man jack. Once someone called the police while he was tuning a pan and they rushed over, bundled him into a jeep and carted him off to jail where he remained until he was brought before the magistrate the following day to be given six months for making noise, six months for throwing missiles and six months for resisting arrestconsecutively. The Bar 20 connection led him and his ping pong into both its offspring: Bad Men of Missouri (later, Renegades), and Casablanca. Blanca led him into City Syncopaters. But that was the least of it, for Jones also played with the sagga boy band of Duke Street, Waterloo; Samba Boys of Belle Eau Road; Sun Valley of Nelson Street; Dead End Kids

(later Highlanders) of La Cour Harpe; the Belmont bands Dem Boys, Dem Fortunates, Dem Stars; Dodge City; Sputnik. And that was just Port of Spain, for Jones also took his ping pong, and then his tenor pan, to Tunapuna, San Fernando and Arima, thus making him indeed one of the great pioneers of the steelband movement.

IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY

Actually, it was yesterday. On July 26, 1951, the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) opened in Southbank, London at the Festival of Britain. It looked like junk. The pans had deliberately been left unpainted and, after six weeks at sea, were rusty. The crowd was barely curious. Then, by one newspaper account, jaws dropped and eyes widened as the first sweet notes were struck and the band swung into 'Mambo Jambo'. This was the most important steelband in history and its impact still reverberates in Britain. As for its significance back home, nothing would ever be the same, neither musically nor even politically, for Taspo, the first modern steelband, paved the way for independence. These pans were the first to be real instruments. All were made from oil drums, and thus had a more consistent timbre. More important, all were tuned on The chromatic scale at concert pitch, which allowed them for the first time to play full chords and to harmonise with any other instrument. Taspo also introduced the idea of multiple drums, which allowed the 3-bass and 2-cello pans to play full scales. Yet the inspiration for Taspo probably came from Antigua. On January 21, 1951, before the thought struck anyone here, the Guardian reported that: Hell's Gate Steel Band of Antigua is likely to represent the West Indian steel bands at the Festival of Britain which will be opened in London on May 3. A month later, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Steel Bands Association Sydney Gollop, a member of Crusaders, was heading for solicitor Lennox Pierre's office in which the Association met, when he was hailed by Albert Gomes. I want you to act now! Gomes urged (according to Gollop). Go and set up a committee or something to get Operation Britain. And so by March the Association had decided to send a representative steelband to the Festival. Government refused their request for $6,000, so the Association decided to raise the money, and a team of the most gifted panmen was chosen: Theo Black James Stephens, 17, from Free French; Orman Patsy Haynes, 21, from Casablanca; Winston Spree Simon, 24, from Fascinators; Ellie Mannette, 22, from Invaders; Belgrave Bonaparte, 19, from Southern Symphony; Philmore Boots Davidson, 22, from City Syncopaters; Sterling Betancourt, 21, from Crossfire; Andrew Pan de la Bastide, 23, from Hill 60; Dudley Smith, 24, from Rising Sun; Anthony Muffman Williams, 20, from North Stars; and Granville Sealey, 24, from Tripoli. Sealey dropped out. He claims that he was snubbed by the other players, but popular belief has it that being recently married he wanted and was refused money to

support his wife. Either way he was replaced by Carlton Sonny Roach from Sun Valley. This was at the height of the riot years, when respectable society recoiled from the steelband movement in fear and loathing. You think they would ever send a steelband to England with them set of hooligans in it? sceptics told Tony Williams. Boy, you're only wasting your time. But committees were established. Fundraising began. And the steelband movement, riven by warfare between bands, closed ranks. Bands held benefit performances all over the island: Fantasia and Mutineers in Princes Town, La Lune in Moruga, for instance. The musical director of the band was Lt Nathaniel Joseph Griffith, the steelband movement's greatest unsung hero. Born 1906 in Barbados, he joined the police band at 14. He left Barbados in 1932 to play clarinet and sax with an American jazz band, but was soon in Martinique arranging for the Municipal Orchestra. In 1935 he took over the St Vincent Government Band and founded the St Vincent Philharmonic Orchestra. Then he led the Grenada Harmony Kings, before joining the Trinidad Police Band in 1938. Here he taught at the Tacarigua Orphanage and led its band, and conducted the Royal Victoria Institute's orchestra. In 1947 he was appointed bandmaster of the St Lucia Police Band, and there he was when he was asked to lead Taspo. If I going to England with you, you can't play any sort of wrong thing, he warned the panmen. You have to play real music. And he set about teaching them. He put numbers on the notes and wrote scores. Spree queried one note on a Negro spiritual. I said to roll that note! You want me to roll your balls? snapped Griffith. And so he taught them a repertoire that included a waltz, a rhumba, a samba, light classics, a foxtrot, a bolero, calypsos, mambos. He made them tune an alto (second) pan with 14 notes. He also insisted the bass have at least 14 notes. When told that they couldn't fit, he replied to everyone's surprise, then use three drums. Griffith's knowledge leavened the genius of men like Williams and Mannette, and they produced better pans than they ever did before. Williams invented the oil drum 2cello, and discovered the technique of tuning two tones in one note. 'Come down an afternoon when we practising,' Ellie told us, recalls Maifan Drayton, then in Invaders. When we went we were shocked to see one man playing two pans. Boots was on bass, Sterling Betancourt was on guitar and Tony Williams on cello. We were mystified. The public was even more dazzled. After a concert at Globe the audience emptied its pockets into the pans. Now that Trinidad realised what a steelband could accomplish, even the elite supported them. Bermudez donated drums, Fitz Blackman offered uniforms, the Himalaya Club, the Little Carib, and the Jaycees held fundraising dances. The Tourist Board and Sir Gerald Wight each offered $500. Governor Sir Hubert Rance's aide de camp organised an auction: Winfield Scott bought a case of whiskey and returned it to the auctioneer, who promptly sold it again.

Edwin Lee Lum, a non-smoker, bought 2,000 cigarettes. Thus Taspo, and by extension the steelband movement, forged the multi-class alliance which seeded the nationalist movement and ultimately, the PNM. The band left on July 5, spent a week in Martinique where almost all the players picked up new girls and old diseases. Sonny Roach got a sore throat and returned home, but the rest went on to Bordeaux, Paris, London. Taspo's first engagement was at the BBC, after which they performed at the Colonial office, and at the Festival. A revolution in music reached London today, and experts predict it will sweep the country in a new craze, reported an English paper. Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra sat outside the Festival Concert Hall? and tapped sweet, swingy music out of rusty pans still with steamer labels stuck to them after their trans-Atlantic voyage. Londoners, hearing a steel band for the first time, passed the verdict: 'The music is sweet and liquid similar to the xylophone but not so harsh'. They rehearsed in the basement flat of musician Edric Connor (Geraldine's father), and held a dance for Jamaica's hurricane relief fund. They got a two-week contract with the Savoy, after which they toured Edingborough, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester. They performed with Kitchener, with Connor and with Boscoe Holder's dance troupe. (Holder had actually been playing pan in London since the previous year.) Late November Taspo returned to Paris for a two-week circus engagement and to catch the boat home. Betancourt, Bonaparte, Davidson, Haynes and Williams Had plans to stay in England, but homesickness, an oncoming winter, and a fight between Bonaparte and Davidson changed that. Only Betancourt, with tears rolling down, returned to cold London, having found an Irish woman there to keep him warm. Fifteen years later Betancourt and two other panmen would transform the small, private Notting Hill garden party into what is now the largest public street festival in Europe. By then Trinidad and Tobago was an independent nation able to boast of having created the century's most important acoustic instrument.

MAN FROM THE HILL

When I die, your birth paper burn, Venezuela-born Francis Pacheco once warned his son, Wilbert. And it turned out to be true. When Wilbert asked his fathers family to build a house on a little end of the many acres of Pacheco land, they refused and the young Pacheco renounced his fathers name and adopted his mothers: Forde. Ah, but on that side of his family too blood ran thinner than water, and when his mother died during one of Wilberts terms in jail, her land in Laventille was hastily divided amongst her other children so that none remained for him on his release. Still, hard as it all must have felt, there was almost an appropriateness because Pacheco/Forde was one of the main men who shaped that family known as the Desperadoes Steel Orchestra which in turn eventually made of the hill known as Laventille one big family. If everyone is familiar with the Desperadoes, few know about Wilbert, either Pacheco or Forde. And, perhaps significantly, to evoke that flicker of recognition youd

have to call him by yet another name, the patois Be-eh, which is the French bain or bath. Ne pas vrais bain! he once as a youth retorted when a woman, demanding he bathe, threw some water on him. Translated, it meant, That eh a real bath! And since then he was known to all who know about steelband as Be-eh. Born in 1921, Be-eh grew up in Cumaca, Laventille, where, as a teenager hed hang around the older men who allowed him to go cut bamboo for the side which tumbled down from the Hill every JOuvert morning, drawing with its rhythm a river of Laventillians (some of whom never otherwise entered the town) waving branches in the air and singing their lavways. His prominence began with the decline of the bamboo bands, however, when the new fashion drumming on paint pans and dustbins took over and Be-eh called his young friends together. I called Fred and Brooks Banfield, Tooksie, Bamboo, Vance and them and we opened a little side called Dead End Kids, he recalls. The name was from a movie about a gang of orphans. We had no pans but I knew a fella from Toco and I heard his name ringing so I went to ask him to help. The fella from Toco (actually it was San Souci) was none other than the great Elliot Mannette of the Woodbrook Invaders. So from the start the greatest communitybased steelband discovered the humility and wisdom of recruiting help from the best available in or out of Laventille, a policy that over the years would put the Desperadoes on top and keep them there with the assistance of people such as Carl Bumpy Nose Greenidge (Robbies uncle); Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley; Beverly Griffith; Raymond Artie Shaw; Rudolph Charles and Pat Bishop. I had to ask a fella where to find the Oval, admits Be-Eh. Eventually he found the place and met the man and asked him to come teach the Dead End Kids how to make pans. Mannette showed them how to sink, groove and burn pans, but to tune them he'd brought his younger brother Vernon Birdie Mannette, and so the two Mannettes men forged a friendship between the Woodbrook and Laventille bandstwo of the most fearsome fighting machineswhich endured through even those years when steelbands fought one another tooth and nail and Desperadoes rioted with Casablanca, Tokyo, Red Army, Rising Sun, San Juan All Stars and even with gangs such as the Marabuntas that wasnt a steelband but just a group of ignorant men from the juvenile home. Dead End Kids wasn't a satisfactory name, so they changed to SS Morocco until Be-Eh saw a cowboy movie that left a great impression on him: Desperado Rides Again. Back on the hill he called Four Roads or Rudolph Crabby Edwards, and said, Get your needle and tattoo that on my hand. Edwards tattooed Be-Eh and most the others too, making of the newly-christened Desperadoes a family to which they would be forever bound with ties thicker than blood. There were men such as Ivan Brains Bourne, George Yeates, Donald Jit Steadman, Winston Talkative Harrison and if they werent to hot on the pans, they concentrated on mas anyway, Talkative organising the masqueraders and Be-Eh doing the designs for the bands head mas. Then he moved from sailors to design war mas: Sands of Iwo Jima, Operation Korea, To Hell and Back. Then he turned to Glorious Spain, Steadman brought Crawl of the Crocodile, then Prisoner of Zenda, The Frozen North and the famous Noahs Ark. Like many of the more violent Desperadoes, Be-Eh was in and out of jail for steelband fighting. Once, when he went armed to the teeth looking for two men in Belmonts Rising Sun, the police held him and carried him back up on the hill. When he

arrived back home with the police his distraught mother wailed, O Gawd, I make a beast! No, he replied, You make a man. Then, during a big dock strike in the late Forties, the police came for him at home, asking him as he sat on the stoop, Who is Be-Eh? There was an English officer with them who told Be-Eh to come. He got a shirt and went along, scared even though they told him they were putting him in a job. And so he began working on the docks where he remained until he retired. He continued as ever, getting into fights and steelband riots, even on occasion acting as a strong arm man for the Chief Minister Dr Eric Williams, but by the late Fifties he began to look for promotion on the job. To build myself up I decide to resign as captain of the band, he explains. And so, he says, he pushed for the band to accept as leader a prominent young man who was captain of a small talented side that paraded at Christmas time and was followed by many young people on the hill. The small band was called Spike Jones and its young leader, who became leader of the Desperadoes, was Rudolph Charles.

TRIPOLI
Younger people mightnt be familiar with the band Tripoli, but older pan aficionados would all remember that great St James steelband. How many of them, however, know that the band, which was formed before the Second World War, was originally called by the unusual name of Grow More Food? I used to take a little jump with them, but it was the more senior fellas playing the pan, recalls Tripoli stalwart Lloyd Butcher. Grow More Food wasnt an organised steelband, it was a community band without a definite leadership. When they start to beat and head for town, the whole of St James going with them. And often he was there in the melee, for he lived around the corner. Born in 1930, Butcher had moved with his family to Ethel Street when he was about four years old, around which time his mother died and he came under the lenient jurisdiction of his father Joseph Butcher, a man who enjoyed his Carnival. Carnival time you eh seeing he at all! says Butcher in explaining why his father never stopped him from playing pan, even in the days when it was considered a hooligan thing to do. He coulda play stick too. He would hide it by the gate because he didnt want he mother to see it, he dress and when he going he reach under the house and get he bois. I eh following him but one year he had too much to drink and he pass out and somebody come and tell he mother to look for him. When we go we see him on the pavement sleeping with he stick under he arm. The old lady, who lived in Woodford Street, was stricter and didnt want her grandson hanging around the lawa boys when the young Lloyd was left in her keeping. Granville Sealey, another Tripoli man, explains that lawa boys meant rough, plebeian types, and although he cant explain the origins of lawa, perhaps it derives from the old batonniers boast, even if the Big Yard didnt have stickfighting: I, lawa (French, le roithe king) with stick, with fight, with woman, with dance, with song, with drum, with everything.

Despite his grandmothers prohibitions, Butcher sneaked out anyway to peep in at the Big Yard on the corner of Tragarete Road, where now stands a Republic Bank but where in the late Thirties and early Forties was an open yard in which limed men such as Carlton Lord Humbugger Forde, Victor Totee Wilson, Carlton Blackhead, Popoyak Cummings and others. These were the men who formed Alexanders Ragtime Band. Even though these were wayward guys, they never encouraged little boys around their yardyou had to keep a distance, says Butcher. It was something to see them and hear them, they used to sound great: theyd be just playing a rhythm, no tune. That was the first time I heard pan. When a few years later the time came for Butcher to fall into the movement, the band he joined was called after a movie, The Shores of Tripoli, which Grow More Food had metamorphosed into, and which would shorten its name to simply Tripoli, even though where the fellas limed down by the waters edge where the fishermen moored their boats continued to be called long after The Shores of Tripoli. The pans used to stay under Joe Cricks mothers house but at first we had no yard, he recalls. Then a kind lady, Miss Christina Goolcharan, she had a property at the corner of Ethel Street and Mucurapo Road and she knew all the guys, so she loaned us there to be our first panyard. If Butchers father was indulgent, Tripolis captain, Joe CrickJoseph Christopherwasnt. He was drastic, is how Butcher describes the authoritarian leadership style of the man who, for example, because of a minor argument with the bands main tuner and leading ping pong player, Granville Sealey, banned Sealey for 99 years. The ban didnt really stay as such-- but it make the relation kinda sour. Tripoli was one of those bands with a surfeit of talented youths many of whom, Butcher reckons, chafed under Joe Cricks abrasive leadership style and consequently broke away to form other bands such as Crossfire with Sterling Betancourt and Eamon Thorpe, and Wonder Harps with Othello Mollineux. Joe Crick wasnt a bad fella, he was a disciplinarian and when he coming out with something he want the best and to get that he used to get on, says Butcher, recalling the military mas when the band had a real sword and scabbard, real gun holsters and belts, as an example of Joe Cricks impulse for authenticity. If you come and hear him getting on you would wonder what kinda fella that is, but when you know him he different. The younger fellas didnt know this and they used to grumble and they leave the band. Butchers instrument was, first, the boomthe large drum which you held sideways and cuffed with your fist like a Hosay bass drum. Then he moved on to the baylay, a background pan with about three notes specially created to get a particular Latin sound Tripoli strove after. The baylay pan didnt last, however, for it was quickly replaced by the tune boom which was made from a biscuit drum on which were tuned several notes. That tune boom make me feel shame on the road once and strike a pain in my heart, says Butcher with a laugh, recalling the time when Tripoli was jamming in St James, sweeping along two blocks of people, when the great tuner Sonny Roachs band, Sun Valley, passed by with the brothers Addawell and Nooksin Sampson playing the newly-invented tune booms.

We jamming, things nice, you feeling to beat pan, when ups come Sun Valley, tells Butcher. After they pass, when you look back you coulda take a glass of water and wet the whole band! Sun Valley with they tune booms take everybody. And yet Tripoli made its fair share of innovations too, introducing as early as 1956 the first amplified pans on the road, the invention of Herbert Sampson, a man who designed a walkie-talkie system so the movement of the front of the band could be controlled from wherever the captain happened to be. This same Herbert constructed it from two big speakers and a radio system. That year they won Best Beating Band on the road with Sparrows Jean and Dinah. By then Butcher, however, was on the way out. After Taspo, steelbands had 3basses on their stage side, and by the end of the Fifties Tony Williams would put them on wheels. This call for a lot of practice, reckoned Butcher, applying the philosophy he holds to this day. I have to make a living and its time to step aside and let the younger guys take over.

THE FIRST MAN OF FYZABAD

When people think of panmen of the early days, they think of the warriors who fought both one another and the police. But they werent all so. The man who introduced pan to Fyzabad, for instance, Julian Darius, was as pacifist as they come without being any less committed to the steelband movement. Born in 1923 he was only an infant when a neighbour into wild Indian mas, Rosetta, would take him where they practised their dances. His Carnival education was brief, though, for Dariuss mother died when he was five and he was shipped off to Grenada to live with his grandmother. He remained in the Spice Isle for 11 years. They had tamboo bamboo in Grenada and pierrot granade, he recalls, which is hardly surprising since pierrot granade is patois for Grenada pierrot. It was a mas that the guys used to recite history and they were good at it. They used to come in gangs from different parts of the island to compete and they used to fight, beat one another bad with long whips. His grandmother would take him to see the mas but Darius couldnt bear the violence of it. I used to be sick in my stomach just thinking about it, he says of those sorties to look at the mas. I was always stooping down by the side of the road; all the time they had to wait for me. He returned to Trinidad before the Second World War, in 1939, to catch the last Carnivals in Fyzabad where the fare was even more violent: pierrot grenade but also stickfighting to the rhythms of the African drumsno tamboo bamboo there. It was very bloody. One family was very good at it, the Briggs brothersthey would get bus head and go back to fight stickalthough the most dangerous was an old man who wore a khaki suit, he recalls with a shudder. They had a hole in the centre of the gayelle where they drained the blood from any bus headI see it with my eyes but I didnt like it too much. The Second World War stopped Carnival from 1942 but word was reaching the deep South about a new musical invention which Darius had neither seen or heard until Free French visited Fyzabad. They had a whole bugle section that set people crazy,

says Darius who decided then and there he wanted to form a steelband too. He got a caustic soda drum and made a pan with four notes and the face pushed upwards, not concave like nowadays, and he and his friends formed the Allies. On a Sunday wed go Erin and play or go Palo Seco and the people would get interested and ask me to help them, he says, recalling how he made the first pan for Belgrave Bonaparte who went on to become the leader and arranger for the great Southern Symphony of La Brea. There was none of the steelband violence as in Port of Spain but the Fyzabad police still harassed the boys, stopping their late night practising. And all the while coming from up North was the talk of innovations which a friend of Darius, one Dowdy who visited Port of Spain regularly, always returned to pass on to the Fyzabad boys. Hed tell me what he saw or heard in town, says Darius. Dowdy wasnt a pan beater but he knew I was interested and Id take what he said and try to improve on it. Just as the war suspended Carnival in Fyzabad, so too it suspended trade union militancy in Tubal Uriah Butlers heartland, but by 1947 the Chief Servant was on the loose again, riling up the working class. A protest march was organised to Port of Spain and Darius, though he wasnt an oil worker and had never been to the bright lights, he joined in with a friend from the Allies and made the two day march into the city which he never again left until he left Trinidad in 1971. I figured Port of Spain is the place to be, he explains. It was where all the action was and all the bands were good. He checked into a hostel in Duncan Street where he slept on a cot in a large dormitory. And he joined Commandos in Edward Street, just above Park Street. That steelband wasnt very good, however, and after a year he left it for Merry Makers which a friend from Duncan Street, Kenrick Drayton, had told him about. Merry Maker was a peaceful breakaway from Red Army. The younger members such as Rudy Two Left Smith and Sack Mayers had grown fed up with Red Armys constant fighting, fighting, fighting, and had recruited for protection the support of Nancya feared Cobotown badjohn. (In those days panmen didnt take lightly to men hiving off to form other bands, but soon Red Army folded up and many of the same badjohns became supporters of Merry Makers so to many people they were just Red Army under another name.) Thus was formed Merry Makers, one of the greatest stage sides ever. And there it was that Darius found his level. With Merry Makers Darius played cello at the top local venues such as the Bel Air hotel and Tavern on the Green. They replaced Invaders as the house band of the Little Carib, and travelled to the US and Canada, Venezuela and Suriname. Under Texaco sponsorship Darius went to Tobago to help establish the Katzanjammer Kids in Black Rock. By the early Sixties Dariuss job at the telephone company was allowing him less and less time for pan and he hung up his pans. I used to have two dreams for steelband: to see it play with other jazz bands, and to have it so a fella could leave South and play in townstandardisation, he concludes today while visiting Trinidad from his home in Florida. And both of them come trueI love it.

IF YOU PLAY THE CHORDS

I studied pan from since 1944, said Kitchener. He was explaining his perennial urge to write for and about the national instrument. The band was Bar 20 and when I came to Port of Spain I stayed in their yard in Harpe Placeright by where Renegades is now. I never heard it in Arima but in Port of Spain I hear pan morning, noon and night. Actually, he came to town in 1942 to sing in the Victory tent, but 1944 was the year he sang his first big hit Green Fig and penned Beat of the Steelband, listing the names of the Bar 20 stalwarts, thus forging a link with the steelband movement that has endured to the present. Strangely, Kitch never felt the urge to play pan. My thing was the bass or the guitar, he admitted, recalling how as a child in Arima hed hang around a bass player named Ralph. When music bands came to Arima to play in dance halls I used to get a tushthey enjoyed seeing a little boy who wanted to play the bass. When Kitch left Trinidad in 1947 pans were still rudimentary, and for the next 15 years he was cut off from the steelband movement. I didnt know anything about pan at all until I returned in 1962, he says, perhaps forgetting hed met men such as Sterling Betancourt in London. Still, he continued writing for tunes for steelband, and many a pan pioneer those days whey they waited anxiously by the radio on Carnival Sunday for Kitch to send down a road march from cold England in time for JOuvert. It was shortly after Kitchener left for England that the guitar pan was invented by one of the youngsters he knew back in Port of SpainNeville Jules, the leader, tuner and arranger for the Trinidad All Stars and, by happy coincidence, pumpkin vine to the famous Jules family of guitar, cuatro and bass-makers. I was walking one night around Christmas time in Port of Spain and I heard a Spanish guy strumming a cuatro, recalls Jules, who now lives in New York. I went and I tuned a pan and called it the cuatro panit was a lower pan than the second pan. We already had the second pan and I didnt want a pan strumming in the same range so I made it a little lower. In those early days, Juless cuatro pan (which Philmore Boots Davidson copied and gave it the name which stuckguitar pan) was the lowest tuned pan in the steelband. So it wasnt mid range, it was the background pan . It was before it had bassyou had tenor, second and guitar, and all the rest was du dup, biscuit drum and stuff like that, says Jules. That situation didnt last long, though. Shortly after his cuatro pan Jules came up with two other innovations that filled the background: a caustic soda bass with three low untuned notes that he called the Paul Robeson; and the biscuit drum tune boom. Both these were superseded almost immediately, however, when in 1950 Tony Williams tuned a 55-gallon 3-bass for Taspo. So only the guitar pan has lasted into the present, not as a single pan but as a double or a triple pan. Ironically, although Juless Trinidad All Stars has always been famous for its background pans, up to today the band still lacks double guitars, relying instead on triple guitars and cellos for the mid range. Perhaps now theyre playing Kitchs Guitar Pan for Panorama theyll get a few double guitars, especially since one of the top double guitar players in the country, Panazz leader Barry Bartholomew, is an All Stars man. I always found it interesting to see what an arranger is doing with the middle pansa lot has to do with how you voice the chords between them, explains

Bartholomew. A full musical chord, you see, needs at least three notes, so unless the player is using three sticks, which is rare today, the chord has to be distributed between different players and even different middle pans: If you spread the chords well you get a much fuller sound: thats what we have to do in Panazz because its such a small side. Playing double guitar for Panazz and triple guitar for All Stars, Bartholomew says that its an easy pan to learnespecially the triple guitar, which demands arm movements like the bass, rather than the wrist movements of the double guitar. The notes are big and many arrangers just have them strumming a simple rhythm throughout. The guitar pan strum was different when it was first invented, closer to a parang cuatro (which, Robert Munro notwithstanding, is a rhythm instrument). But the pans essential role has remained the same, providing a rhythmic framework around which the music is built. But there are greater possibilities than that, which is why Kitch has a different pram praram chorus in every verse of Guitar Pan. Additionally, some arrangers such as Jit Samaroo use the middle pans to play counter melodies. Indeed, Jit often has the middle pans doing some very complex runs. Then Panazz often starts or ends a tune with them. So the band has a double guitar and a triple guitar but no cellos or quads. If we have a gig and one guitar pan is missing theres an emptiness in the arrangement, but if a tenor or a bass player cant make it it hardly matters, argues Bartholomew. Perhaps this is why Renegades, Exodus and All Stars will be playing Guitar Pan for Panorama. And with Jit Samaroo, Pelham Goddard and Eddy Quarless highlighting the middle range of three of the greatest steelbands ever, the guitar pan will finally come into its own.

THE SAMPSONS OF SUN VALLEY

A tune boom once strike a pain in my heart, Tripoli panman Lloyd Butcher once reminisced. It make me feel very shame in the road. That happened one Carnival in the late 1940s when the great south St James steelband, Tripoli, was jamming in the road, things nice, two blocks of people moving to the music. You now feeling to beat pan, described Butcher. Then along came the great north St James steelband Sun Valley, the band which won the first islandwide steelband competition in 1948. They pass us by Ethel Street bank, he recalled. When they pass and you look back, you coulda take a glass of water and wet the whole bandthey had two tune boom and take everybody. If you hear that thing, it was out of the world. Addawell and Nooksin, the Sampson brothers, played it for Sun Valley. The pans was made by Sonny Roach, one of the great pan tuners, a fella whose talent stop in cobweb. Actually, only Franklyn Addawell Sampson was beating a tune booma biscuit drum tuned to provide the band with a bass. His younger brother Noel Nooksin Sampson was beating a baylaya four-note caustic soda drum with a slightly higher range than the tune boom. Butchers anecdote is true in its fundamentals, however, emphasising the unsung greatness of Sonny Roach, and the importance of his two lieutenants Addawell and Nooksin Sampson.

You beat thatdont lend nobody, it too difficult to tune! Roach instructed Addawell, handing him the tune boom hed invented. (Neville Jules in the east also claims to have invented the tune boom; like many pan innovations, it probably occurred spontaneously in both east and west Port of Spain.) Sonny Roach put in five notes on a Sunrise biscuit pan and we called it tune boomI is the only fella used to beat it. From St James to town and back, nobody beating my pan, I eh lending it out cause they go spoil it, hit it too hard, says Addawell. He is the first man to sink a pan four inches without bursting it. We used to tune by the East Dry Riverits the only place you coulda go and keep noise and they still used to send police. Sire, they called Roach, because his mother, a religious woman, swore his talents were God-given. Despite their genuflection, however, Addawell and Nooksin were long before Roach the pioneers of pan in north St James. Born in 1917 and 1925 respectively, the Sampson brothers spent their earliest years in Picton Street, however. Their parents moved to St James in 1935 but the boys spent much time by their godmother in Newtown where theyd go peep at the seminal Alexanders Ragtime Band. And when in 1938 they met Frankie Soyer and other Newtown youths whod also moved to St James, the gang decided to bring out a band in the west too. We had the most appropriate yard and its so the whole thing start with a tarpaulin what we get from a shop, recalls Nooksin. That come like we tentwe had seats from bamboo and we start with the bamboo, continue what we know from Newtown. Soyer had four sisters so they were roped in to play Dame Lorraine and the whole gang moved out that JOuvert. We had them little small pan with the bamboo, says Nooksin. We hadnt no name, we just form weself together to bring out a band. That was on Boundary Road by where the Catholic church was being built, and though at first the big Irish priest Fr Currant used to enjoy them, he eventually got fed up with the noise and started complaining. Mrs SampsonMiss Hetty to the youthsdidnt too like the idea either. She was fervent Catholic and wanted her sons to follow the straight and narrow path. Mr Sampson, a man who played guitar and liked his waters, was different. He was whehar, Addawell recalls, using the Hindu word for wutless. And he did let we play. Both boys were acolytes. Nooksin got caught drinking the communion wine and was released from the Lords service but Fr Currant even carried Addawell, who rang the church bell morning, noon and night, to serve in high mass at St Theresas. Once he skipped church to practice with the band and his mother blazed him with licks. You go kill the little boy? intervened his father. Is only one day he eh go to churchyou is Mary? On one occasion, however, he was able to his knowledge of church to the benefit of the youths. The boys wanted to go cinema, Rialto, and they had no money. Addawell, himself quite whehar, said he had an idea. He got a piece of newspaper. He spread it on the ground and started a prayer meeting. Nooksin sang chorus. All this was right there on Bournes Road. Everybody knew Miss Hetty son, they were glad to see Addawell change his ways. They began putting money in a bowl for him. Nooksin stood there discreetly counting the money and checking the time. When it was time for theatre to start, Addawell closed the meeting and everybody went to the theatre. Anyway, the priest eventually got his way and the band moved to Guthrie Street in 1940 by the grandmother of one of the gang, Johnathan Mayers, where they lasted out the Second World War.

There was no Carnival from 1942 to 1945 but the band played at times like Easter and Christmas and took the occasional chance to parade up Fort George hill. It grew in size and volume and changed their name to Harlem Nightingales, bringing out the famous scrunters burlap mas in 1946: St James Sufferers. Mayerss grandmother fell ill and asked them to leave because the noise was humbugging her. They shifted up Bournes Road where they were joined by members of a little struggling Kandahar band named Nob Hill. One Nob Hill newcomer was the young Anthony Williams. The yard they shifted to was by the home of another talented youth whod been hanging around Harlem NightingalesSonny Roach. And they changed name again, this time borrowing from the musical Sun Valley Serenade. Like the other great pioneers Ellie Mannette, Tony Williams and Neville Jules, Roach quickly became a leading tuner, ping pong player, arranger and captain. The same year Sun Valley won the islandwide steelband competition, Roach came first in ping pong solo. When Taspo was picked to go to England and Granville Sealey dropped out, Sonny Roach was called up. Unfortunately he fell ill and had to leave the group in Martinique and return home. Roachs talents attracted talented youths such as Cecil Bajan Cecil Ward who knew music, Roy Harper, Tony Williams and Addawell Sampson. So too the band attracted the public, sometimes to their detriment. One Carnival Tuesday Sun Valley, coasting a Shango rhythm Ogun la la olaylay, when they bounced up Belle Vues Five Graves to Cairo at the bottom of Long Circular Road. As with the Tripoli episode, Sun Valley passed by and all Cairos revellers joined the Bournes Road band. By the time we reach Harvards, says Addawell. It was bottle and stone in we tail. The same thing happened in a club along the Wrightson Road Gaza Strip and in a competition in Arima, when audiences, calling back Sun Valley, refused to let the next bands come on stage. Again, war broke out. We had to run with we pans, Nooksin says. We was staying in DAbadiewe run from Arima to DAbadie. Is ice they was pelting at we. Roach was ignorant, though. His closest associates were badjohns such as Charles Samuel, who never beat a pan, and Winston Badman Jordan. When the younger players found that pair was taking the band fees to go drinking, they protested. If allyuh eh like it, leave! Roach replied, so they moved a hundred yards down Bournes Road to the Shango yard of one Giant and formed a new under the leadership of Roy Harper, whod learned to tune under Roach. The new bands name was taken from a Humphrey Bogart movie, North Star. The proud Roach said not a word as his best players left but, recalls Addawell, You coulda see it in his face. So the Sampson brothers, whose hearts were with the youths, remained with Sun Valley. But decline had set in. Roach began liming heavily with the Port of Spain jamettes and drinking hardsomething not allowed in Sun Valleys glory days. Look how the band change, Roachs mother complained. And eventually Roach just left them to stay at home and beat tenor pan by himself, slowly to succumb to solitude and resentment.

THE SKULL AND CROSSBONES BAND

Perhaps its the lateness of their greatness that makes Renegades seem a recent band, or maybe its because for their first ten years they had no name. Owing to its misty past, the Charlotte Street steelband is sometimes said to be an offshoot of Casablanca, or even of Bar 20. True, Renegades captain Stephen Goldteeth Nicholson fought for Casablanca, and Bar 20 patroness Muriel White flew flag for Renegades. Nevertheless, the band which is rivalled only by Desperadoes for its six Panorama victories happens to be one of the oldest steelbands in existence, possessing its own history reaching back to the days of tamboo bamboo. Lenus Syms had a bamboo band in Basilon Street and wed run away to take a little beat while watching out for we mother, recalls Joseph Baird. It was tamboo bamboo and cuff boom in those days. Born in 1927, Baird would have been around 12 years old. But it was the younger Kelvin Pelican Brown who at about six years of age began syncopating on the horizontal side of the cuff boom. It had a man walking backwards in front the cuff boom, cutting on it, says Baird with a laugh. Pelican as a baby used to do thatwe had to hold him up to cut. Symss unnamed band crumbled when iron replaced all the bamboo, for the older men werent able to make the transition and the baton passed to an older youth, Ethelbert Serrette. Bar 20 was in Bath Street but our parents didnt want us to associate with them: them was fellas who gambling, they make prison, explains Baird. Ethelbert decided to open a band around therehe did everything and get us together. What made it easier is that they were already together, in a football and cricket club named Ohio Sports Club in Bonaparte Lane. All Serrette had to do was to get some pans from Bar 20. We had no name, only a flag made from flour bag and with a skull and crossbones on it, says Baird. But when we was beating in the road Carnival day people would say, Look Ohio band because they recognised the members of the sports club. During and immediately after the war the youths continued as a sort of unnamed band. Once they tried on Ohio Casanovas for size, and another time they had a go at Bad Men from Missouri, but neither name stuck. Until in 1947 Serrette mashed up the band. Hed told them not to carry out the band, but it was Carnival and they went ahead anyway. When Serrette found out, he was furious, and he was known to be ignorant. It was he whod got the pans from Bar 20, they were his. He got a hatchet and went out for them and bounced them up on the corner of Charlotte and New Streets. Well, who could run with their pan ran with their pan. The rest dropped pans and scattered, and Serrette mashed up whatever pans he could get. After that Serrette dropped out of the steelband movement and the youths regrouped with the few pans theyd salvaged and began stealing some more. And, as luck would have it, at Royal cinema they saw the Ricardo Montalban swashbuckling movie Mark of the Renegade.

Everybody come back to Basilon Street and put skull and crossbones on they arm and say we is Renegades, recalls Pelican. Thats when Stephen Nicholson come in and become captain. It was the same young men from Ohio, both band and club. Indeed, the new skipper, Stephen Nicholson, a tall man with long, simian arms, was their ferocious pace bowler. Better known as Goldteeth, Nicholson would make both his band and himself infamous for ignorance and rioting. They rioted with Invaders; they rioted with Ebonites; they rioted with Desperadoes; they rioted with Tokyo; they rioted with the Marabuntas. That time if you see the skull and crossbones its to keep far, says Pelican. You better run. Once some Belmont men beat Pelican and Dennis Baird in Olympic theatre, so they retaliated by thrashing whoever they caught catching taxi at the Belmont stand. A small section of the band began calling themselves Lawbreakers and terrorised people in town. And as if they werent fighting enough, Goldteeth joined with their close neighbours, Casablanca, when they were rioting too. As a matter of fact, Goldteeth wasnt above doling out licks to his own panmen. Once Pelican and a few other unemployed Renegades took some pans to play in a Park Street club and earn some money. When I come back everybody saying Stephen looking for me. When I see him he start up saying, Mister Pelican... recalls Pelican. I went back to the club alone and bring every pan back by myself, all of them knocking and clanking under my arms. Still, Pelican had to duck a right hand. So notoriously ignorant was Goldteeth that when he got married to American anthropologist Judith Weller, Prime Minister Eric Williams cabled a request to US President John Kennedy to investigate if Weller was right in the head or some kind of weird communist. Despite their warfare with Invaders, Pelican admits he used to go Woodbrook to copy ideas from Invaders, how they tuned and played. And yet, to compound the irony, Renegades produced the master tuner who was instrumental in helping the middle- class college boy bands such as Dixieland and TroubadorsAlvin Benjamin, better known as Yankee Boy. He born in the States but grow up in Belgrave Street. Before him, each one of us used to tune we own pan, says Baird, to which Pelican adds: We dont know where Yankee Boy learn to tune. He just start. He coulda tune a whole steelband in a day, just humming right through. It used to marvel me. Both Goldteeth and Yankee Boy are dead but Renegades has continued as ever, without any individuals standing out like other bands had. And Joe Baird and Kelvin Pelican Brown ended the interview with a list of the pioneers of the Ohio Sports Club who built the most successful Panorama steelband ever: Joe Baird, Desmond Bad Nigger Baird, Newton Mouths James, Desmond Mugger James, Lennox Madman Calender, Desmond Preacher Harris, Grafton Poco Moco Thomas, Trevor Rock Stewart, Wallace Ako Paul, Milton Chandler, Cecil White, Desmond OBrien and Errol OBrien.

THE PING PONGS OF PEARL HARBOUR

Even as a boy knocking discarded instruments in the Coffee Street tamboo bamboo yard in the 1930s, Meadow Williams was considered good. Once, when his great uncle saw him there, he ordered the boy go home. Leave the boy, na, pleaded Tarzan, the captain of the band. He doing good. Let me hear you, said Williamss great uncle, and the boy began syncopating on his two lengths of bamboo. After that he got permission. His grandmother was pleased she played Martiniquan with them for Carnival. How differently things turned out a few years later when he was discovered beating pan! The family moved across town to Johnson Street in 1936, and just at the bottom by Mucurapo Street and was where a steelband named German Camp was formed as early as 1940, by a migrant from BelmontJulian Tall Boy Benjamin, brother of the infamous Mano. And Williams would hang around the yard watching, until one day Benjamin inquired after his name, where he lived, who were his parents. You like to beat? asked Benjamin, and Williams nodded. Give him a beat, Benjamin told a youth with a pan, and again Williams amazed them. I start to beat and roll, he recalls. Theyd never heard that. After that, Benjamin promised Williams that any time he came to the yard the pan was his. He began frequenting the yard, until his grandmother and great uncle got to hear of it and they banned him. Mucurapo Street in those daysa street of chance, what with its clubs, had a reputation. But secretly the boy continued playing with them on the way to or from cinema, for even though it was within earshot, you couldnt see the yard from his home. One day a neighbour visited his grandmother. Williams, around 14 now, was also doing blacksmith work in his stepfathers shop nearby, and the lady recognised him. He does do blacksmith work too? she said. The grandmother, pleased, pointed out the boy was talented. Yes, agreed her guest. And hes the best beater in the yard too. To Williamss relief, his grandmother just smiled at that. That evening, he told her he was going to the cinema. Wait, said his grandmother. I want to talk to you. And she dragged him inside for the worst licking he ever got in his life. Around that time the band changed name to Pearl Harbour. Also around then did Williams get his hands on a proper ping pong and learned to tune. Heres how that happened: Tall Boy went to visit his family in Belmont and carried the young Williams. And then they went to Hell Yard where they met Fisheye Olliverre. I only hearing pan knocking, and when I go by the river where it had fellas gambling I see Jules tuning a pan, recalls Williams. I stay there watching and listening. They had some TGR grease pans with four notes. Then I notice he have a bigger one with different notes. Tall Boy and Williams stayed three days in Port of Spain and they left carrying a ping pong Fisheye had given the youth with a promise to bring another down south for the band. (Fisheye did bring the pan, an act of generosity which Williams repeated when he helped other south bands, including forming two in central: Eagle Squadron in Couva and Starlift in California.)

By the time Williams visited Hell Yard he was too big for his grandmother to beat, but there were other travails to come, such as the afternoon towards the end of the war when the nearby St Josephs Convent complained of the noise coming from the band and the police raided. Some of the youths ran off but Williams and a few others remained: they werent doing anything wrong. The police confiscated the pans they were charged and summoned before a magistrate who fined them each $96 or six months in jail. With the fellas not working that come like $96 thousandit make some fellas leave Trinidad, one reach America and never come back just to dodge that warrant, recalls Williams whose grandmother coughed up the money. The war passed and VE Day came around when the steelbands were given license from 9 a.m. to parade. Tall Boy and Williams went stealing drums to replace those in the police station, although Williams personal ping pong was home. When the day dawned, however, Williams had to do an emergency job in the blacksmith shop so he arranged to catch up with the band. He finished his job and made his way downtown, hearing them by the Promenade. When I meet them by the Library I hear the pan beating, I thought it was Billy, he recalls. But he was blowing the bugle and it was Vida, my girl, on the ping pong. I didnt know but shed taught herself to play when the pan was home and I was out. It was her first time playing on the road, but there were other women in the bandMucurapo Street regular girls such as Olga on the boom, and Stocking Dinah who also took up the boom eventually. That was its moment of glory, for when Williams and a few more serious panmen tried to improve for the upcoming VJ Day, the others couldnt make the grade. Williams and two others left to join Zolas Free French, all the while still visiting All Stars to see what Jules was up to, but now also discreetly helping out Red Army in Prince Street. All Stars get to find out I with Red Army, he says. Rudder vex, Fisheye vex, (Red Army captain Leonard) Morris vex, Wellington (Bostock) vex. It didnt make sense I stick around town. Back in south Williams left Zola around 1953 to follow Theo Stephens into Metronome, only for Stephens to abandon them to form Southern All Stars with their best players for the second Steelband Festival in 1954. Williams tried to regroup Metronome and outdo Stephens and his cronies, but the band wasnt up to the tunes Williams had chosen: Perez Prados Granada Mambo, and Gold and Silver Waltz. Free French was still suffering from Stephenss departure too and the two tried to join forces as French Metronomes for the upcoming Festival. I wanted to show those fellas how I coulda do without them, recalls Williams of the day he left the steelband movement. Zola say he cyar play ittoo much music. He say, Hear them strings and thing. And Williams gave the reply which took him out of the steelband movement for 20 years: If you feel you cyar make it, it eh make no sense trying.

THE RISING SUN OF BELMONT

Tambi Maximin is well-known among the underworld of drug addicts. The dark man with a full head of silver hair that falls in a long plait is the founder and director of

Rebirth House rehabilitation centre. Fewer people are aware, however, that he was a steelband pioneer in the great Belmont band Rising Sun. Born in 1927, Maximin grew up in Industry Lane in the district known as Warner Lands, the upmarket side of Belmont bounded by the Circular. As a youth hed go look at the stickfighting by Yeates rumshop in Norfolk Street and at the Crown Lion Bar, or attend the Rada feasts in the Valley Road to eat the food and hear the drumming. Although he recalls taking a little jump with the district bamboo band in which his father beat bass bamboo, it was after Maximin and his friends had heard a Gonzales band beating pan that Maximin joined the gang beating cement drums, dustbins or any other piece of iron. Somebody would be beating cement drum and then another person would be walking backwards cutting on itI did that, he says. That was before the war. Their band, which came to call itself Rising Sunthe Japanese emblemwas based in Belmont Valley Road in an open lot opposite the Rada compound. This was the more plebeian side of Belmont where the youths were more wutless, and Maximin in their company turned wild. My father was strict but when he eh there I do what I want, he explained of how he came to play ping pong in the band. When they think I in school I in the dry river playing ground dice and wappie. So, for instance, in 1942 after the government prohibited Carnival for the war, Rising Sun decided to ignore the ban. We saw the police but we figured they couldnt stop the Carnival, says Maximin. Its when they start to share licks everybody start to run. Belmont was like that: an old creole district with the full social spectrum, ranging from upper class whites to lower class blacks, and if the boundaries between them were sharply drawn they all came together for Carnival. Youths from both sides met at Olympic Cinema, some in house, some in pit. And their steelband, Rising Sun, was filled with all the same contradictions. Once when Red Army was coming down Cadiz Road for fight with bottle and cutlass, all the middle class people sided with us to repel them, says Maximin. Belmont was like a clan. So there were the youths from Warner Lands, a lot of sagga boyssharp dressers and good dancers like singer Nap Hepburn, virtuoso pannist Dudley Smith and Carly Drakes. But there were also the Belmont Valley Road men, rough ones like Carl and Arthur Byer, Albert Thompson and others. Ray Apollon was a member and indeed there was a side of wrestlers theyd put in front the band. They had a bugle section of youths from the Young Offenders Detention Institute (YODI). Those days men fought with cutlasses, razors or broken bottles and the band had a section from down by the river called Bottleneck. Rising Sun rioted with bestDesperadoes, Red Army, Tokyo, Casablancaand if Maximins many bus heads cant be seen today he can still show the scar where a man with a broken bottle almost severed his hand at the wrist in a clash one Carnival Monday. One man, whom Maximin prefers to not name, was chopped by another panman whom he chopped back in return. When the two of them were carried to hospital, the Rising Sun badjohn left the bed and sliced up his opponent with a razor. He make a jail for that, says Maximin. With its different elements the band couldnt last and in the forties the Warners Land youths hived off to form Sunland in Industry Lane by the Maximin yard. And the rift widened until the two bands fell into a deadly fratricidal war. Carly Byer, for instance, was the captain of the east side which became Modernaires, but his brother Big

Pants Byer was in Sunland when he was stabbed to death by Lorris Phillip from the other side. Sunland eventually split again over money and into a college boys side named Stromboli went Maximin and his brothers Monty, Tony, Tyrone Mike and Rawle. Valmond and Neil Jones were in that side. There was even an upper class band in Lockhart Lane, Dem Boys, from which splintered Dem Fortunates and Am Boys. And yet despite their internal fighting the Belmont people continued to support Belmont people, Maximins brother Mike sponsoring Sunland, then 5th Dimension both the band and the football teamthen Am Boys. And as for Tambi, he says, The steelband built my character. And the street experience, well its helped me with Rebirth House because there I have to deal with people from the streets.

WHEN THE JACK WAS KING

In the first decade of the steelband movement, Invaders set the pace, and to most panmen that meant Ellie Mannette. During the Fifties, however, many would have included a man who was seen in the band once again on Carnival Monday and Tuesday, having returned from New York for two weeks. One of his names is Emmanuel Riley, although hes better know to the steelband world as Cobo Jack. Not only was he one of Mannettes closest understudies in the pan tuning business, but Jack was perhaps the most well-known steelband soloist of his day, a man of surpassing musical talent and not a scrap of training. He was way ahead of his time, recalls Ray Hollman, then a youth now learning to play. When I look back now its more amazing what he was doing then. He really motivated me to try to improvise, he was the father of improvisation. Jack didnt began an Invaders man, though. Born on Christmas Day, 1934, Jacks early youth was spent in Methuen Street, just a block away from a little known band called Charlie Chan. He was about eight or nine and too young to play, but within a year or so that changed. It was in Methuen Street too that he got the nickname from an old Indian man in whose parlour Jack would help out. The old patois-speaker wasnt good with English pronunciation and when he called the boy Herbert Jack (his father was Vernon Jack) it came out as Cobo Jean. By then the band had metamorphosed into Hellzapoppin whose captain, Ulric Springer, was better known as Chick Macgrew. He was a good mentor, for Springer once beat islandwide ping pong solo champion Ellie Mannette in a competition by playing his pan with two hands, some time 1947 in Astor, when everybody was still using one hand. The way the community was, everybody knew everybody and Chick Macgrew asked my parents, says Jack. It was during the war when they didnt have Carnival. There was only a Discovery parade. Hellzapoppin didnt last too long, and Jack began moving to different houses, staying a while in St Vincent Street, or a while in Bournes Road. My father lived in Bournes Road and up there I used to listen to Sun Valley but I couldnt play because he didnt like steelband, says Jack. Moving back into Woodbrook in Gallus Street, Jack and some youths decided formed a little band. That was late Forties. We begged for pans. Invaders wanted to

charge us 36 cents a note but we couldnt pay. Sterling Betancourt from Crossfire gave us a pan and we got some old pans, recalls Jack. We used to play up and down the slipway off Wrightson Road and sometimes the police would chase us and mash up the pans. They were hired to play in a club on Wrightson Road whose name the band took: Green Eyes. Having to repair the pans destroyed by police Jack had learnt tuning. Then he began to help their tuner Michael Nazi Contante who did some work for Renegades. I coulda blend but not tune from scratch until Goldteeth ask me to try to make a tenor pan. I got a good B note, he says. That didnt last either. The leader left, they shifted to Ariapita Avenue and became Sombreros. And then Jack got his break. We always wanted to get into Invaders: we liked how their instruments sounded, how they played, the type of tunes they played, but we were young and they found us too miserable, he recalls. Then the older Invaders were getting out and it had an opening. Jack was tuning with Mannette, doing most the bands background pans, and playing cellos. Ironically, the pan he made his mark with came from La Brea. Invaders still had single seconds and Belgrave Bonaparte from Southern Symphony had double seconds. He brought a sketch for Ellie to tune a pair for him, says Jack. Ellie introduced it to Invaders. I thought it was a better pan to solo on so I went over. Those Fifties were perhaps the greatest days of the Invaders, when the band was unbeatable for either music or warfare. Jack was tuning for several bands including Desperadoes in Laventille and Harmony Kings in Speyside. It was a time when Jack was perhaps the most famous soloist even though he never competed. I didnt like competitions, I just liked to play what came to me, he explains. In competitions you had to play what was correct and I could only do it my own way. Jack went on to play with a Renegades stage side in the Stork club, and with Desperadoes after being charged and acquitted of having stabbed another panman. Still he remained an Invaders man. Although he remained neutral in Tobago when Invaders and Renegades rioted, Jack captained the Woodbrook band for a few months after Ellie Mannette left Trinidad in 1967, until Jack too migrated to the US where he still lives today and has most recently set up the USA Invaders.

A DAISY AMONGST THE THORNS

My mother was very strict, recalls Ancil Sonny James with a laugh. He was speaking of the 1940s when he became involved in steelband. When she vex, anything she pick up you getting it; when you run away, make up your mind to get licks when you return. It was understandable. After all, his mother, Alricia James, had two sons and eight daughters to raise. So when Sonny and younger brother Fitzroy Gaga James decided they were going to join the steelband movement, both their running away and the hiding shed share out became a matter of course. Once I gone I make up my mind to get licks when I come back, Sonny says.

He was born in 1927, when the family lived in Oxford Street, and they moved to Quarry Street in east Port of Spain in 1936, so the band Sonny and Fitzroy joined was Casablanca. There was another reason too: their cousin Ossie Tom Campbell was one of the stalwarts of first Bar 20 and then Casablanca. Is Ossie who break me out, says Sonny. I used to lift weights and had a big body, but I wasnt in riot. Is Ossie who used to drag me. He say, You go just stay and watch? Come! And I in front with a seta fellas with cutlass. I didnt like that he teach me to defend myself. In those days of the 1940s and 1950s young men around Casablanca had to learn to box and wrestle under the tuition of noted street fighters such as James Batman Anderson. On Sundays at 42 Steps they bring boxing gloves and tell you, Fight he! and you had to fight. Nevertheless, when Casablanca was going out for a riotwhich they did perhaps more than any other band in the fortiesSonny made sure to walk with his slim, sharp, stiletto-like shoemakers knife. Those days panmen were outcasts but the blows they got were nothing compared to what a young girl received for consorting with them. When Ma James tried to get her youngest daughter Lera into Miss Paynes Private School in Quarry Street, Miss Payne refused to admit her because her brothers played pan for Casablanca. And when Lorna Baird, cousin to Renegades pioneers Joe and Desmond Baird, associated with Sonny, it was blows until they got married. My wife and all get licks for me, he recalls of Baird. Licks! Her mother and father used to cut her tail. How ironic then, that one of the earliest girls to join the steelband movement should be none other than Daisy, the second youngest sister of Sonny and Fitzroy. Born in 1938, she wasnt a rebel or a tomboy or anything so, just a curious little girl about six years old in 1945 who was fascinated by this little pan Fitzroy brought home one day. It had two-three notes, she recalls. To me it was like a toy. Of course she had to wait until he went out, then shed borrow this toy and practice whatever shed heard him playing. She didnt care if Sonny heard, thoughit wasnt his panso he knew. And one Saturday Sonny carried his little sister, without their mothers knowledge, to Casablancas panyard. Oscar Pile was standing on the steps, Art de Couteau was there too, Croppy, Patsy Haynes, she vividly remembers. They all had instruments. It also had some white people there. I didnt know the pan I had concerned that. It was the first time I see a steelband. The band was missing a lead player at a time when tourists had come to hear them, so Sonny had drafted the little girl in to fill the gap. He told her to play what hed heard her playing. In those early days the ping pong would first start up with its rhythm and play for a while before the rest of the band joined in. Daisy didn't even know what a steelband was, however, far less how they co-ordinated their instruments. When I hear the band start up it confused me, she admits. I forget what I used to play. Sonny patiently coaxed his little sistera lot depended on herand she soon recovered her composure, much to the delight of the tourists, who began throwing money at her. Alas, Sonny took it.

He take the notes and give me the coins, she recollects. After that he used to take me to play to play often and the white people would give me money. Even the coins she'd collected and carefully hidden under a stone in the yard Sonny appropriated in her absence, leaving Daisy searching the yard wondering which stone shed put her money under. Its true, Sonny says today with the mischief still in his voice. Daisy continued playing with the band, much more than Sonny, who for all his love of pan wasnt really a panman. Shed sneak out on her own when she could, some times getting caught by her mother and beaten with the pot spoon, other times being warned in time by the men so she could scurry away and deny any involvement. As for Sonny and Fitzroy, Mrs James, along with the parents of a few other Quarry Street youths such as Philmore Boots Davidson and Kenny and Kelvin Hart, decided if she couldnt stop them playing pan, at least they could get out of Casablanca. They called the boys, who agreed, and snuck out of Casablanca around 1950, when some of the badjohns were in jail for a riot with Rising Sun in Belmont. When we formed City Syncopaters, Ossie, James Anderson and them used to come and bus up we pan, says Sonny. We report it in the station and the police called Kenny Hart and Oscar Pile and said, Talk to your men and stop it. Daisy wasnt part of that, though, until one day she heard the sweetest music coming over the hills. She rushed out their Quarry Street house to see the boys tramping down the hill playing pan, moving straight into the Jamess yard and under the house. I was glad, she says. After that every day I pounding this one or that one, even though I still couldnt let she see me. As before, shed listen to them practising across the road in a vacant lot and quietly with her ping pong try to learn it. Until one day in 1956, when a little drama group she was in decided to hold a concert and they asked Daisy to play. The show was carded for 8 p.m. but by nine Education Minister John Donaldson, who was to open the proceedings, hadnt arrived. The crowd was restive. They began making noise and pounding chairs, and the organisers called on Daisy to entertain them. She resisted but they insisted. They pulled the curtain and I bowed and played Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I played it straight and then I started to rev (improvise). I got a standing ovation and they called for more, she says. I was frightenedgood thing I had learn two tunes. I played Indian Love Call. When I finish people clapped and Donaldson congratulated me. After that Daisy was never hindered from playing pan, which she continued up until the end of Synco in 1981. As for Sonny, hed dropped out long before, shortly after he got married, contenting himself thereafter with making mas for his first love, Casablanca.

RED ARMY'S RELUCTANT SOLDIER

Alfred Sack Mayers was perhaps one of the most unlikely pan pioneers, and also one of the most long-standing. Starting in the days of tamboo bamboo, Sack has remained up to today an active pannist, playing at the Wisconsin Summer Fest every year, even though much of the early steelband movement repelled him.

Born prematurely on January 12, 1927, he was frail as a baby. Sacky Winky his mother called the tiny infant she had to hold in a pillow when his eyes filled with tears although you could barely hear his cries. But years later his voice would become booming, as it pretty much still is. He grew up in London Street in Port of Spain and as a child hed see the Cobo Town tamboo bamboo players. From lunch theyd buy two-three bottles of rum and they all assemble in a yard to play the bamboo and chant songs, he recalls. That was around 1937. People used to be jumping up just as now they jump up with steelband. Mayerss father kept his sons away from the Cobo Town bamboo yard when there was stickfighting, though, and besides, the young Sack wasnt keen on it anyway. Every Saturday used to have bamboo and stickfighting, he says, admitting, It used to be nice but the bussin of the headI didnt like to see that. He wasnt too keen when the bamboo instruments were replaced by metal, either. They started with a sweet-oil can that was terrible to the ear, he says. Its a really noisy thing, and in those days the more noise you make the better because its the further away from you people will hear and they will come. But I couldnt take it. This thing was terrible and I didnt used to go nowhere near it. Still, when one Carlton Grimes collected some tin pans and started a little side called Boys from Bernardo (named after a movie about a juvenile prison) in his barrack yard in Sackville Street, Sacks older brother Clifford Seabee Mayers joined and encouraged Sack to do the same. During the war we just used to stay in the yard and playwe couldnt come on the street at all, you had to get that written permission from the police, he explains. It didnt have no tuning. If you feel to play bass you walk with your biscuit drum. Some people come with them sweet-oil tinO Lord, that was terrible. Pan was just rhythm. But Seabee Mayers was something of a saga boy, so when the war ended and the great saga boy band Red Army was formed, he moved over. Why allyou dont leave this stupidy band, man, Seabee coaxed Sack and the other boys from Bernardo. Come up the road and join a big band. Why not? Red Army was located quite up Prince Street, so there was little chance of their disapproving father discovering they were in a steelband. He didnt want me take no part in steelband at all--but he eh coming up Prince Street to see me, says Sack. When he come home all around seven, eight he tight and he want to know all what go on for the whole day, who do what, who misbehave, who get licks. Fortunately, his mother was more sympathetic. Better he do that than go out gambling and get into trouble, shed intercede for the son whod been so fragile as a baby. What made Red Army doubly attractive to the Cobotown youth was that it had some of the baddest men in town, so nobody would mess with them when you were with that band. Still, initially Sack was cautious. The first Carnival in 1946 I didnt play, I just walk and follow them all where they go cause my brother was with them, he says. I walk on the pavement because everybody so fraid that band. After that he began to take a little knock, but still he kept a distance and when the first islandwide steelband competition was held later in 1946 at the Mucurapo Stadium (where Fatima College is now), Sack didnt try to get into the Red Army stage side, even though he was good on the ping pong.

I was scared to go and playI figured if I go to play I putting somebody off and I mighta get my head bus, he explains. So I just go and stand up in the yard and hear them practice. It had a lot of men I was better than, so any time I take up a pan they couldnt make the stage side--so I coulda get lash from about three people. Sun Valley won, but Red Army had the sharpest panmen and they were given the prize for best-dressed bandwhich led to their being chosen by promoter Ranny Phillip to tour British Guiana. It was the first time a steelband ever went abroad, and they were rehearsing when Sack made passed by the yard and couldnt resist taking a knock. Two older members accosted him. Whe you doing? one flashy but untalented panman named Basil Lucas asked. You focking me up? I want to go BG. Sack backed off, which was just as well, because they got into a riot down there and ended up making a jail. By the end of the Forties the younger players in the band were becoming fed up with Red Armys continuous fighting, fighting, fighting, so Leonard Morris decided he was leaving to start another band. Boy, you got to be careful, warned Sack. When Red Army hear we pull out is licks in all of we backside whenever they see we in the road. They hived off anyway, taking the younger players (including one youth named Rudy Smith who walked as if he had two left legs). They got John Slater from Crusaders to tune for them. For protection from Red Army they enlisted the assistance one of the Red Army badjohns, Nancy, who brought along his equally ignorant brother. (Eventually many of the old Red Army became their supporters.) And thus was born Merry Makers Steel Orchestra in Sacks yard in Sackville Street, one of the great stage sides. Shorn of the badjohn image and back in Cobotown once more, Merry Makers almost immediately began attracting a different kind of youth: St Marys College boys like Ernest Fereira and Curtis Pierre. They used to come in the yard when we practising and theyd come and stand up by me because Id mix and make joke with all of them, says Sack. They was a bunch of college boys and white children and I figured, look when you playing a pan you is a badjohn? Well, let me see if they go put that stigma on to the white children too. Merry Makers began getting the big jobs playing at hotels and restaurants, even replacing Invaders as the Little Carib Theatres house band in 1957. And they began touring overseas, starting with a Suriname gig in 1956, then Canada in 1958, until 1962 when the band left to perform at the US bases in Germany and remained in Europe, travelling from place to place, dropping off panmen to take root like wildflowers in different countries, until somewhere in Spain the Merry Makers Steel Orchestra dwindled into nothing.

THE IRON MAN IN THE ENGINE

This year, or indeed any of the past 40 years, if you looked in Starlifts engine room, day or night, youd see a tall dark man beating iron. His name is Carlton Drayton, but hes better known to the steelband world by the name David Rudder uses for him in Engine Room: Maifan.

Born on August 14, 1937 he inherited the name Maifan from his brother Kenrick Drayton, who was several years older and the first one to be called Maifan. The older brother, who was working at the Trinidad Guardian and was something of a dandy, became involved in Red Army, for which he blew bugle. He got a bugle borrowed and came home with this thing keeping one seta noise, recalls Maifan. Only bands in that area (east Port of Spain) had buglesCasablanca, Hill 60, Tokyo, Red Army and Fascinators. Desperadoes didnt have, and the west never got involved in that. It used to sound nice, though, and it would still sound nice today. With a big brother playing such a prominent role in such an infamous band, when Carlton entered the steelband movement he became known as Little Maifan until the big brother stopped playing pan and the younger one inherited the full nickname. Maifan (the younger) never followed his brother into Red Army, though. Growing up in Buller Street, he entered the band two blocks away, which was also Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley's first: Hellzapoppin. They were in 17 Macdonald Street in Woodbrook, he recalls. Ernest Arthur was the leader. It was there I met Chick McGrewUlric Springer was his real name. That was 1946, when Maifan was ten and Springer won a bicycle in the first islandwide steelband competition by playing his pan with two hands when all the soloists, including first runner-up Ellie Mannette, were still using only one hand. Although most pans at the time were rudimentary in the extremeeight notes on a ping pong, two on a du dupthe iron, a car brakehub, was there already, and it would remain almost unchanged to the present. Gerald Gittens used to beat that, says Maifan. Id be amazed at how he could do that. It looked so difficult, he beating and in time. It was very strenuous. He didnt remain in Hellzapoppin long. One evening a year or two after Maifan had begun playing ping pong with Hellzapoppin, Invaders passed along Macdonald Street. I found they sounded so good, I took a little jump with them and followed them all the way to the Oval, he says. A week after I went to the panyard, introduced myself and asked to join the band. Maifan was playing ping pong then, and he soon moved to tune boomthe biscuit drum with a few notes that was the bass in the band. But pan was soon to change, for an accomplished musician from the St Lucia police band, Lt Nathaniel Griffiths, had been chosen to take charge of the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) for the 1951 Festival of Britain. He is a man what never get the recognition he deserved, says Maifan, remembering the quantum leap pan took under Griffithss direction. About two weeks after Taspo formed, Ellie (Mannette) came into the yard and say, Youall go see something youall go marvel at. The police bandsman had calculated the notes which were needed for a steel orchestra to have a full symphonic scale, and had ordered Tony Williams to invent the necessary pans and put the notes on. Williams explained to Griffiths that no more notes could hold on a pan. Griffiths replied with a suggestion that shocked the Taspo players and the wider steelband community: Then use two pans. Come down an afternoon when we practising, Ellie told us, recalls Maifan. When we went we were shocked to see one man playing two pans. Boots (Davidson) was on bass, Sterling Betancourt was on guitar and Tony Williams on cello. We were

mystified, but Lt Griffiths had the vision and it still have the double guitar, the double cello. In the forties and fifties Invaders had the best sounding pans by far. Not only was their captain Ellie Mannette the greatest tuner ever. The band also had several excellent tuners such as Mannette's brother Vernon Birdie Mannette, his cousin Herman Gomez, Kelvin Dove and Cobo Jack. In that band even the iron was tuned. Fellas used to come in Invaders with they iron and Ellie would tell them, Na man, you cyar do thatthat iron eh tuned. Tune? they asking, says Maifan. After some years fellas realise you have to tune iron: some C, some G, some F. Mannette himself played iron for Invaders, along with Francis Wickham, who still does, and Kent Jones. Maifan only moved into the engine room after hed left Invaders in 1956 to help out a tiny new band called Starlift. It was about seven of them in Eugene Peters yard with a set of old Hit Paraders pans Kelvin Dove had tuned, says Maifan. Then around November they say they want to bring the band out on the road. Allyou mad? I asked. But they werent. Theyd joined forces with another small band, Saigon, and had organised to get some more pans from yet another small band, Starland. That was Brian Griffiths band and it had a lot of Chinese. Hit Paraders was Chinese too, and when Starlift formed it was the same, says Maifan. Only five negroes you could say was in Starliftall the rest was Chinese, French Creoles, like Silver Stars. Monday they played Rock Around the Clock and Tuesday Undersea Kingdom, but their rhythm section wasnt up to mark, and the following year Maifan, the captain Albert James and the previous captain Eugene Peters began to play iron. Thereafter Maifan has concentrated on iron, even though he still takes the occasional knock on the guitar pans. People look slight at the rhythm section but it important. Take the scratcher listen to Renegades rhythm section and hear how nice the scratcher is. Cow bellAll Stars is number one for that. You should see Eddie Hart with a scratcher: he very good, points out Maifan. When it come to iron they cyar touch we with that. You know a west band from how they iron sounding. I does take a knock with Phase II and I could tell when the fellas not from the westthey play a different way. In the sixties Maifan was playing iron like everyone else, holding it shoulder level between his thumb and forefinger, until one Sunday morning in 1968 when the band was rehearsing Ray Holmans arrangement of Jane. Maifan was gently knocking his iron which rested on the rhythm stand and he picked up another twig and began to tap someone elses brake hub. And, he says, it just blossom. Thus was invented the two-tone iron rhythm which every band uses today as its basic timing. And as for the inventor, Maifan Drayton, he still there in the engine room, jammin and jammin and jammin because, as Rudder sang, this thing could never die, ever.

THE BIGGER THE BETTER

In the earlies, panmen were often good sportsmen. They played football and cricket, they wrestled and boxed. But few were as versatile as George Bigger

Braithwaite, who also played basketball and lawn tennis (he umpired the US Open in 1981), taught ballroom dancing and had a music band. Born to Charlie and Theresa Braithwaite in 1924, the first of three boys and one girl, Bigger grew up in the house where he still lives on Broadway, San Fernando. Next door was the community tamboo bamboo yard, where hed take a knock on the cutter. They practiced on evenings just for Carnival and you had to chant, he recalls. Those days bamboo was for Indian and little stick bands. Historical mas had guitar and cuatro. All that changed from about 1942, when the fishermen on the wharf formed a rudimentary steelband called Royal Air Force. Their example was immediately followed by Pearl Harbour on Mucurapo Street, Cross of Lorraine on the track joining Prince and Cipero Streets, and Broadway Syncopators. I chose the name after Archie MacLeans music band Broadway Syncopators, Bigger explains. We used to go down by the sea and practice to not disturb anybody. It didnt have no notes, only old paint pan, and you blowing them old car horn what bus up all your lip, but you still blowing. They didnt only beat iron by the sea, for most of the Broadway youths were good swimmers. Indeed, their aquatic habits had already served Bigger in good stead when he was about 14 and decided to join some older youths planning to run away to Venezuela. After some weeks of saving up whatever cents he could and learning a little Spanish, Bigger joined the older boys one afternoon to steal a boat and row to the Main. About a mile out, just approaching Farillon Rock, Bigger had a change of heart and decided he didnt want to go. Swim back, nah, the others suggested. As darkness fell, he begged them, tears running down his cheeks, to turn around the boat, but the two rowers continued straight ahead. In desperation, Bigger jumped overboard to compel them to return to Trinidad. As he trod water, however, he realized to his dismay that the boat was steadily drawing away from him. So he began swimming. He reached San Fernando about eight that night and ran all the way home, not looking back as he sprinted past the silk cotton tree by the cemetery. Bigger got licks when he got home, but nothing compared to what the others got when the Venezuelan police held them and deported them all back home weeks later in flourbag clothes and alpagats. The war ran its course and the Government gave the steelbands licence to celebrate on the streets on VE Day, 1945. Bigger and his friends began rehearsing on their old paint pans. The pans werent any good, though, and the bottoms began bursting off. Pans werent as easy to get as in Port of Spain, however, so the Broadway boys had to get the bases welded on. I used to cuff a drum from here to McEnearney and it used to burst, he recalls. I dont know why I used to be hitting it so hard. Perhaps it was because of his enormous strength or maybe it was his penchant for boxing and wrestling. A man from India teach me to wrestlehe showed me all the points on the human bodybut when I started to weigh 200 pounds, then I began to box. Whatever the reason why they mashed up the pans, once Broadway Syncopators began to weld their pans at the railroad garage (where one Randolph Burroughs was a mechanic), Bigger also began to tune them. And for the 1946 Carnival, they changed their name and brought out a band of reckless sailors.

Kenneth Vincents grandmother had a room where we used to lime after she died. We called it Hatters Castle, after a horror picture, says Bigger. So we called the band Broadway Hatters. Bigger was playing bass for Hatters on Jouvert, but once that was over he concentrated on making the bands mas, putting the decorations on hundreds of naval costumes. All the while Bigger was also involved in dancinghe came third in an islandwide dancing competition in 1946and in a music band, drumming for the Melody Masters in 1942. After some years he moved over to Starlight. He also played with great bandleaders like Edwin Payne and Al Timothy, until he formed his own band, George Brathwaite and the Tinpanny Five. We used play in weddings, christenings. I used to take a marching for $20, he says, explaining: A friendly society would have their annual march, when theyd go from the hall to a church service and back to the hall. Bigger withdrew from Hatters in the early Sixties, after which it collapsed, so when the Broadway youths decided to revive the band around 1966, they called on him once again. He raised over $1,000 to buy pans from Cavaliers and for a brief period started back playing bass. Since then, Bigger has remained a close supporter of the community band he formed a half-century ago, and a mentor to its younger members, who still visit the house on Broadway whose fence advertises the classes he still gives in ballroom dancing

BLANCAS BUGLE BOY

Once someone bet Kendolph Cokey Mason a bottle of scotch that steelband never had bugles. Come by me, Mason said. Ill show you something. It was a foregone conclusion, for not only was Mason a bugler for the band with the greatest bugle sideCasablanca--but he also had proof in the form of a photograph. Why, he even had the bugle still. Fred Corbin bring the bugles for the bandabout seven of them and two trumpet-bugles, recalled Mason, calling to mind one of the bands pioneers. I dont know where he got them. It was partly its link with the Belmont orphanage that made Casablanca one of the most musical of the early bands, for the countrys top musicians were mainly from Belmont or Tacarigua. And Casablanca was a Gonzales band from its inception under the house of the Masons on 11 Blackett Lane. I had a nice understanding with my family. My father didnt play mas but they would give me money to play, said Mason. So even though I was an acolyte in the church, it wasnt no problem to have the pans under my house. It wasnt his first steelband, though, for Mason and his younger brother James were members of the Gonzales band Bataan until the group of youngsters formed their own band, which they named after the Bogart movie, Casablanca. As Mason reminisced about the first members of the band last week, Renegades pioneer Joseph Baird interrupted to recall when he first heard a bugle, in 1945. I was in Royal Cinema. The picture had now stopped and I hear people running, like a stampede,

said Baird. It was VE or VJ day and I run out too and I see Chamberlainhe was tall, bigblasting the bugle. Neville Chamberlain was from Tokyo, and some credit him with starting the bugling tradition when he began blowing a car horn with a trumpet mouthpiece attached. Either way, it was the town bands which specialised in bugling. In St James, Tripolis Joe Crick carried a bugle with his admirals uniform, and Badman from Sun Valley called the players to practice with one. But the bugling bands up north were Red Army, Tokyo, Rising Sun, Hill 60, Crusaders, All Stars and, especially, Casablanca. I used to play second pan but I liked a challenge too bad, said Mason of those days in the Forties and Fifties. When bands met, its then the bugles excelled to drown out the next band. I loved that. So there Mason found himself, among orphanage boys Clyde Holdip, Conrad Jones, Sonny Cummings and others. Conrad was better than me but he never played on the road, Mason recalled. He was a trumpeter and played during Carnival for a music band. Casablanca men got their bugles from the nearby orphanage, just as the Dinsley band Boom Town got its bugles from the Tacarigua orphanage, but other bands also got them from the Americans on the basethe bigger trumpet-bugles. These instruments came into the steelband movement when panmen began to aspire to playing melodies but their lead ping pongs couldnt yet make the grade: they had too few notes and, besides, they werent loud enough. But those were the rioting days and the bugles were also valued for their martial sound and their link with the military world. The strongest thing in the world is keg, Mason explained, using the old word for the home-made skin drums. If you concentrate on a drum it carry you anywhere. It manifest in you. Pan was just rhythm too, but we lose that when we get melody. And when steelbands became melodically complete, the bugles began to fade out of the movement, and Mason turned his hand to mas. Since his childhood in the Thirties hed liked mas: Indian mas, dragon mas. His stepfather played with King Tempters devil band. Mason himself began to build mas for Casablanca. Once he made so many costumes, bent so much wire for different bands, that he sat in a rocking chair for a rest after Jouvert and had to be awakened to play on Tuesday morning. In those days Casablanca played French Sailors on Monday and some mas on Tuesday, such as Masai Warriors. But it was devil masCasablanca once played Dantes Inferno and Satans Kingdomwhich Mason became known for, and which he played until two years ago. The nearest thing to dragon mas is ballet. That is our ballet, he argued. I played all characters in that, and you have to dance till you go back home. And he described the many characters in the dragon bands of long ago. It had horn, bell, executioner with axe, executioner with mallet, he said, talking about the halfscale imps, the whole-scale imps, the wooly man who danced like a skittish mimic, the upper man whose top half was scorched from feeding the fire-breathing Beast. The character whom people refer to today as the Bookman was really Beelzebub, who carried the book and pen to note the names of evil people. His was the Book of Justice.

But all dragon men does smile behind their mask, said Mason And he explained how the mas became manifest in you just as the African drums did. Then you know the step you making before you make it.

ARTHUR TRAMCAR
Now 72 years old, he walks slowly, bent by the rheumatism which hardly allows him to even sit comfortably. A pinched spinal nerve has made recent years a haze of pain. But Arthur Tramcar Andrews wasnt always so. Once he was agility and poise itself, when he waved flag for the Belmont band Rising Sun. Born in 1925 he grew up the only child of Camilla Andrews in Erthig Road, Belmont, and she ruled him strictly. He wasn't, for instance, allowed to jump in the Belmont tamboo band when they passed by his house. My mother had a left hand that hit you like a jackass, he says with a laugh. I get enough lash from that. Still, he began playing mas from age eight with Jim Harding's sailor band, USS Mischevious, through the more benign influence of his mother's mother, Alphosine Andrews, the household matriarch. Give him a chance and let him have a good time, she ruled and she paid the five shillings for his sailor suit. Thus Arthur Tramcar was set on the track that would lead him to fame as a steelband flagman. His grandmother's influence didn't always turn out so well, however, and when she told a relative who taught at Rosary Boys to keep an eye on the boy, it backfired. He used me as a target. Anybody he want to lash, its me, recalls Andrews. And that continued until one evening when he was 16 years old and in Fourth Standard. He played football for the school and was planning strategy with the team when the teacher approached silently. He clout me from behind on my headI still don't know why, says Arthur Tramcar laconically. But I stopped him instantly: I put him down. So he ran away to sea. That is, he left home as if for school, hid his copybook under a nearby bridge, and tramped to the wharf where he hung around by the fishermen. I didnt know about fishing but a friend give me an old pants and shirt and I helped him on the boat. Thus began the fishing career which Arthur Tramcar followed for 34 years. You see what come from inexperience? he says, displaying the wire scars on his pointing finger. Long time I couldn't touch a ladys face with this hand it was so hard. I used to stick pins in it and they'd stand up. Calloused hands didnt impede the delicacy with which he learnt to fly a flag, however, nor did a maritime vocation interfere with his terrestrial hobby of tramcar hopping, which earned him the nickname by which he is known today. From young he practiced the dangerous art of jumping on to the moving tramcars which circled Belmont, until it became second nature. He didn't run behind the tram to jump on, as most people would who chose to ignore the clear prohibition against tramcar hopping. Instead he sprinted straight towards it, launching himself airborne about six feet away, timing the vehicles speed so as to land on the footboard exactly between its vertical handrails. I did it just for fun, playing with my life, he says. If you touched the rail in front you, the speed of the tram, the jerk, would pelt you off. A man, hearing of his skill, once challenged him just in front the Oval to see who was better. Arthur Tramcar rode his bicycle down Wrightson Road and told the tram

driver about it. We having a competitionIll leave him to you, he warned the driver, and he rode back to the Oval to wait. The tram trundled up at top speed. The challenger, heading to St James, was to go first. As the tram approached, the driver reduced the electricity powering the car, so it was coasting fast, and as the man jumped the driver powered the tram up again. It jumped forward. From the time he touch the railgoodbye! recalls Arthur Tramcar. He down on the concrete. Then Arthur Tramcar's turn came, the tram barrelling along at its flat-out six mph. He leapt for the front, touched down briefly on the footboard, jumped immediately back to the ground while pivoting on the rail behind so the road would kick his feet back up on to the floorboard at the third rail which he grabbed, repeating the manoeuver all the way down to the end of the tram. It was a similar audaciousness and grace he brought to the flagwaving which steelbands began in earnest at the end of the Second World War. It was on VE (Victory in Europe) Day when the band came out, he reminisces. I don't know who made the flag but as I see it I fell in love. Short George had it but he didn't like that, he liked to beat boom so I took it. The bamboo pole was about seven feet long with a flag a yard and a half wide bearing the Japanese symbol of the rising sun. That flag was labour! It was too heavy so I went home and cut the pole shorter, but the cloth was too heavy too so I cut that shorter also, he says, explaining how he soon learnt the correct balance for a flag, with the pole being slightly heavier than the cloth. If you see a man with a little pole and a lot of cloth, he working hard, he labouring to keep the flag going, which shouldn't be, he says. The pole must be able to carry the cloth so when you hold it at the junction you just using your fingers. And yet the flag had to be big enoughsix foot for the pole, the cloth just under a yard wideanything smaller being dismissed as a little piece of bunting. Steelbands on the road were all led by flagmen, or women in the case of Trinidad All Stars for whom Mayfield Camps and Yvonne Bubulups Smith waved flag. But most of them Arthur Tramcar considers mere flag carriers without knowledge of the true art of twirling the flag so it was always flying without rolls or falling down, yet moving slowly enough so the writing could be read. Then when the rhythm take you you could do whatever your mind tell you to try; thats when the music talking to you and you dancing and putting in all kind of moves. So when Arthur Tramcar waved in front Rising Sun to clear the road, not parting the crowd by threatening to hit anyone but by his sheer skill at the dance. Sometimes a flag will fallno matter how good you is, a flag bound to fall if for instance somebody bounce you from behind, he says. Then I catch it before it touch the ground, working that movement into my dance too. Its an art hardly seen todayonly perhaps in Exodus or Invaders. But even in his era there weren't many whom Arthur Tramcar felt was in his class: just a few like Black James from Tokyo or Jim Bill from Casablanca. Jim was the best, the only man who mighta been better than me, he admits. But there was a difference between us because I danced sailor while he danced fireman. Ironically, it was a Casablanca man who began edging Arthur Tramcar out of the steelband world in the early Fifties when that band rioted with Rising Sun. What you doing hereyou don't know they in riot? Casablanca fighter Daniel Barker asked Arthur Tramcar one evening when he was walking home from work along Observatory

Street. Barkers warning came too late, however, for he hardly had time to shout Look out! when another Casablanca man slashed Arthur Tramcar in the back. He spun around only to get the army penknife in his chest. Thirty three stitches worth of slashes cooled his ardour, and then within a year or two his back problem began. He played mas a few times with Rudolph Corbys historical band from Belle Eau Road but his Carnival days were effectively over. Rising Sun was unluckyother bands what died left behind sub-bands but they didn't leave anything, he concludes wistfully. Except, of course, the distinction of having been led by one of the greatest flagwavers in steelband history.

MILTON LYONS
If ever a steelband was a family affair, it was the Southern Marines of Marabella. Whereas most bands might have had two or three brothers such as Invaders Ellie, Ossie and Birdie Mannette or Casablancas Kelvin and Kenny Hart, Southern Marines was founded mainly by the five Lyons brothers and their neighbours, the five Green brothers with whom they went to Marabella Boys EC school, limed, swam in the sea and hunted crabs. It all began when I was still at school, recounts Milton Squeezer Lyons. That was towards the end of the Second World war, for Milton was born in 1931. My brother Harold was working Pointe-a-Pierre and one day he brought home two pieces of drums. Theyd already heard pan when one youth produced one and played it at a Christmas fete in Marabella. But this time when Harold brought home the two cut drums, it was different. Leonard, another brother, told me they were tuning pans now, says Milton. I dont know where he learn but he told me to light a fire and burn the drum first. Then he said to pound the bottom of the pan out, give it some dents with the hammer, and that was it. Once Leonard Sonny and Milton Lyons began knocking on the two pans, the other boys fell in automatically. So it was John, Harold, Sonny, Milton and Fitzroy Lyons and Malcolm, Ulric, Billy, Hollis and Lloyd Green. But Sonny who was the musical onefrom school he coulda sing and was taking some music lessons, piano or guitar. He wasnt into sports but musically he had real talent, says Milton. Once the others come around Harold had to get more paint tins so we could make pans for them. Even during the war, before the band had a name, they paraded the Marabella streets, scattering when the police came. They also played at sporting matches in the village, and competed informally against the nearby Vistabella bands such as Black Swan and Rising Sun by the beach known as The Iron (judging was done by their parents). And they practiced. Except in Lent or on Sundays, says Milton. By the time the war was over the band was sounding good, Milton went to learn a trade with Battoo Brothers bus company (sweeping the garage for no pay until he graduated to 60 cents per week) and in 1946 the elders suggested the band choose a name. Milton suggested Music Makers; someone else offered Village Boys. But bands at the time were choosing more warlike names so when Sonny came up with Marines it was accepted. A year after, to distinguish them from a band theyd heard about in Port of Spain named Marines, they added Southern.

Like most panmen at the time, they gambled. We used to play under the Pointea-Pierre bridge, says Milton. Police even make a raid and lock up a few but I dived in the river and get away. It was in these sessions that Milton got the nickname many call him today: Squeezer from his penchant for squeezing the cards in romey, that is, never handing out what another man might want. The Marabella youths werent at all warlike like Port of Spain panmen, though, and indeed their parents and other village elders such as one Mr Griffithan accomplished mouth organist and singermanaged and advised the Marines. Why, Harold Lyons was the captain even though Sonny was more involved in the band and Milton the most outstanding pannist, simply because Harold was older. Consequently, when the 1950 steelband association was formed to stop the riots, Southern Marines abstained. We didnt join because we had no badjohns and we all decided to stay out, says Milton, lamenting that only members of the association were eligible to be picked to go to England in 1951 with the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra. I was a favourite in South with Theo Stephens and Belgrave Bonaparte. By the early Fifties Milton had graduated to repairing bus engines, which he did throughout the many changes in ownership of the bus company (right down to 1990 when he retired from PTSC). Later in the Fifties Harold got married and moved away. The band was till based in the Lyons yard, though, and Milton took over leadership, just in time to confront the greatest crisis to which steelbands were pronea split down the centre. The occasion was the fourth Steelband Festival when the band topped the scores in the South preliminaries at Naparima Bowl, in 1959, playing La Macarina. Sonny had chosen the tune but had decided the band should play a different tune, Love Walk In, for the semi-finals. If allyou play the same tune, I staying in my house, threatened the recently-married Sonny. A good tune never dies, argued the youngest brother, Fitzroy, who also was determined to drop out if his choice wasnt played. Both brothers were able to convince a section to boycott, so a meeting was called at which the captain was to decide one way or the other. I was the captain but I and all was confused, so I made no decision, recalls Milton. I postponed the meeting until the following night. And in the interim he lobbied. He asked friends of both brothers to talk to them; he got influential elders and supporters like Everton Smith to intercede; he had their mother try mediation; Milton even spoke to Sonnys new wife. Hug him in the night and tell him he cyar let me down like that, he implored. Nothing worked. But Milton reckoned Sonnys loss would have weakened the band more than Fitzroys, so they changed tune and failed to qualify for the finals. Personally, however, Milton fared better for he went on to top the overall ping pong solo category of the Festival with Winnifred Atwells Saronata. Southern Marines wasnt the only band Milton led. In the mid-Sixties he also formed the Public Transport Service Corporation Steel Orchestra, but again his band was a victim of pulling and tugging, this time on a larger scale. It was during the big 69 strike, he says. The company wanted us to continue and the shop stewards said, No way! Some players agreed with one side, others supported the union, so Milton folded up the band and donated the pans to a small steelband on the wharf. Milton remained the captain of Southern Marines until the early Seventies when his mother the bands matriarch with whom hed lived all his life, died. Depressed,

Milton felt he couldnt cope and he passed leadership to the bands present captain Michael Scobie Joseph.

THE WOLF AT THE CROSSROADS

Hells Kitchen was around the corner in Church Street opposite the school, says Winston Wolf King as he sits in the same Quamina Street home, St James, where he grew up as a boy. In those days it was called Mary Street. It was just a lot of youths beating all kinda milk pan, dustbinanything you could get to make noise, he explains. As long as school over and we eh have nothing to do, we gone and we beating pan. When was that? Wolf scratches his face and squints his eyes but still cant say. He summons Ralph French, who lives in the same compound and was also in Hells Kitchen. I was around five or six, says French. And I was born in 1936. That puts it around 1942, during the Second World War. King, who was born in 1926, would have been 16. Hells Kitchen (an early Tunapuna band had the same name) was taken from a film, says French. Kings nickname, Wolf, came from a film too: Harlem on the Prairie, about a gang of black outlaws led by Wolf King. French warms to his topic and asks, What was the first movie made in Trinidad? Fire Down Below, I ventured. No, said French, Affair in Trinidad with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth. He disappeared to get proof and King continued his narrative. Hells Kitchen mashed up when people get bigger and migrate to bigger bands, recalled King. French moved from Sun Valley to Nob Hill and then North Stars. Northern Stars, French corrects, giving the title of the Humphrey Bogart film after which Tony Williams great band was first called. Kings father like his involvement in steelband, even though hed sent him before the war to music classes. Every evening my old man wind up a thing that does go ticktock and all the children have to sing: White sand and grey sand, recalls King. When steelband emerged, however, King had already gone to live with an aunt. I joined Harlem Nightingales at 20 Guthrie Street, what became Sun Valley when Sonny Roach took over. In Sun Valley King learnt to tune under the great Sonny Sire Roach, and from there he moved to the band he led and for which he tuned, arranged and designed mas Crossroads, named after a William Powell movie. They hadnt always been a band, though. Before that they were just a group of youths liming at the corner of Jerry and Angelina Streets. John Daddy Cole was one of the Crossroads limers. We learn to dance there, jitterbug and foxtrot, practicing with no music, Cole recalls. We used to go races at the Savannahit had fair and dance after in the Princes Buildingand we wearing flannel pants and Brazilian shoe and we used to have a T-shirt with a cross printed on it. Born in 1929, Cole grew up in Ranjit Kumar StreetStone Street it was called in those days, when it was just a dirt road. In those days St James only had pitch roads where it had cemeteries: Nizam Street, Long Circular Road because of the soldiers burying ground, and Bournes Road because of the pauper cemetery and the hangman cemetery, reflects Cole. Maybe they wanted the last rites to be a smooth ride.

Just up the road a group of them began beating Dancow milk tins and makeshift bass drums in the Forties. For sticks theyd use cocoyea stems on which were stuck tiny, round green mangos. Then take any old bowltensil and all we usedand put about six layers of brown shop-kite paper and soft breadfruit across the top, he says. We also used to take OK keg buttersalt butter pansand stretch motor car tube over it. I always liked percussion. Coles introduction to real pan, however, was from Arthur Josephpopularly known as Short Arthurliving one house away. Born to an Indian mother and African father, Short Arthur was big in the St James Hosay and he taught Cole to play gatkathe Indian form of stickfighting in which a stick is held in one hand and a small shield in the other. I was still in short pants and Short Arthur was much older but he liked me, recalls Cole. He used to mind gamecock and turn Red Moon for Hosay. He got married under bamboo. Those days Id go around and help beat dholak, majira and dhantal. And it was Short Arthur who got the Crossroads limers to form a steelband and asked Wolf King to tune for them. Immediately, says Cole, We start thiefing pans from all about. Crossroads was formed around 1950 in Short Arthurs yard but the neighbours complained of the noise, so they moved to Wolf Kings yard in Quamina Street. By then King was a good tuner and a good tenor player and so he was invited to practice with the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo). His wife had recently given birth, however, so he didnt bother with them. Once he tuned a few pans in a style he called The Rose, grooving the inner notes to form the petals of a rose. I make four, he says. By the time the band come back it eh have none: people thief them. I say thats the end of that. He also designed mas for Crossroads. The first year they brought out a head mas, Atomic Bomb. Unfortunately the bomb, which was meant to stand out straight, succumbed to gravity. Everybody, says King, called it Totee Nose. It wasnt a good start but Crossroads improved considerably once King and Gary Mascall got their length. Mascall, a straightener, lived opposite King, who learnt from him, and together they brought out a Mucumbi Warriors mas that was carried in Time magazine, using mops to look like dada head, and when the band reached Park Street, actor Van Heflin, from whose movie the mas was taken, joined them. King and Mascall also made a baseball mas that got into the Saturday Evening Post. Mascall show us how to bend wire and weld. He didnt play pan but he made the mas, says King. Hed use pitch oil tin instead of copper to make the helmets of the Toltec Warriors. Another year they dug up the paupers cemetery to retrieve the skulls for their costumes. Then King started to arrange for them, drawing on what hed learnt as a child. I was the only one with musical ideas, he says, explaining how Crossroads played their famous Crying in the Chapel on the road in 1954. I didnt like to beat calypso on Carnival, I beat things like the Warsaw Concerto and Serenade from the Student Prince. It was the Sunday before Carnival when the band played for a christening in Cocorite. Crying was such a hit in the party they played it all the way back to the panyard, where it was rearranged into calypso tempo for the road.

Crossroads never became a big band. When we leave the yard fellas used to say if you cyar come back with the pan, take it, says Cole, explaining that theyd never had enough relief players to take a pan to if you needed a rest. The reason was that in peaceful St James Crossroads early on developed a reputation for getting into fights. They skirmished with North Stars, they bickered with Invaders, they fought with Renegades. Smacky, Jap, Major Domo, Scaramouchethey were some of the fighters, says Cole. Scaramouche cut off somebody hand and get three years. It had a gang in Belle Vue that used to terrorise people and we ban them from St Jamesthat was how we start putting pitch oil in bottle to pelt at man. The younger players began to leave them. One section hived off to form a band by Isaac Terrace called Stargazers. Hugo Besson went to Invaders with Vats Duncan. So too did Norman Darway. Cole himself went to Hit Paraders, which eventually became Starlift. As for King, he stuck with Crossroads until 1959 when the band became embroiled in a serious riot between Desperadoes, San Juan All Stars and Tokyo on Charlotte Street by the Colonial Hospital. We was swinging from New Street just when the riot start and Citos Fruits and Flowers get mash up, says King. We get lick up too, playing Apache Warriors; all the stands get mash up. I tell the masqueraders find a band to jump in and we bring the stands back to the yard. After that I closed shop. Thereafter Wolf King stopped tuning, arranging and playing pan, and limited himself solely to building stands for steelbands.

KING XAVIER
Its well known in this country that a mans mouth can get him into trouble, and of none is this more true than of Rudolph Xavier, one of Trinidads last surviving chantwells, who in the African tradition sang for work and for pleasure and for his pains was shot and sent to gaol. Born in 1911 in Victoria Village, Santa Cruz, Xavier was the second youngest of his mothers seven boys and one girl. He moved as an infant with his mother to Besson Street, Port of Spain. She was a marchande who sold in the market. One of his most vivid memories from those days is of the nearby quarry. I used to stand every morning by the gap to see the prisoners from the jail marching under turnkey protection, going to work, he recalls. The men were wearing flourbag jail clothes, in their belt every one have an enamel or galvanize cup, and they carrying toolsshovel, pickaxe, crowbar, sledge hammermarching from the Royal Gaol to the quarry. He couldnt have guessed how close hed come later in life to joining them. Opposite was a barracks yard where on Sundays the little boy watched small-islanders holding their African drum dances. Xavier moved to San Fernando as a teenager with his mother. As in Port of Spain, he assisted her vending in the market, but around 16 years old he developed greater ambitions so he borrowed an older brothers khaki trousers and, pretending to be 21, he sought work in Pointe-a-Pierre.

He started rolling pitch oil drums in the bond for six cents an hour, nine hours a day; when that ended he got another job on a pipe-fitting section, and there it was that he began singing for his supper. There was no machines, no crane, no tractor, no forklift, he explains. Everything was man-handled. If they had a tank to build, men dragged the sheets there from the nearest spot where the trucks dropped them. Theyd put the steel sheets to roll on four-inch pipes, and the men would be heaving as they responded to the call of a chantwell. Call: Mary gone a-mountain Response: High land dey Call: She gone for yellow plantain Response: High land dey Call: Hooray, Miss Mary Response: High land dey Call: What you going to cook today? There were songs to drag sheets by, shorter ones to lift rigs by, stacatto spoken call-responses for threading pipesevery one of the many different manual gang tasks was done in the African fashion to song, and the leader who set the rhythm of work was the chantwell. His was an invaluable role which depended on the inspiring qualities of the singing, and his sense of timing because it determined the pace and efficiency of work. And although every gang had its chantwell, they all wanted Xavier for the power and sweetness of his voice. My job was to sing and to see if everything was going properly, or else Id have to stop the gang, says Xavier. If you singing too fast the men might bawl, Hold it, hold it, but when it going good the fellas get a zeal and they vex when the work stop. If we working near the road people passing by would stop and join us because we working with harmony and love. Back home with his friends Xavier also sang, this time to the rhythms of Key brand gin bottles and lengths of bamboo. Sometimes hed sing with more orthodox instruments such as a guitar, at a christening. And as was inevitable, he became the chantwell for a tamboo bamboo band, Toll Gate bamboo band from Cipero Street. That was where he limed, even though he was living on Coffee Street by then in the Thirties, and he quickly became known as King Xavier. One Carnival Tuesday when he was leading the band from competition in Skinner Park, one player was so filled to overflowing with grog and gladness, he waved his shirt and began shouting that he didnt care if he died, when he died bury his clothes. Xavier took the exclamation and turned it into the chant which would become the most famous: I dont want no one to wear me clothes When ah dead bury me clothes Not even me brother must wear me clothes Today he isnt known for composing that chant, which was a hit this carnival, but for his role in the 1937 Butler riots which began on Saturday, June 19, when Corporal Charlie King was burnt to death in Fyzabad. The next day, Sunday, Xavier was helping his mother in the market where people were grumbling about the attempt to arrest Butler. On the Monday Xavier was working by Coffee Street when a large crowd marched up calling for King Xavier. Point-a-Pierre shut down and we going to shut down Using Ste Madeleine, they told him, and he

joined them, leading the crowd with his singing, unifying the determination of hundreds of men and women with his improvised call: We eh working at all, we want money Hooray, hurrah! Monday morning give we we money Hooray, hurrah! The demonstrators closed down the market, Globe theatre, Empire theatre. They moved to the railway station and closed that too, then moved on to Usine, then to the power station, stopping all work. With Xavier in front they decided to go to the telephone exchange which was surrounded by armed soldiers. Someone flung a brick at the soldiers and the white officer barked an order: Raise your arms and shoot! The volunteers shot some rounds up in the sky, but the crowd still moved forward as men behind shouted Is blank shot they firing! Then the officer ordered, Lower arms and fire! From that I hear people bawling O Gawd! Jesus Christ! and I see a fella fall, recalls Xavier. But my foot cyar move at all. Then I just feel bam! on my hand. I hold it and lie down then the fella shout Cease fire! The bullet had passed right through his forearm, shattering both bones. Xavier was taken to the hospital where over the next days Dr Henry Pierre (who became Sir Henry), laboured by candlelight to patch up wounded strikers. There he was charged on nine counts of leading the riotersone count for each streetand eventually sentenced by a magistrate to three months hard labour. Xavier didnt make it to the prisoners quarry of his youth, though, but just whiled his sentence away in the Colonial Hospital. Once he was back on the streets Xavier continued his singing vocation, going so far as to take a turn in a calypso tent during the Second World War. I went to the tent in Port of Spain with a friend and I see Lion, all of them, but the more I drink rum the more I cyar build a head to go on that stage, he recalls. Eventually they forced his hand. Now ladies and gentlemen, your desire is at hand, announced the MC. The great King Xavier! He stepped up and began: Mabel, Im leaving home Im going to take a chance on the battle zone (repeat) I cant remain in La Trinity I mean for Hitler to rein king in Germany Girl, Im going to fly to America Darling, Im trying to make myself an aviator. The crowd went wild, but Xavier never returned for a follow up. Instead, around 1942 he turned to the latest craze that was sweeping young people, steelband. He used to beat biscuit drum boom in the bamboo but now he started collecting pans and was joined by youngsters like Emile Zola Williams. Xavier didnt keep the pans by his Toll Gate bamboo yard, however, but at his bachelor apartment in Coffee Streeta place noticable for its neatness and the long row of potted palms hed laid out. People going by used to say, Look King Xavier in Buckingham Palace, he says. So he called that first Coffee Street steelband, Buckingham Boys, which would knock a little pan during the war. It was the beginning of the end, however, for the human

voice was about to be removed from the streets the steelband with its greater volume and melodic capacity. On VE (Victory in Europe) Day when we parading, I on the boom, coming up High Street I watch in a store and saw myself in the showcase, Xavier recalls. I could see me with an old hat and this hot sun and how I sweating and looking miserable and nasty, and I say, Come out of this thing. He gave his biscuit drum to a masquerader and walked away, never to participate again.

THE KENTUCKIANS LAST FIGHT

For every steelband today with a history stretching back to the Forties, there are a dozen others that collapsed along the way. And although the reasons are many why the casualties didnt make it, the most common cause was moneywhich is the story told by Errol Augustus Philip of the bands which grew up in the Old St Joseph Road district of Success Village, Laventille. Philip, better known as Tank, wasnt originally from there, though, for he was one of four children born to Albert and Terecita Philip in Chaguaramas and spent his first few years in Hardbargain in Central. His father was a schoolmaster and the family was well off. Terecita didnt workshe had servantsand there was a piano in the house. But Albert was felled on November 7, 1939 by malaria or some other such disease and things went downhill. The Venezuela-born Terecita had to leave the house the family occupied on the school grounds and she moved to Marcella Street, which was at the time known as Sixth Street, Success Village. It was there that Philip first heard pan around 1940the kittle pans and biscuit drums of Tin Pan Alley, led by Sonny Charles. The band changed its name to Mission to Moscow during the Second World War, after which it became Torrid Zone, which Philip would look at on the way home from playing football or cricket. In those days lead pans, known as ping pongs, were now getting a range of about 12 notes and Casablancas tuner, Croppy Simmonds, who was seeing a girl in the district, would help out the boys in Torrid Zone. Carefully observing everything Simmonds did was Carl Bumpy Nose Greenidge, and by the late Forties Greenidge was tuning for the band. By 1947, too, Philip was beating tenor for them. Torrid Zone only lasted two years after Philip joined, for the band mashed up in 1949 after Carnival. Those days when you win prize you get it right awaywhen you leave the stage you get a case of rum, then a fella would pay the captain by the paddock, recalls Philip. But back in the yard some youths had to make do with a drink or two of rum, while others who were given money were drinking scotch. The majority of men from down Old St Joseph Road were dissatisfied. We went in the house, take up the wares, take some of the pans and leave, say we opening we own band. The following Sunday Philip, Greenidge and others built a shed to practice by Lloyd Blackie L Taylors house. Down the road was a cinema whose poster board advertised a John Wayne movie, The Fighting Kentuckians, and once they saw that they knew they wouldnt have to search for a name.

Shortly after Kentuckians got its name, Philip too got his aliasTank. By his recollection it was in the Spike, a club upstairs at the corner of Queen and George Streets, where they were drinking when a big burly Grenadian man began throwing his weight around. He snatched their bottle of rum from the table and Vernon Ringo Bellerand hit him with a flask. It bounced off. Philip snatched it up and the Grenadian grabbed for it. I cross him a right to the jaw, he tells. It had some other ones there and they come too. I knock out six of themno wounding, just fisticuffs. A whore working in the club whod seen the fight walked up to the victor and whispered in his ear, I never believe you coulda fight sofrom now on Tank, you is my man. Lets go and f--- right now. All Kentuckians, replied Philip, is fighting Kentuckians. And they had talent too, for Carl Greenidge was good enough as a player and tuner to be selected for the 1951 Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) although he eventually dropped out. But the fighting Kentuckians lived up to their name, splitting temporarily in 1953, and permanently in 1954. The same money thing caused them separations, says Philip, recalling 1954 when the band played Feast of the Canadian White Indians. The captain play the big chief and he had all the money in a bag. People say he let his girlfriend cut the bag and thief the money, so when he supposed to be buying liquor for the band he saying, No bagthe string cut and he drunk. That Ash Wednesday a group of them went and smashed the prizes the band had won, carried off the tenor pans and sold them to a tourist shop down the road, and dispersed; Greenidge to the Desperadoes his nephew now leads, and Philip to Tokyo, where he has remained to this day.

HERCULES IN THE CROSSFIRE

Steelband, as everyone knows, was created and developed through the love of countless young men who nurtured and protected it in its infancy. Less acknowledged, however, is the role of those men who more sceptical about this great movement and had fewer illusions of its preciousness. I did never like steelband, it was a hooligan thing and I was not one, recalls Victor Sufferer Hercules, one of the stalwarts of Crossfire steelband in St James. I became a hooligan through steelband. Born on May 8, 1929, the one and only child of Hilda Hercules, Victor grew up in a good household. His mother was a registered midwife, which was as decent a profession a woman could have in those days, and she had grand ambitions for her son. She sent him to Belmont Intermediate when he was seven, and then around 1938 she was transferred to San Fernando and took the boy with her. I used to hear tamboo bamboo on the road and might take a little chip behind the band, he recalls. He was going St Benedicts at the time (now Presentation College). As for taking a knock, I couldnt do thatif somebody see me knocking tamboo bamboo and tell my mother, all now my tail red. My mother a nurse and I beating tamboo bambooyou mad?

The Second World War came and stopped all of that. Still, by 1944 nurse Hilda felt her son, now a 15-year old teenager, was getting out of control. So she sent him up north to work with his father, Felix Griffith, an ex-policeman turned house commission agent. Hercules boarded with his aunt in Carlton Avenue, St James. That, he says, made me worse. Had he remained under the jurisdiction of the mother he respected and feared, Hercules feels he might have continued his education and gone on to become perhaps a lawyer like his cousins Wilton and Ralph. Instead curiosity took him around the corner to the bottom of Ethel Street where south St James youths congregated to beat in the yard of Joseph Joe Crick Christopher, the home of Tripoli steelband. I went there through fastness, not to learn to beat pan, says Hercules. I learn five-note kittle and du dup because it was the easiest thing to play, thats all. Liming with youths such as the Theodore brothers Shark-bite and Vatican, Emmanuel Camps, Granville Sealey, Sam and Gandhi Boodhoo, Sterling Betancourt, Hercules feel into the outcast world of pan, and that is where VE (Victory in Europe) Day caught him. It was my birthday, May 8, and I was gambling turn down romey with Cody and Slick Rollie in a barrack yard when I hear the noisesteelband coming, he recalls. Hed set out that morning with six cents and already had won nearly two dollars. I say thats my birthday present and I gone to jump up, it was Harlem Nightingales. And when the following year Harlem Nightingales played St James Sufferers for Carnival, Hercules, who had no money to play sailor with Tripoli, nastied up an old khaki shirt, called himself King Sufferer, and went with the Nightingales. The name has stuck ever since. Still, Hercules was a Tripoli man, and he idolised Joe Crick, the bands martinet leader, for his forceful masculinity. Once he hit a man with a blackjack for coasting Emmanuel Camps, a leading tenor man; if you eh come to practice march he fine you six cents, recalls Hercules of his leaders famous discipline. Any young fella coulda learn from Joeself-reliance, how to deal with manhood, he was a true leader. And yet, just as Herculess love and respect for his stern mother didnt stop him from breaking away once he got the chance, so too his admiration for Joe Crick didnt stop Hercules from joining the bunch of young men who broke away in 1949 because they couldnt bear the bands regimentation. Thus was formed Crossfire with Eric Drayton as captain, Sterling Betancourt as tuner/arranger. The moved to the Hyderabad Street yard of Cyril Jackman, a place they called the house of Shuvay Morgan after a Raymond Massy civil war movie Santa Fe Trail. The band suffered in 1951 when Sterling Betancourt went to England with the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) and stayed there. Then, on Coronation Day, 1953, a foreigner, one Mr OConnor, attempting to drive a car through the Crossfire, got into a fight and was killed with baseball bats. Still, the band was on the rise. They had the support of saxophonist and bandleader Sel Duncan, who lived nearby in Gandhi Street, and a gifted arranger, Emmanuel Eamon Thorpe, who got both the band and himself into the 1956 finals of the Steelband Festival. The band played El Mambo with a lot of bass and the adjudicator, Dr Herbert Wiseman, disqualify wehe say bass dont play tune, says Hercules. Eamon came second to Nerlin Taitt in ping pong solo and he tear up the certificate.

Hercules had long abandoned any attempt at playing pan. His role was a sort of manager of the band, as well as waver of their skull and crossbones flag. Indeed he was waving flag the 1957 Jouvert morning of their greatest musical achievementbettering the great Trinidad All Stars. It was after playing all night in the Rainbow Terrace club with Sel Duncan, and they were hot to trot with Another Night Like This, when they came upon All Stars in Prince Street waiting for Invaders. We caught them flat-footed now trying to form up, and we hit them with Another Night Like This, he recalls. They clap we, and then we went back home. That was our moment of glory. It was that victory which spurred Neville Jules to secretly rehearse Beethovens Minuet in G the following year and wait for Crossfire to demolish their Indian Love Call, and in the process creating the Bomb competition. By then Crossfire was on the way down, however. Eamon Thorpe had left for England, running from the law after hed smashed a bottle in a players face for querying the $15 Hercules was paid as a nonpanman. Rupert Shadow Nathaniel had taken over, but after the 1958 debacle he took the social players away to form Symphonettes. Hercules remained with a revived Modern Crossfire in Nepal Street. Roy Scorpion Hunte was the captain of Modern Crossfire and the band limped along into the sixties, even going so far as to win an Independence Competition and Hunte appropriated the prize money. After that skulduggery most the fellas get disenchanted and move back to Symphonettes, concludes Hercules. I say I eh able with that and I dropped out of steelband. For the baton had passed to Nathaniels Symphonettes in whose Benares Street panyard a little no-pants four-year old boy would play any tune they called for and whose name was Boogsie Sharpe.

GARVEYS GHOST
Whatever Pan Trinbagos problems today, which are as wide as they are deep, theres no doubt that the genius of those men who invented pan, was also manifest in the organisation they created half century ago to see after its interests. And if this organisation was the labour of countless men, it was conceived by only one. Sydney Gollop, who was honoured two weeks ago by Pan Trinbago for his contribution to the steelband movement, was a 30-year-old member of Crusaders steelband in St Pauls Street when he came up with the idea in 1950. In the late 1940s the society was in turmoil. The end of the War and the departure of the American soldiers left unemployment in their wake. Butler was agitating for industrial action again. Panmen throughout the city were fighting one another tooth and nail, particularly those in Invaders and Casablanca. If those two bands were musically the best in the country, they were also the most violent. No month passed without some panman stabbing or steelband affray. Respectable society, already disdainful, recoiled in fear and loathing. Calls were made for the return of the cat (abolished in 1940). In response, the police were brutal with the panmen. Invaders supporter Lennox Pierre, a socialist, was also secretary of the Trinidad and Tobago Youth Council, and through his influence the Youth Council petitioned Albert Gomes about the police brutality towards panmen. In November 1949 a 10-

member government committee was set up to study the Port of Spain bands and suggest what could be done about them. Canon Max E Farquhar chaired the committee, Pearl Carter was secretary. The rest were representatives of concerned organisations: Carlyle Kerr and Lennox Pierre (Youth Council); Carlton Ottley (Education Extension Services); George Mose (Probation Department); Charles Espinet (Folklore Society); Bertie Thompson (Colts); Mortiner Mitchell (Friendly Societies); Beryl McBurnie (Little Carib). They asked the police to back off, and the 1949 Christmas was quiet. But by Carnival 1950 Invaders had 17 men in court for fighting. Early in March, however, the bands signed a non-aggression pact, and shared drinks in the Black Lion rumshop. Tokyo, another Invaders enemy, was there too. The Youth Council had also held a meeting at the public library, and it was there that Sydney Gollop from Crusaders called on panmen to form an organisation. The previous year schoolteacher Harold Blake had formed a Steel Band Music Association with about 20 bands in Chenet Alley. Invaders Ellie Mannette was President, Casablancas Oscar Pile Vice-President. Crusaders captain John Slater, and Hill 60s captain Patcheye Pachot, were there too. But for some unknown reason Blakes Association never took off. Gollops suggestion that night in the Public Library in favour of an organisation wasnt a repeat of Blakes idea, but rather came from a different, deeper source. He was born in March, 1919, to James and Emelda Gollop. His father, a meat vendor in the market, was a highly-respected man of Bajan stock, who with his wife was an executive member of the Port of Spain branch of Marcus Garveys United Negro Improvement Association (Unia). As a child Gollop joined the UNIA youth group, the Vanguards. After that declined he moved into the Cubs. As he grew older his impulse to organisation carried him into many sporting and cultural clubs. For instance, in one drama group he acted with De Wilton Rogers and Donald Granado. Another group was the Lecontine Sports Club (named after Learie Constantine). He was also a voluntary social worker for the City Councils Health Committee. Accordingly, Gollops steelband, Crusaders, for which he briefly played biscuit drum, was one of the most formally organised bands of those days, and their panyard in the old prisoners quarry on St Paul Street (now site of the sports complex) was the chosen venue for peace talks between the warring bands. It was such a funny feeling that day when you look at the situation and for the first time you looking at a bunch of heavyweights get together and you get the feeling they might start a fight, no matter what happen, recalled Andrew Pan de Labastide from Hill 60. I was standing in a strategic positionI will be truthful with youI was standing in a position that the first time I hear something click I was getting ready to cut loose because nobody know that part of St Paul Street or Clifton Hill much better than I do. All the big guns were there, and everyone was jumpy. From the Committee were an uneasy Espinet, a calmer Mose, and an impatient Ottley, who demanded an explanation for the fighting. He remonstrated, Instead of all this cutlass and bottle and stone, why dont you fellas, if you want to settle, thrash it out hand to hand.

Ottley produced two pairs of boxing gloves from under the table. You guys can use this, Ottley said. If you fellows dont know how to use it I will show you, I will teach you. The meeting worked out well, one result of which was to get off with a reprimand the many panmen on criminal charges. Of far greater long-term significance was to elect a provisional executive of a Steelband Association, with Gollop as President, Casablancas Nathanlel Crichlow as Vice-President, and Claude Harewood as General Secretary. The badjohns or the warmongers, you had a problem to get rid of them because they felt from the time the organisation was formed that they had no position again, because then the captain of the band and the officers of the band control the bands, so they had no control again over these bands, says Gollop. So they lost their position. I was being assaulted, Ive been assaulted and I took it. This team was re-elected when the Association held its first general meeting at the Youth Council headquarters in Cocorite. And by the time Gollop resigned the post in 1956, he had led the steelband movement through the formation of Taspo, which created the modern, symphonic steelband ensemble, and into the Trinidad Music Festival, where it showed its mettle.

HELLZAPOPPINS SECRET WEAPON

The offspring of the great progenitor bands of Gonzales, Newtown and Hell Yard all known today: Casablanca, Invaders and Trinidad All Stars. One other seminal steelband has been largely forgotten, however, even though its contribution to the steelband movement was of fundamental importance. Its name was Charlie Chan and it came from 23 Macdonald Street, Woodbrook, right behind the house of one Lavina Arthur. When I was three I played long-nose sailor with my uncle in Charlie Chan, recalls Valentino Arthur, who was born in 1932. It was a Chinee-type steelband with two tong-ting, tong-ting notes on the pans. The uncle on whose shoulders young Val perched that Carnival in the mid-1930s was Earnest Arthur, Lavinas son, and when he carrying his nephew he was Charlie Chans main iron man. Now 82 years old, he describes when he was in his twenties: I used to push cotton in my ears and put a big car brakes on my head. Other bands had a little piece of iron and I used to drown them outyou know how much bois get let go because I humbugging them? Although he and his friends would take a jump in the tamboo bamboo bands of the time, the small Charlie Chan, named after a movie and led by Ray Bucket, always had metal percussion. I was the captain of a Shell barge and I took paint pans, burn them out and make two notes, he says. Bucket wasnt easywhen he start to roll people would go mad. Other members included Ben Tabby Downs who was a master on the biscuit drum, Mando Wilson who also limed with the Gonzales men; and Ulric Chick McGrew Springer, whose talent, like that of Casablancas Art de Couteau, eventually led him out of the steelband movement.

Around 1942 the elder fellas phased out and the type of thing coming in with steelbandjersey with print, fightingthat drove them out, says Val. So the younger fellas asked Theophilus Man Gittens to captain a new band. From his home next door at 21 Macdonald Street Chick McGrew Springer, one of the younger Charlie Chan fellas, joined with youths such as Val and his older brother Hugh Arthur, Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley, Carlton Maifan Drayton. The new band was called Hellzapoppinanother movie nameand during the war they kept to themselves in their yard, occasionally coming out to make a fast rounds before the police were alerted. And once the war ended Hellzapoppin showed its pedigree in the first Islandwide steelband competition in 1946. The venue was the Mucurapo boxing stadium, located where Fatima College now stands, but Hellzapoppin wasnt confident enough to enter the group leg of the competition. Still, they had a bomb for the soloist leg: Chick McGrew, their tuner. He knew piano, drums and bass and for weeks before wed hear him playing All Through The Night on the piano, recalls Val. Then we started hearing it on pan. On the night nobody was talking about this unknown youth from a small insignificant band: all the big guns were there, including Orman Patsy Haynes from Casablanca, Sonny Roach from Sun Valley and Ellie Mannette from Invaders and money hung in the balance. All the others played and leading the pack was Mannette when the second to last competitor, Chick McGrew, came on stage with the large ping pong hed tuned from a CGA pan. In those days the ping pong was rested on the seated players knee, held with one hand and played with the other hand, so when Chick McGrew hung the pan around his neck and took out two sticks, eyes widened. To get the attention of the few who hadnt noticed, he rolled on his pan, and then he launched into All Through The Night. If a pin had drop you woulda hear it, recalls Val. And when he finish people couldnt talkeverybody was just looking at everybody else. And for starting a new phase in the development of pan Chick McGrew was given the first prize, a Humber bicycle. Nevertheless, Hellzapoppin remained a small band, playing in parties and excursions but keeping away from Port of Spain where the big bands held sway. Springer left the steelband movement to play drums in a brass band (he went to England to play bass at a Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1965 and is still there). As for the older players, they dropped out and by the late Forties Hellzapoppin was no more. By then Val had shifted to Invaders, playing and designing mas with a section leader of the band named George Bailey. The younger Hellzapoppin members had no such outlet though, and when around 1951 some youths they knew from Belmont decided to form a steelband and needed a panyard, Rudolph Peterkin invited them into his parents yard in Arapita Avenue. Thus was born Katzenjammers, with Woodbrook contributing Peterkin Val Arthur, Mervin and Everest Barquain, Kent Jones, Roland Pelletier and others, and Percy Lizard Thomas, Frankie Mason, Errol Quamina, Vincent Boorman and Arthur Lewis coming from Belmont. Percy Lizard Thomas was the tuner and captain, and a talented man he was. Even masters such as Tony Williams thought they could learn a thing or two from how he tuned the high range pans. But it was with the newly formed college boy steelbands that Thomas made his mark as a tuner, making around 1952 for Dixieland the first ever double second pan.

The college boys got Percy to tune for them because I think they liked Katzenjammers style and seeing we were non-violent people, says Val. Besides, he was an approachable fella. Katzenjammers was small, they didnt come on the road, they didnt even play in the nearby Gaza Strip of Wrightson Road nightclubs. So Val continued focussing on mas for Carnival, branching off with Bailey when they quarrelled with Invaders over the band fees. But Katzenjammers was ambitious, and by 1954 their lead tenor Everest Barquain entered the Steelband Festival and was only edged out from first place by Dudley Smith. And in 1956 the band took on the big guns once again in the Steelband Festival, winning with The Breeze and I. That year The Fire Down Below was being filmed in Trinidad with Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth, and they hired Katzenjammers to play in the nightclub scenes. So when the film crew returned to London, the band left with them to do the background music and make the nightclub scenes. By then Val was married and starting a family. He had a good job on the sea, just as his uncle did before him, and he let the band sail out of his life, allowing him to concentrate on his domestic affairs and the mas hes played ever since.

BAJAN CECIL
In the last Pan Pioneers article there was a small error in placing Ulric Chick McGrew Springers solo victory at the 1946 Islandwide Steelband Competition. Springers victory actually came about a year later, and the first Islandwide ping pong solo winner was Sonny Roach whose band, Sun Valley from St James, also won in the ensemble category, but that victory was a more collective one due not only to the genius and the talent of Sonny Roach but also to a little known man called Bajan Cecil. To tell that story, however, one has to go back to Barbados where one Cecil Ward was born in 1923 and grew up with his father and grandparents, his mother having early on migrated to greener pastures in Trinidad. Its well known that all Bajans at the time knew music, for singing was on every primary school curriculum. Perhaps that disciplined nation was especially amenable to musical training, unlike the anarchic Trinidadians, but Wards background was even more musical. His father and grandparents sang in a church choir, and there was a piano at home. And when he was in Ebenezer schools sixth standard, Teacher Sergeant offered to teach him music. Next door to the school was the church and there was an organ, recalls Ward. I joined the music class to be in the church choir. As for Teacher Sergeant, he had a particular interest in instructing the boy in music: Wards half-brothers older sister taught in the school, and Teacher Sergeant had taken a fancy to her. So he made sure the boy learnt well. Home Sweet Home had an F# in the passage that I will always remember, he says. Teacher Sergeant hit me a lash with a tamarind rod on my hand because I couldnt expand enough to reach the F#. Be that as it may, in 1939 he came to Isaac Terrace, St James, to live with his mother. I didnt know her and I wanted to meet her, he says. My stepfather was a joiner and he worked in Macqueripe where I first heard tamboo bamboo.

In St James, however, Ward heard the real thing: the Harlem Nightingales, a band which many people refer to by the mas they played once the war was overSt James Sufferers. Wards mother didnt too like his involvement with pan, but his stepfather did and he encouraged Ward, who became friendly with Sonny Roach. We had a contrary beat and at a certain time they had a little pan beating and I realised they had three notes on the pan what gave me Rum and Coca Cola, he recalls. Sonny Roach and I were making pans so I said Lets get a few more notes and he got some sweet oil drums and got eight notes in 1945 plus F#. With those nine notes Ward played Home Sweet Home. And though Ward was a law-abiding young man and Roach was more wayward, the musical partnership between them gelled. Once Ward heard a band playing in the Bombay Club in Kandahar with a boxbassthe creole variation of the African thumb piano in which you plucked bent pieces of metal attached to a resonating boxand he made a small one with bits of clock spring. Sonny Roach took the idea and transferred it to a biscuit drum to get a bass pan. Before theyd made the nine-note Home Sweet Home pan Roach used to play Mary Had A Little Lamb, and Ward would play a sort of counterpoint to it on his pan. So when the Islandwide Competition approached, the Barbadian had Roach make a pan with higher notes to his nine and he taught Roach Home Sweet Home. Sonny Roach had the gift for playing, he was faster than me, recalls Ward. Id only play the basic thing but hed play in a stylish rhythm. He was faster but I was the basic fella, Id correct his bad notes. Accordingly, Roach played the basic melody while Ward accompanied him three tones lower. When he played Home Sweet Home I followed on the second pan, explains Ward. It was alto to the song, it played like a chord with the ping pong, a third below. On the night of the competition the Sun Valley players wore ordinary clothes, unlike the other panmen who had uniforms of some kind. But Sun Valley had the talent, with members like young Tony Williams and Nooksin and Addawell Sampson. There is a conflict of memory here, for Ward says that he had no problem going to the competition. Indeed, he got a lift in the car of one Ramkit, a shopkeeper in Kandahar. Nooksin Sampson, however, says Wards mother didnt want him to go out with his stepfathers white shirt. He went inside and pass the shirt through the window. We take the shirt and gone and later when he come we give him the shirt, says Sampson whose own mother was similarly disapproving. Be that as it may, that night Red Army, who placed second, would be chosen as th e Best Dressed Band and would be taken on tour to British Guiana in 1947the first steelband to go abroad. Sun Valley would only be invited to play in Royal Theatre. Still, the band which dazzled them all with music at that first Islandwide Steelband competition was Sun Valley, with an arrangement never heard before in steelband: Sonny Roach on lead pan and Cecil Ward on second. One tune they played was La Paloma, a difficult tune which went down well. But it was when the band hit them with Home Sweet Home, an arrangement that drew from all the music Teacher Sergeant had beaten into Ward years before, that the judges Major Dennison from the police band and either Auntie Kay Warner or one of the Padmore sisterstook notice. When I play the alto pan and hit them the F#, recalls Ward, Dennisonhe had he foot cock uphe sit upright.

Thereafter Ward withdrew from steelband. He was always a disciplined kind of fellow and he was getting ahead in the construction business, whereas Sonny Roach was drawing closer to the more rango types in the band. And by the time the talented Sun Valley youths such as Tony Williams and Roy Harper broke away to form North Stars in 1950, Ward was out of it.

DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE BOOM TOWN

Neville Jules always admits it: the first time he saw with a tuned 55-gallon oil drum was around 1947 when some youth from the East played one at Monarch cinema, Tunapuna, in a competition. The other people go up and they play but when this guy come out with this pan, he had was to sit down with it, recalls Jules of that night in Monarch. The whole place start to laugh at himthat come like a big joke, the theatre cracking up laughing at that man. Three months later its everybody using that. Well, in Kenrick Daba Thomass marvellous, unpublished book on the steelband movement in Tacarigua, the unknown panman was Cyril Snatcher Guy from the Tacarigua steelband Boom Town, and his pan was tuned by Andrew Beddoe and Randolph Phil Wiltshire. Born in 1926 in Tacarigua to Barbadian parents, Wiltshire as a child followed the village tamboo bamboo band before World War II. Kenricks father was in that group, says Wiltshire. They called theyself Boys from the Centre and on excursion theyd be dressed in raja shirt and flannel pantsreal sagga boy clothes and I admired them. Even then Wiltshire was musical. He was nicknamed after a vaudeville artist Phil Marsden because as an infant hed dance and sing whenever the neighbour put on a gramophone record, until even his schoolteachers thought he was really named Phil. Indeed, because all took Phil as his real name, the youths gave him another nickname Ladd. From early on he had become known as a singer and mouth organ virtuoso, and was regularly asked to perform at social functions in the village, and when he was with his friends theyd always ask him to play that steelband lavway Alan Ladd, this gun for hire. Hence the additional nickname, Ladd. Its not surprising, then, that Wiltshire became involved in the Tacariguas first prototype steelband, Dead End Kids, which he dates before the war but which Thomas places in 1945 in the yard of his uncle, Shango devotee Bernard Zorro Thomasa man who, 50 years before the modern fashion, shaved his head to leave a big Z on the back. I had a little 12 inch cooking oil tin and I pound it and get some notes with some naked stick, says Wiltshire. With Lyn Belle flying their flag, the Dead End Kids included Percy Giant Waithe, Ishmael Penco Best, Harvey Snooze Skeete, Sonny Shango Sonny John and others. Wiltshires parents disapproved strongly, for the family was a respectable one in the neighbourhood, but the boy persisted. Notwithstanding Wiltshires cooking oil tin, Thomas relates that it was only when Andrew and Jeffrey Beddoe attended a week-long Shango feast in 1945 at Rosina Mother Gerald Skeetes palais that the youths were introduced to state-of-the-art pan. The palais was next door to Zorro Thomass yard, so the Beddoes checked out the side

and Andrew tuned a pan for them. And they were mesmerised when he began playing some simple Shango tunes for them on the pan. Although Wiltshire admits Beddoe was well-known in the village because of his visits to the palais, he doesnt accord him any tuning role. Wiltshire was working at the Caura Sanatorium at the time and there he and a new Tacarigua resident, Cyril Guy, decided to form a proper steelband. We decide when we get pay on Friday we going to buy a three dollar drum because we hearing about this steelband thing and we going to try it, is Wiltshires account. We cut it and heat it and pound it with a hammerno groovingand we get three notes and find that was good. It was an oil drum. The band grew, Wiltshire named it Boom Town after a Clark Gable movie and designed a uniform for membersyellow towelling T-shirt with an oil derrick monogram. However he had to surrender leadership in favour of Shango Sonny in whose yard it was relocated in lower Tacarigua, near to the orphanage which supplied Boom Town with players and in particular buglers. With Wiltshires musical flair and Cyril Guys talent Boom Town easily outplayed other country bands by introducing Mary Had A Little Lamb into the rhythm. Lower Tacarigua was a more respectable district and added to the respectability Wiltshire brought to the band was that of the handful of women who joined, such as Ruffina ThomasZoros sisterand Eva John. This early presence of the fairer sex didnt keep Boom Town from being pulled into the vortex of steelband violence that Port of Spain generated, though, and they had minor scuffles between steelbands in the circuit from St Joseph to Arima, such as a skirmish with Aroucas Wake Island steelband. Boom Towns main clash, however, took place at Manzanilla Beach on Easter Monday, 1946, where the band went on a fund-raising excursion. Other bands were there too, including Swanee River (George Street) who were playing with rubber on their sticks, and a belligerent Red Army whose badjohns picked fights and generally molested people. The next thing is I see my men running down the beach, recalls Wiltshire. They say the fellas coming to thief we bugle. We didnt come to fight so I say its better we go home and by 2.30 we were back in Tacarigua. But the fellas say they eh taking that. The excursion busses all had to pass through Tacarigua, so the young men armed themselves with bottles and as the Battoo Silverbus came they closed the railway gates blocked it off. And they began pelting bottle. Some fellas came out of the bus to fight and they were chased away so they couldnt return to the bus. And some days later Wiltshire was charged and convicted of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, and put on two or three months probation. It was due to that incident Cyril Guy also got the nickname that stuck with him ever since, Snatcher. The loss of the bugle was bitterly resented by band members and at a competition in Tunapuna he decided to do something about it. Casablanca, who had the most famous bugle section, was there and town band was town band. Penco Best asked one of Blancas buglers for a blow. We eh come to blow no bugle, said Guy who shoved Penco aside, grabbed the bugle and dashed through the police yard, scurried along the back streets and the canefield tracks, all the way to Tacarigua. Boy, Penco later commended him, You is a real snatcher.

Guys claim to fame, however, rests on being the one who played that 55-gallon drum Jules first heard in Monarch cinema, although their accounts vary. That night Vigilantes play, Atomic play and Malabar All Stars play, recalls Guy, calling the Arima bands. You also had Hells Kitchen from Tunapuna, Pearl Harbour from Five Rivers and Boom Town. Red Vernon from Arima had a big pan and Gillis from Vigilantes had a big pan. Wiltshires leadership was inspired. For instance, he organised a tour to Tobago and encouraged Sterling Betancourt from St James to tune their pans. And when in 1951 Wiltshire left the village to live in San Fernando where he captained Hatters Tacariguas boom fizzled out, and all was left was for Snatcher to move to Arima where he joined Atomic.

QUEEN OF THE STEELBANDS

Not many women played pan in the early days, a mere handful, but dont be fooled: women were vitally important, and not only for providing support and solace for the outcast panmen. Most times it was women who controlled the yards in which bands found their homes, where theyd store their pans and practise. Without these women, many a band would have not survived the Forties and Fifties. One such pillar of the early steelband movement was Muriel White. A tall, unbent woman, she still has her loud raucous laugh from the days during the Second World War when Bar 20 was opposite her house at 9 Bath Street, east of Observatory Street, and she supported the band. She was like a mother to all the fellas and them, once recalled Ossie Tom Campbell of Bar 20 and, after that, Casablanca. If you in distress and thing, you could go there. If you come from the country and have nowhere to sleep, she will give you lodge until you catch yourself. So when, for instance, Russel Screebo Maloney came to town from San Fernando to join Bar 20, he got a place to stay at Muriel until he could find his feet. Born in Trinidad in 1904 to a Barbadian mother, White moved to Barbados as a child, and remained there long enough to acquire the accent she still has, before returning to Trinidad. Muriel used to be what they call a matador, explains Renegades pioneer Kirton Eddy Boom Moore. Like a saga girlfancy clothes, big ear-ring, liming all the time in snackette. She smoked a pipe, as she still does today. You get more from it than cigarette, she explains. Her daughter Phyllis White became involved with Ancil Boyce, the captain of Bar 20, whose flag was waved by Yvonne Bubulups Smith. Later on, when Phyllis decided to wave a steelband flag, however, it was for the young boys who formed Renegades. Phyllis always liked that kind of bacchanal, recalls Muriel. The tradition continued when Phyllis and Boyce had a son, Cecil White, who became one of the pioneering captains of Renegades. Throughout all of this Muriel was there in Bath Street helping first one generation of panmen, then another.

I used to run them with some big stone, she says with a wink at Winston Dr Rat Bruce. If the boys wanted somewhere to sleep because they cyar go home, they used to come by me. Dr Rat adds: By the time morning break, when she still sleeping, we by she gambling. I remember when you had to close your window at six oclock, fus stone pelting, says Muriel. That was when it had gang fight between Desperadoes and Renegadesyou cyar sleep at night. In the yard behind her house the younger Renegades such as Winston Dr Rat Bruce gambled with her daughter Phyllis and her grandson Cecil. Phyllis used to beat all of we, recalls Dr Rat, at which Muriel laughs. He continues: She used to sit with she legs wide so, and while we studying to look under she, she looking at your hand. Right by Whites house was also a tunnel which led down to the East Dry River, and this was used as a sort of two-way escape route for the youngsters hanging aroundgambling in the yard. We coulda run up the river when police coming, explains Dr Rat. In the other direction, the tunnel was used to transport stolen drums to the Renegades panyard in Basilon Street. When we thief pans from the gas station on Observatory Street they throw them in the Dry River, and we would take it through the tunnel to Bath Street, through Muriel yard and up Basilon Street, says Dr Rat. That was me and Mr Lee work. In all the conversation White is attentive, cackling at the high jinks of the young delinquents she recalls from those days, relating the blank front she gave the police inquiries. Then, you cyar ask me nothing, I never know, I never hear that name, she says. Once they want to come through the gateI slam the door in he face. She talks of a bad police, Auburn, from the district, and another one who was unfortunately for him, less fearsome. That brownskin one, says Muriel. He did only smelling bad. It was this what allowed Muriel to come and go as she pleased at any time of the day or night in one of Port of Spains rougher districts for the 42 years she lived in Bath Street, for that was steelband territory. And in a sense Muriel White was like a mother to the movement.

RENEGADE REALITIES
Its taken for granted by journalists and judges that all Trinidadians share a single reality. The truth is, every man carries his unique reality in his head, and nowhere is this more so than in steelband history, especially as regards Renegades. How Renegades come: Ethelbert as captain of Ohio told the players he not bringing out the band some day, I think it was Carnival Tuesday. They took the pans and went and beat. When he discoveredhe was a joinerhe took the joiner hatchet and mash up some of the pans. Some fellas run with they pan and save them, said Joseph Baird in January. Baird and Kelvin Pelican Brown were recalling to me how theyd moved from Lennus Simms tamboo bamboo band in Basilon Street, to Ethelbert Serrettes steelband in Basilon Street, to Renegades in Basilon Street, From the night Ethelbert mash up the pans they decide to form the band, said Baird.

Pelican, who also began in the tamboo bamboo era, agreed. First the band was in Ethelbert Serrette yard, under his house; then we move to the lime kiln where it had a big shelter, said Pelican, whose father was in charge of the quarrys lime kiln. We used to cook and do everything there. Then we moved to upper Johnson Street under Tantie Baby house. She son used to be in the band, Kenneth Johnson. Then the band move to Ludin Lane in a bamboo shed off Basilon Street. Raymond was a kind of captain. Then we move to Harpe Place. Baird and Pelican were earnest and they gave me a list of names of other pioneers I could interview, including Wallace Ako Paul. Talk to him, they recommended. Ako does remember. Wallace Paul, better known as Ako, wasnt a Basilonian, though, but rather hailed from La Cour Harpe, and when I spoke to him last month, he told a very different story. He began playing pan during World War II when East Side Kids was formed in the Harpe by Kim Loy Wong and other youths. Almost immediately Ako began tuning his own pans and soon he was also tuning for Eighth Army on Siparia Hill. A Discovery Day I leave East Side Kids to beat with them. That evening we coming back, beating in George Street, when Red Army clash with them and the band mash up, he recalled. I take the pan and run through Hell Yard. That was after the War had ended, for Red Army was formed on VE Day. Then, the same year Ethelbert mashed up Ohio, Eighth Army also collapsed. In the Harpe we had our side when Ethelbert side mash up so we find long time it eh have no Basilon Street band and I say Let we open a band, says Ako whose mother had by then moved to Laventille. They began collecting pans, including those of the defunct Eighth Army. Desmond (Baird) was to be the leader but they say Ako not living herenobody eh go tell he mother. Those days nobody eh want to be captain, so at first nobody know who is captain, explained Ako. It was almost the same spot as Ohio that Renegades start up, or very near. Shortly after that, by Akos account, they moved to the quarry where they decided to hold a fete. Food and drinks were collected from people throughout the district and on Empire Day, May 24, 1948, the as yet unnamed band was launched. Shortly after they saw a movie which gave them the name Renegades: The Renegades with Larry Parks, according to Ako; Mark of the Renegade with Ricardo Montalban, according to Pelican. So far the stories coincide but for small details: the Basilonians had an idea to form a band; the Harpies had the same idea; they got together. Which is how Renwick Ricko Alexander, a Basilon Street youth, tells it, although he dates both the bands at the end of the war. East Side Kids and Ohio was the same 1945, he says. After Ethelbert punch up the pans we decide on Ash Wednesday to form our own bandwe sat down in Basilon Street to form our own band. East Side Kids came up and joined with us and formed one bandthat was the end of East Side Kids. It wasnt enough, though, and when I asked Renegades present captain, he said, You have to speak to Cecil Dead. And Cecil Dead Hinkson, a Basilonian, gave yet another story of how the link was made between Basilon Street and Harpe Place. Kim Loy used to lime around with Herman Macwarren who lived at the head of Lubin Lane, said Cecil Dead. One day we got together, Kim Loy and I, and were discussing pan. It had a band in Stone Street at the bottom of Duke Street and Kim Loy and I went

there and he got a tenor pan. When we were coming back we reach Calvary school on the steps and we met Raymond (Pierre), Tampico and about two others, and there we started beating the pan. The first person from Renegades to beat that pan was Brokofoot Raymond (Pierre). Soon after, according to Cecil Dead, the decision was made by himself, Broko, Tampico and some others, in light of Ohios destruction, to form a band. Renegades form under a house in Lubin LaneHerman and Teewee lived near, says Cecil Dead. We thief people water drum and thing but we had nowhere to put the pans. Herman and Teewee had pigeons and we keep some pans in the coop until things expanded and we move to the kiln. As had Ako before him, Cecil Dead claimed to have been the first captain. It was to be Desmond Bairdhe was the biggest onebut he refused, says Cecil Dead. About three times I was captain. Brokofoot Raymond says, however, that there was a first Renegades which broke up, and he had no part of that. They was in the kilnI was a little kid, he says. After it mash up I used to lime by the school with Pelican, Piggy (Hollis Cassidy), Tilolie and some others and we get some pans from other bands. They started beating pan by the school and Broko suggested they form a band. They moved to Martineau Lane and used the earlier name, Renegades. They didnt too long mash up so we decide to use the same name and everybody come and join back up, he says. We had no captain and only when the band get bigger we get Desmond (Baird). No wonder it required the extremely authoritarian leadership of Stephen Goldteeth Nicholson to hold together such a fissiparous group.

FIGHTING AMONG THE JAPS

Old talk might never end as to who invented what first in the steelband movement, but the truth is many inventions were arrived at by different men quite independently. So if Ellie Mannette is credited with switching to the 55-gallon oil drum, Sun Valleys Tony Muffman Williams in St James and Boom Towns Cyril Snatcher Guy in Tacarigua also made the same breakthrough. And even in the sleepy village of Chaguanas there was a man who switched to tuning a 55-gallon oil drum quite spontaneously. Ancil Phillip was born in March 1926 in Chaguanas. He grew up there, lived there as an adult, where he now is a bishop in the Spiritual Baptist church. Those days from the roundabout to the market was cocoa on both sides, he recalls. Chaguanas was bush, and the village was only from the market to Henderson Street. In his childhood there were three tamboo bamboo bands in the district, including one that emerged from the Public Works Department. It was the elderly group having a good time, he says. As a child you had to stop by your mother and just watchyou have to stand by her and hold she dress or else is licks. The village also had a mas band in which the women dressed in douilettes, head ties and masks. Music came from guitars, flutes and a double bass which the player lugged around with a strap over his shoulders. Looking on, Phillips wondered: How them does tote that?

The generation who came of age towards the end of the Second World War, however, were drawn to a different kind of music. We start to pick up old dustbin, he says. It was a different trend of noise, just a gay noise to make you feel good. And from that rhythm Phillip began to innovate. The idea just come, nobody never show me. I get a 20 gallon coconut oil drum, about 15 inches circumference, cut it about six inches long. I sink it, groove it and make notesI get ten notes. When the teenagers in the neighbourhood saw him playing tunes, they all clamoured for pans too, until they had a band which only lacked for one thing: a name. VJ Day came and for the same obscure reason as those in John John and Belmont, the Chaguanas youths took the name of the defeated side. Not Rising Sun, not Destination Tokyo, but Japs Alley. The pan tent was at the corner of Henderson and Frederick Streets, under a chenit tree in an empty lot where they played cricket, he says. We was the Japs and down there was called the alley, so Big Bill name band Japs Alley. As the only band in Chaguanas they had a monopoly, and they came on the road for holidays, Christmas and Carnival, in addition to small fetes. At such engagements they wore their peaked caps with a monogram of two swords and Japs Alley. Still not satisfied, Phillip tried for a bigger sound. I get a barrel, cut it, sink it about four inches and put on 16 notes, he says. I used to sink it because it was easier than beating it from the inside. It was just instinct. I took a tape and measured from the bass notesix inches. Then quarter inch smaller, and so on. They didnt stray far afield, though. We never went in Port of Spainwe was fraid. Every time you turn in Port of Spain its fight, so we was never eager to go, he says. We always remain in County CaroniCouva, Longdenville Couva. There was bands there but they didnt even have a name. Sometimes town bands came into the country, though, and once Phillip got a chance to compete with Rudolph Fisheye Olliverre from Trinidad All Stars. I was beating nice, playing Ave Maria but my rubber bus and he win, he says. In 1950 Phillip got a deathbed wish from his grandfather to quit steelband. He was the only of his mothers six children whod got involved in pan. His parents had never chided him about it. He was a good boy, working at Woodford Lodge estate and married, but the old man was sick. One day he fell out of his bed and Phillip saw him on the floor. He sat next to him and put the old mans head in his lap. Son, said the old man to his favourite grandson. Stop playing mas, stop beating pan. Alright, said Phillip, with no intention whatsoever of doing so. After a while Phillip noticed the old mans eyes were closed and his neck was loose. He called his mother: Grandpa sleeping. When Phillips mother came and saw the old man, she knew better, and she began to bawl for he was dead. Phillip did leave pan after that, but it was for different reasons. Like many steelbands at the time, Japs Alley had its fair share of warriors: Big Boy, Buboy, Marcus. They liked to fightI didnt like it but they always getting in fights with cutlass and thing, says Phillip. Then one day the band had an engagement in Carapachaima. Phillip had somewhere else to go, so he came late. When he passed home, his wife said: You hear what happen?

The band had got into a fight at St Marys Junction and police had locked up the whole side. Good thing you wasnt there, said Phillips wife. He replied, Anytime they want to fight I move outwho get lock up its their business. Most of them were charged for affray, and Phillip decided to leave the band. He took a hatchet and mashed up the pan at home. And when the band members came, he returned the trophies hed kept for the band as its captain. I done with that, he told them, and he stuck to his word. Now, 45 years and twelve children later, Phillip has never returned to the steelband movement, but he is the proud father of Jim Phillip, one of the tuners whose pans are bought as far afield as Germany and England.

WHEN THE SUN ROSE IN BELMONT

Pan is the instrument of Trinidad and Tobagoit belongs to everyone, regardless of race, class, creed or sex. Notwithstanding this, there can be no doubt of its African provenance, and nowhere is this more clear than in Belmont whose mother band, Rising Sun, and before that, the districts tamboo bamboo band, emerged from the heart of African Trinidad. The tamboo bamboo came from the Valley RoadNannys yard, says Carlton Carli Byer. Opposite the Shango yard had the Chinee Savannah, an open spot where cricket and football used to play. Tamboo bamboo start from there. Although Byer, 75, is a born and bred Belmontian from Braithwaite Street, he does what most other Trinidadians do and refers to the Belmont Valley Road Rada devotees as Shango. There are similarities but the Rada are from what is now Dahomey, whereas the Orisha are from Nigeria. And in Belmont, the Rada compound was the base for many tamboo bamboo men and, after them, many of the district panmen. Ovzovy Antoine, Vernon, Vivien and Hugh Delimo Baptiste, Patrick Zaba Anthony and Dudley Smith were all Rada devotees in Nannys compound, and during the Second World War they formed the steelband that was named Rising Sun on VJ Day. They used to beat skin drum and they hand was so fast that in pan they was tops because they coulda roll a note for long, says Byer. Hence Dudley Smiths first place as pint pong soloist in the first two Steelband Festivals. There was another reason why up there was something of a cultural centrethe Rose Bowl. This was a nightclub, one of the very few such places during the war, and it was owned by Ranny Phillipthe man who held many of the early steelband competitions including the first islandwide competition, and who organised for Red Army to go on the first steelband tour abroad to British Guiana. Although Rising Sun formed opposite the Rada Compound in the Chinee Savannah (so called because the owner of the land was Chinese), for Carnival it moved through Belmont picking up different sides, making sure to stop at the Hunter and Tiger Cat rumshop. Another important stop was at Warner Lands (which produced Kathleen Auntie Kay Warner) where a more respectable side joined the band. Belmont is a large area and there were splinter groups. Those from Warner Lands, who included men such as Tambi Maximin, formed Stepyard. Byer from Braithwaite Lane formed Corsican Brothers. But they all came together for Carnival to form the steelband Belmont United.

Like most steelbands of the Forties, Belmont United got into fights, and was once banned from coming on the road with the bugles theyd got from the Orphanage, because bugles were considered to incite the panmens aggressiveness. The bugles used to send you mad, says Byer. I learn through Malcolm Holdip and Cokey Mason in Casablancait used to make you feel a zest. When the police take we bugles, recalls Leo Bams Bailey, 65, then a young Rising Sun member. Next year they take pau pau stem and cut it to fit your lip and blow it like a bugle. Apart from up in the Valley Road and at the Tiger Cat rumshop, there was another gathering place for Belmont panmen, the younger side, and that was the yard of Juliana ToussaintMiss Girlie. There the boys played pitch, spun top, flew kite, and beat rhythms on a derelict car. A gas tank give a good tone, says Miss Girlies son McIllwain Mackie Toussaint, 53. The rhythm was in the back. Eventually they collected the discarded pans from Rising Sun and formed City Kids, amongst whose members also included Miss Girlies other son Roderick Toussaint, and Robbie Greenidge, both of whom were selected for the first National Steelband. Mama, says Mackie, put up with a lot of young fellas. These youths werent only into pan. Near to Rising Sun panyard, in the drain by Farrell Lane, they formed a group called The Galvanizers. Their instruments consisted of klim milk tins, a five-gallon drum coated with tar for a bongo sound, a scratcher from rolled galvanize, a guitar made from balsa, plywood and cedar. Years later the band would become better known as Gemini Brass. Belmont United notwithstanding, the district had its divisions. The more respectable youth formed Dem Boys and Stromboliparallels to college boy bands like Dixieland and Silver Starsalthough Dixieland would move to Belmont and be supplied with players from City Kids, and Percy Thomas from Rising Sun would form Katzenjammers in Woodbrook. Even Rising Sun itself had its divisions. The fellas get a contract to beat at Piarco Bel Air, says Bailey. They start to sift out the bad behaviour fellas and it make a split. Thus was formed Sunland in Warner Lands. Up in St Francois Valley Road was formed Modernaires, and the two fought a bitter fratricidal riot, leaving one to wonder if this isnt why steelband in Belmont took a down turn and has never risen ever since.

REQUIEM FOR WAKE ISLAND

Some time around the end of the Second World War two steelbands were formed in Arouca. One was called Wake Island, and the other North Star, both names taken from movies. Neither band lasted very long or made any significant impact on the steelband movement. They just added to the vast number of small bands that mushroomed in every nook and cranny of this island from 1945 onwards. Most of these bands lasted only a few years and no more than one or two survived and grew. Some of the short-lived ones enjoyed an afterlife by contributing players to the larger bands, but most, especially those in the countryside, just expired without a trace like tiny wildflowers in a forest. Like Wake Island, for instance.

The band was formed by the 15 to 20 boys who limed south of the road through Arouca. They had a sports and cultural club called Defiance in which they played cricket and organised variety concerts and debates. Every village in those days had a Chinese parlour and Aroucas was the centre of attraction for youthmen in the district, for their leaders were Anthony, Victor and Martin, the three sons of shopkeepers Ambrose and Ivy Look Loy, who were, respectively, Cantonese and creole. Victor wrote the skits which Defiance would perform for the village concerts. But it was Anthony Look Loy, the oldest, who started the steelband. Born in 1926, Anthony went to school at St Marys and had begun working in Port of Spain as a public servant towards the end of the war, when he got interested in pan. Hed seen and heard the town bands and decided to form one back home. I used my own initiative to tune them, he recalls. We used to beat the pans outnot sink them inand then make some indentations to make the notes. Immediately the Defiance members fell in, about ten to actually beat pan, the rest to support, and they began to play around the district at weddings and christenings and, of course, Carnival. They didnt leave the bounds of Arouca, and the only real competition they entered was held with a fete in Olive Hall, down by Golden Grove Road. North Star, from north Arouca, was there, as were Boom Town from Tacarigua and Red Glory from San Juan. Wake Island had only one tenor, which Anthony played, and no buglesthe San Juan band had about four. Still, the Aroucans gave a good account of themselves with In The Mood. But the Croisee band was a riotous one and they intimidated the country boys. The judge say people feel we win, but it had one set of supporters from San Juan, says Anthony. So we tied for first place. They were a peaceful bunch. They didnt meddle with the nearby North Star because that band had the rougher type from the district. One night they were on the road when they shouldnt have been and a policeman, Cpl Dennis, stopped them. The officer ordered them to stop beating so they turned around and went back to the panyard by the Look Loy parlour. Nevertheless, Wake Island wasnt completely parochial. Once Sonny Roach from Sun Valley visited some friend or relative in Arouca and checked out the band. Those days steelbands were all a fraternity and a panman going to any other district would seek out a panyard to lime in. After that Anthony would visit Sun Valley and he even bought a tenor from Roach, who was one of the most important tuners of those times. By the late Forties Wake Island was in terminal decline. The two Look Loys were devoting more time to their jobs and the other members of the band were migrating one by one, this one to England, that one to the US, until by 1951 Wake Island was no more.

THE COCONUT HEAD MAN

From his full head of hair and the alertness of his mind and body, you wouldnt think Hugo Besson has trod this earth for 73 years. And he hasnt only preserved himself

beyond the alotted three score and ten. Besson has also preserved intact some of our weirder long-time crafts, carving dried coconuts and cow horns today as it was done decades ago. He has made prize-winning fancy Indian mas, and makes ornate goatskin drums, which are not unusual things to do. But he also still carves the dried coconuts and cow horns of yesteryear, crafts which have in common the fact that they both use cheap natural raw materials which are sculpted along traditional lines. Dried coconuts are normal enough, even if youd only see them when theyve fallen from the trees and are still lying around because once theyve been collected for sale the husk is removed. However, by the time Besson is finished carving them adn this friend George Hinds has painted them, theyve become grotesque monkeys in different poses, many sitting atop a small cylindrical penny bank. Some are eating watermellon, some bananas or pineapple, one or two are beating a drum and others are plain faces without limbs. Most have alarming little fangs for a final touch of weirdness. The creatures shaped from Bessons cow horns derive their wierdness from a different source. Although they come in a wide range of sizes and, indeed, species, in form they retain the gentle taper of their raw material, horns, whose slight curl make the birds seem like graceful and delicate but slightly quizzical long-necked swans. The fishes have huge gaping mouths but still the twist of the horns give them the grace of the swimming motion. Their wierdness arises not out of the shape of these carvings but out of the material itself, the horns of water buffalos which Besson must buy at $100 per bag, although that is just a prejudice because we see nothing wierd about leather goods or tortoise shell goods. Nobody dont see when Im working them, says Besson. The wings of his birds and their feet are carved, as are the fins of the fishes. The birds wings and fishes fins are also detachable, fitting neatly into small holes in the body of the horns, and usually are fashioned from the hooves of the buffalo. You can take them off, Besson explains, so they could be packeda legacy of the tourist market for which they were made and a reminder of how Besson learnt the craft. Born in Point Cumana, Besson moved as a child to his grandmothers house in St James where he ran wild, hustling coppers wherever he could, begging a roti from the Muslims living by the poor house, spending nights wherever was easiest. I din go to schoolI was a street child, he sighs, recalling how he hung around the demi mondainethe men who brought out the district tamboo bamboo band, the stickfighters, gamblers, sagga boys, bad johns, hustlers. They used to gamble in the back of a shop, he recalls. I was a street kid but I always had discipline so when they talking I would just stand up there, me eh opening my mouth. A man would say, Look, I want a snowball and milk, I want a mauby and milk Besson, go for that for me. And I gone, because I eh going to school: I have to have some kinda knowledge so these people come as my teacher. Sometimes theyd send him up a tree to sentry for police. Other times hed go out with some of them on the bum boatssmall craft theyd row out to the passenger liners anchored in the gulfthat was before the harbour was dredged to accomodate themto peddle goods to the tourists. Besson stayed in the bum boat while the men went aboard the liner. If they wanted more stocks theyd lower a rope and hed send it up. For that he got a small cut of the days takings, so he started to make the coconut monkeys he saw some of the older men selling. He also began to make the cow horn sculptures just as hed seen his uncle doing.

Them bum boat men was the high men, he explains. When a woman have a bum boat man, she have a man whe have money. Hanging out between the older men in the St James bamboo band, Besson was also there when they moved into the era of iron and indeed as the street child grew into the sweetman bad john he was very much in the forefront of the steelband movement when he led the rowdy Belle Vue band Five Graves to Cairo, playing a three-note background pan. I was making the monkey head and a seta boys used to come round so I decide to make a little band myself and we start to beat right there, he says of Cairos genesis. It didnt have no name, it was after the war I give it the name. By the late forties hed left Cairo for Invaders, moving in front the band to clear the way. You have to have some weight to do that or people eh go listen to you, he says. By then he was concentrating more on making mas than playing pan, bending wire the way hed been taught by Mack Copeland, another panman turned to mas but this one from South. Besson had long acquired considerable notoriety as one of the more fearless bad johns, a status which attracted the attentions of both the police and the fairer sex, though for different reasons and with different consequencesand the one-time unloved, ignored street child revelled in it. And now in the evening of his years Hugo Besson can look back through the years to the way hes managed to make the best of a bad hand life has dealt him, and his only complaint is that he still doesnt collect a pensionneither from the docks where he sweated for over 20 years, nor from the governmentand that Pan Trinbago hasnt recognised his pioneer status. Panman fight four seta people: the police, church, they own family and they girl family, he says wistfully. All my sweat went into that and the docks and now I cant even fix my glasses.

MR PAMP AND THE SOUND OF STEEL

My father, explains Lord Kitchener with a gap-toothed smile, was a blacksmith and a wheelwright. Stephen Roberts was his name. He blinks several times, blink, blink, blink, and then continues with unusual fluency: They used to make musicpurposely make it while slimming down a piece of iron. The morning is cool, a breeze weaves through the porch of Rainorama, his home in Diego Martin, and Kitchener is relaxed as we search for the roots of his long-standing romance with the steelband, manifest this year in the tune Symphony on the Street on his album of the same name. The calypso is about a Frenchman who arrives in Trinidad and hears some music so sweet hes convinced must be coming from a symphonic orchestra, so Kitchener points out that its a steelband hes hearing and that pan can sound like any instrument. But our conversation starts with his childhood in Arima, where he first became enthralled with the music of iron. The notorious stammer which usually cripples Kitcheners speech is almost completely absent, perhaps because of his pleasure in recalling those days 60 years ago.

There were three blacksmiths in his hometown: Mr Horne, Mr Griffiths and the young Aldwyns father, who wasnt called Mr Roberts but rather was known as Mr Pamp for some inexplicable reason. (The young Kitch was known for his tallness as Stringbean, which became Bean Pamp.) And in Mr Pamps smithy, as probably in Mr Hornes and Mr Griffiths and other such institutions throughout the island, the rhythms of iron drew a crowd. One man was beating the iron with the sledge and my father would hit it with a smaller hammer, explains Kitch. When the sledge come down bup, the smaller hammer would go tangalang. Bup-tangalang, bup-tangalang, bup-tangalangthat was sweet music. Kitcheners parents werent Carnival people, but they were in their own way musical. His mother improvised songs for her children, one of which can still get Kitch misty. Mama will be killin them for she whoopsin, shed sing. Killing them for she thing like a thing. She was calling me she whoopsin, explains Kitch. Nobody could interfere with her child, she was singing. His father, Mr Pamp, was a well-known dancer in the district and could also whistle up a storm. Indeed, Kitchs brother Rupert inherited that ability and once placed second in a whistling competition. It wasnt through his whistling so much as his rhythms that Mr Pamp influenced the young Aldwyn, however, and Kitch recalls fondly how children from the neighbourhood were drawn to his fathers smithy when the time came for Pamp to start pounding on the iron in those days before automobiles drove the horse-drawn carts off the roads and made redundant the blacksmiths who fabricated cartwheels. Here was the African sensitivity to the rhythms of life and not surprisingly a description exists of this same activity from the same era, in a famous book, Out of Africa. The only difference is that the book isnt about Trinidadians in Arima but about Africans in Kenya. Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), in her memoirs of her years living on a coffee plantation in East Africa, described how the Kikuyu tribesmen were attracted by the hammering in the farms iron forge. The Native world was drawn to the forge by its song, observed Dinesen. The treble, sprightly, monotonous, and surprising rhythm of the blacksmiths work has a mythical force. It is so virile that it appals and melts the womens hearts, it is straight and unaffected and tells the truth and nothing but the truth. Sometimes it is very outspoken. It has an excess of strength and is gay as well as strong, it is obliging to you and does great things for you, willingly, as in play. The Natives, who love rhythm, collected by (the blacksmiths) hut and felt at their ease. According to an ancient Nordic law a man was not held responsible for what he said in a forge. The tongues were loosened in Africa as well in the blacksmiths shop, and the talk flowed freely; audacious fancies were set forth to the inspiring hammer-song. Around that time, the late 1920s, back in Trinidad, the steelband had not yet emerged, and the musical instrument which drew the young Kitchener was the double bass. He hung around a bass player named Ralph, from whom he picked up a smattering of technique, and whenever bands came to Arima hed ask for a tush on the bass. He even formed a little band and theyd play in country dances, travelling to Sangre Grande, Blanchisseuse, Cumuto.

(Apart from the drum, the bass is how the African feel for rhythm translates into modern instrumentationyou can hear it in reggae or R&B.) Kitch was also singing in a bamboo tent in Arima (a penny to enter) and when he eventually moved permanently to Port of Spain to hustle in 1944, it was as a calypsonian with the hit Green Fig. Living in La Cour Harpe in east Port of Spain, he encountered the steelband for the first time. It was the nearby Bar 20 from Bath Street, and Kitchener immediately was inspired to write The Beat of the Steelband, celebrating pioneers like Zigilee, Bitterman, Barker and Ossie Campbell. Creativity cannot be explained by cause-and-effect reasoning, and genius less so. But Kitcheners long-standing romance with the steelband must have surely been seeded by the rhythms of his father tempering iron. He has sung A Tribute to Spree Simon, Pan Harmony, Pan Explosion, Sweet Pan, Pan Night and Day, Pan in A Minor, Iron Man, The Mystery Band, Guitar Panits a long list. And the steelband movement has returned the compliment by playing at least one Kitch tune in every single Panorama finals, including 19 winners.

STRIKE THE IRON

Its a difficult pill to swallow in this country where people like a definite winner, a band which played better than all others or a man who came first, but the truth is, however, that the steelband movement was seeded in three different places in Port of Spain in the late 1930s. It began in the Big Yard on Woodford Street, in Hell Yard on Charlotte Street, and in Tantie Willies Orisha compound in Gonzales where Wellington Killey Yearwood got the idea to dismantle some derelict cars and beat their metallic parts instead of bamboo. When did this occur? Killey cant say for sure, even though despite his 85 years he has a memory as sharp as an elephants. By 1937, however, hes certain his Gonzales band was all-metal because they paraded around town in June for the Coronation of George VI. As for where the idea came from, that was way back, long before Killey was living in Gonzales and liming in the yard of Orisha priestess Wilhemina HarriotMolly Ahyes aunt, who was better known as Tantie Willie. In the late 1920s Killey was still in Rose Hill where he grew up, and that was the tamboo bamboo band which he joined. Only, he didnt beat a bamboo. My cousin Willie Grovenor was a returned soldier from the First World War and he brought back a shell case as a souvenir, a real shell case of brass, recalls Killey. Aha! thought Killey, this could work in the tamboo bamboo band. He goes on to explain that the younger men werent too good with the Key brand gin bottle that provided the bottle-and-spoon rhythm. If you gripped it too tightly, the sound was muffled, so it had to just rest in your palm. Whats worse, if you tried to get a louder sound and beat it harder, chances are it would break. Killeys shell case was a hit in the large Rose Hill band and fellas would always be asking for a knock. Well, one day when the band was making one of its illegal rounds in Laventille, they were raided by the ferocious Sergeant Caesar and the man who was

beating the shell case dropped it and, like everyone else, fled. Sergeant Caesar picked it up and strode off with his characteristic duck walk. O Gawd! Look the man gone with the shell case, lamented Killey. What I go tell my cousin? A desperate attempt was made to recover the shell case, for after all it was a prized possession of the band. David Dyer, a good runner, sneaked up behind the sergeant, snatched the shell case and bolted. Alas, Sergeant Caesar, despite his splayedfoot gait, was also fleet. He gave chase and began to gain on the handicapped Dyer. Dyer dropped the shell case and escaped, and the sergeant collected it once again. And that was the end of that. Years later saw Killey living in Gonzales, liming in Tantie Willies yard, going up Red Hill to cut bamboo when Carnival came around, with the First Elevenmen such as Conrad Musso Rat Roach, Raymond Saucy Deane, Lionel and Rupert Cook, Reginald Piggy Joseph (who later on wrote for Sparrow) and a few others. Come 1937, however, they couldnt get their act together to go as a group for the bamboo. How I go go? said one man protesting the lack of co-operation. Two of we alone cyar go. If they eh go, advised Killey, to arse with that. It happens every year, even today, when people decide they arent playing Carnival and then at the last minute withdrawal symptoms prove too stong and they rush about in frantic search of a costume. So too it happened a half century ago when the urge to beat bamboo gripped the hearts of the First Eleven, only it was too late to go and cut new instruments. Killey looked around at the derelict vehicles in Tantie Willies yard where they limed and perhaps he recalled his cousins shell casing. Maybe his trade, for he was a tinsmith, predisposed him to the concept of hammering iron. Whatever the reason, he suggested they substitute car parts for the missing bamboo tubes. Immediately they began to stip the vehicles, this one taking a gas tank, another going for a piece of fender, until everyone had some piece of iron on which they could knock a rhythm. When we really hit the road, recalls Killey. We make Belmont band throw they bamboo over in the river. Explaining how the Belmont fellas were so demoralised when they heard the Gonzales band with their scrap iron percussion, Killey says: I go tell you something what a band, a tamboo bamboo band does feel proud of and feel hes a champ whether he beating good or he eh beating good: if you passing another tamboo bamboo, your band drown he band. That is all you looking out for. When I passing my band could drown your band and they cant hear your band at allthat is the kudos, thats a feather in my cap, that when I pass you I cant hear you at all. Its like we lick you up. So that is what happen when we first came out with Belmont band. The Gonzales band only lasted a few years, by which time theyd chosen a name: the Gonzales Rhythm Makers. In 1944 the band was revived for a lecture/demonstration given by Edric Connor at the Bishops Anstey High School. The lecture was a success and it was repeated at the Victoria Institute, and thereafter Killey returned to the domestic concerns which had begun to pull him, for that year his first child was born.

By then, however, the steelband movement was already in existence and the early iron bands had been eclipsed by steelbands such as Invaders, Tripoli and, coming out of the younger Gonzales generation, Casablanca.

WHEN HAMIL WENT UNHEEDED

The research process can be agonisingly slow, and it was years ago I first read of Hamilton Thomas, also known as Hamil or Big Head, the man to whom Neville Jules, the great captain, tuner and arranger of Trinidad All Stars, paid homage as his captain. Prince Batson states that the first person he saw obtaining notes on a pan was Hamilton Big Head Thomas of the Hell Yard, wrote Stephen Stuempfle in his 1990 PhD thesis, which eventually became the book The Steelband Movement: Formation of a National Art. Batson himself years later did tell me of Hamilnot as an inventor but as a leader of the Hell Yard fighting side. Then Jerry Serrant, the historian of Trinidad All Stars, and Sonny Jones, a pioneer from the band, both told me early last year about Hamils combativity and innovativeness. Neither knew his present address, however, and only when Jules himself returned to Trinidad to celebrate his 70th birthday last year did I meet the man known as Hamil and arrange to interview him when the Pan Pioneers series began once again. Born in 1920, he was the son of Eva Thomas, an African woman, and Maximin Thomas, a Chinaman who worked in Pantins Bakery in Prince Street. Accordingly, who now lives in Diego Martin, grew up where most Port of Spain Chinese livedin Charlotte Street: specifically, 90 Charlotte Street, next to one of the passages to the open lot known as Hell Yard where there congregated the inheritors of the old jamette culture. Sagiator and his brothersthe Draytonswas there, and it had Demsee, Tall Black and Short Black, Lulie and Bruce Dr Rats father, he used to push a cart and he was a fighter: long- time fight, wrestling and boxing and stick, says Hamil in a rush. The George Street fellas used to come there tooTom Keane, Nigger, Brown Boy, Fitzgerald, Matura, Hamilnot me, another oneand they used to have the prostitutes with them. Words tumble out of Hamil as if theyd been pent up for years, jumbling any sense of narrative as he describes places and people and events, starting with the bacchanal between the George Street men and the Charlotte Street posse. Look, my pores raise, he says as he bursts into song, evoking the riot which broke out in a rumshop and gambling club called the wang at the bottom of Charlotte Street: Riot in the wang with Hell Yard and George Street, Once again they meet. I say riot in the wang with Hell Yard and George Street, Once again they meet. The only thing that made me feel bad Knowing that they fought for a pack of card. But the pelting of the bottle and the throwing of the stone They made George Street a battle zone.

As a result of this riot the George Street men ended up forming their own band. Those were the tamboo bamboo days of the 1930s when the Hell Yard men produced a famous sailor band every Carnival, SS Bad Behaviour. Hamil was one of its younger members and a leader amongst the youth whom he trained in boxing and wrestling. Now bent and slow-moving, Hamil still possesses a full head of grey hair. He raises his T-shirt and turns to show a scar on his back. Wrestling, showing a man a fall, the sand bus my backit had a piece of steel in it what cut me, he says. I eh go to no doctor, I take cobweb and cocoayoung cocoa what I scrapeand put it in. Old-time medicine, nah, bush medicine. In later years, after the steelband movement was formed, Hamil would take over the self-defence of the band, training the men in the martial arts and instilling in them self-discipline. They had one misunderstanding with Casablanca and they make Casablanca men go to the police station. They had to go by force. Casablanca men couldnt come down Charlotte Street. They had to pass the other way around to go to the market, they couldnt pass there. Hamil marshal the forces. He say, Everybody have to pass, they must come down Charlotte Street to go to the market for food and we will deal with them. He line up bottles both side of Charlotte Street, recalled Batson in 1995. Back in the 1930s, however, the older generation still held sway, men such as the Stowe brothers and Edmund Waj Raymond. At that time Hamil tried to mobilise the Hell Yard men to bring out an all-metal band in keeping with a vision he had, but the youth had no standing in the eyes of the older men, even though Andre Lulie Abbott had for years been knocking a piece of iron in the bamboo rhythms of Hell Yard. Like God inspire it in me, he says. I take a yeast pan and I dent it and it going: ping-a-ling, ting; ping-a-ling, ting. Thats allonly two notes I did have. It was sounding very nice but they didnt want to hear: when you is a floor member no character doesnt want to hear you. For Jouvert that yearit was 1939the Woodford Street band Alexanders Ragtime Band hit the streets with all metal percussion, led by Carlton Forde, known as Lord Humbugger. He had a scissors-tail coat as the bandmaster coming down Charlotte Street. If you see the manwith he top hat he looking like Death. The man thin, he like galvanise, and they coming down: tong tong ting, tong tong ting ting, recalls Hamil. O Gawd, listen, wailed Hamil. They cut we before we raise we hand, What you mean? asked his bemused friends. Listen to that! said Hamil. What I was telling allyou? Listen! After that everything changed. The Hell Yard youths began collecting dustbins, paint tins, anything out of metal, as did all the other traditional tamboo bamboo bands John John, Laventille, Basilon Street. The steelband movement was born. And if Alexanders Ragtime Band got the jump on all the others, the Hell Yard boys caught up when they formed Cross of Lorraine, which after the war became Trinidad All Stars, one of the greatest steelbands ever.

BREAKADOOR

There was always a togetherness on the Hill, recalls Ricardo Breakadoor Josephever since the days of tamboo bamboo when the huge, extended Bowen family brought out the Jouvert band from 19 Laventille Road. It was a set of bush in the road when the band coming down, he says. From Jouvert morning we played mas right through, the same mastrees they holding up in the air. Born in 1927, he was in those days, the 1930s, too young to beat tamboo bamboo. You have to have shoulders to keep beating the bamboo in the road, he explains. The big fellas did that. Still, everyone was there on Carnival, men, women, children, because even then the Hill moved as one. When you on the road it was like you home because everybody taking care of each other, he says. It come like you on Laventille Road, the way everybody take care of each other in those days. The birth of the steelband movement, however, signalled the immediate death of tamboo bamboo, and the torch passed to the younger generation. That was when Joseph and his friends decided to form their own steelband. That was around 1940 or 1941, around the time a movie showed at Royal Cinema about some youths who were able to beat up a gang of older men. Dead End Kids was the name of the movie, and the Laventille youths took it for their new band. For their T-shirts they stencilled a red heart on the front, with a bow and arrow in it. Members included Four Roads Collins, Reynold Singco John, Brooks Banfield, Wilbert Be eh Pacheco, Donald Jit Steadman and Wilfred Talkative Harrisona group who limed together. Laventillians in those days rarely came into town singly. Indeed, those living higher up didnt come into town at all, except on Carnival day. When we going in town to cinema it was a group, not one by one, says Joseph. We didnt knock about town by weself. We always figured nobody in town didnt like Laventille people. Of the group Jit and Talkative were the slightly older ones and they werent averse to bullying their younger friends; but the leader, insofar as there was one, was first Wilbert Be eh Pacheco, followed by Orisha drummer Carlton Mimp Francis, who now lives in New Jersey. Mimp always had more knowledgewhere to go and where not to go, what is right and what is wrong, recalls Joseph. He was quiet but very dangerous. The band hadnt a yard yet, but Laventillians didnt ostracise panmen as did most other communities, so they left their instruments, their biscuit drums and paint pans and dustbins, under the houses of different matriarchs who didnt mind helping the youths out. After all, the Dead End Kids, for all their combative name, didnt really get into trouble. Eventually, however, they felt for their own place, so they cleared the bush around a spot where they used to lime and make cooks and there the band settled. Years later a community centre would be built there, placing the band symbolically in the heart of the community. Way back when they first moved to that location they might have still been Dead End Kids but around that time, just before the end of the Second World War or perhaps just after it, another movie captured their imagination: Glen Ford in The Desperados. That night we was going up Basilon Street, recalls Joseph. By the corner we sit down and decide to name weself Desperadoes. We liked the name and most steelbands had movie names. It means desperate men and from there we start to get into trouble.

There had already been a fight with the Gonzales men, some of whom were stabbed or chopped. Ivan Brains Bourne made a jail for some criminal behaviour or other. Joseph became known as Breakadoor after breaking into a house to beat a man. Panmen all over were targeted for police harassment but especially those from the east Port of Spain fighting bands: Casablanca, Tokyo, Red Army, Rising Sun and Desperadoes. All the time police was making a raid and hold we for illegal assembly, says Joseph. When we assemble we get into mischief, make a raid somewhere, so they used to run we. I get lock up for assembly when I was about 21, it was about 17 of we who get charge with assembling for the purpose of committing a felony. Ivan Bourne do something and he wasnt with we but so long as people get lash the police holding everybody from the band. One day towards the end of the 1940s the Desperadoes were liming at the side of Laventille Road when a black maria pulled up. Every man ran. A policeman pulled out a megaphone. Dont runwe eh come to lock allyou up! said the officer. We come to give allyou job. The men were taken to the docks where workers were on strike, and put to unload the ships with other panmen, this band eating and sleeping in one shed, another band in another shed. It was felt that only panmen could have withstood the intimidation of the dock workers. Then there was a fight in a fete at SWWTU and it escalated into a feud with Tokyo which lasted for years as every minor incident became blown out of proportion. Once we was in the market and Bake Nose hit a fella from up by we, recalls Joseph. He tell we and everybody say nobody eh have no right hitting nobody from Laventille Road. We meet a fella from John Johnhe wasnt there, he eh know what going on, but he unlucky so he get plenty lash. Both sides dug in for a war of attrition and matters got worse and worse, sucking in both communities, until people from both John John and Laventille were afraid to go out at night. It was out of this the Special Works project was created to reduce the violence. George Yeates from Desperadoes was brought to work in the Prime Ministers Office and the band was given a community centre. Internally, Yeates and Donald Jit Steadman decided to bring in a youth who was already showing outstanding leadership qualities. He was from a small but highly musical band called Spike Jones and his name was Rudolph Charles. Charles was determined to build a winning steelband and he used his considerable charisma to bring in top tuners, arrangers and players from wherever he could find them: Ellie and Birdie Mannette and Emmanuel Cobo Jack Riley from Invaders; Beverly Griffith from Starland; Carl Bumpy Nose Greenidge from Kentuckians; Raymond Artie Shaw from the police band, Clive Bradley from Clarence Curvans dance band. By then Joseph was out of it, however. A biscuit drum and two-note bass player, hed never been very good. After Tony Williams put the bass on wheels so more drums could be mobile, Joseph quietly shifted over to the mas side of the band.

THE MAN WHO FORMED NORTH STARS

Today, at 69 years of age, Roy Harper can still be heard playing with Pan Vibes every Monday night at the Trinidad Hilton, and youd hardly know this was one of the pioneers of the steelband movement in St James. Born in Barbados, he was brought to Trinidad once his mother was able to travel, and eventually settled in Luknow Street in St JamesBlue Stocking Alley it was called in those days. It had a big river running down almost in the centre of the road, like how Bournes Road used to be, he recalls. Those days there was a tamboo bamboo yard with stickfighting close by in Ranjit Kumar Street, but Harper hardly got to see it, being at the time under his mothers jurisdiction. As a little fella, he explains, you could open a little part between th e coconut branch and peep but if they see you they give you one cut arse and send you home. Sometimes you sitting hereWap! Across your back and you cant complain because you go get it when you reach home too. And, as he emphasises, his mother didnt eat sorf. Still, on VE (Victory in Europe) Day when the infant steelband movement legally took to the streets for the first time, Harper, sick with chickenpox, took a jump in the rain: I get good tap for that. He started hanging around Harlem Nightingales in Guthrie Street in 1946, secretly, and when Sonny Roach decided to branch off and form his own band, Sun Valley, Harper followed. To be in a steelband was the most degrading thing. Steelband didnt start to riot yet but when they come down the road to beat, especially at Christmas time, police used to run them, he says. You have to have a good pair of foot because once you see police jump out the bush its licks. They didnt carry you in courts, they just used to carry you in the station and lock you up, give you a cut tail and send you home. You might get a good piece of wood across your back, or a tamarind rod, or if them police bad they walk with they bull pistle and give you two if they catch you. Harper played with them for Carnival but he wasnt too involved, until he dropped by the panyard one night when the band was rehearsing for the first Islandwide Steelband Competition, and Sonny Roach was teaching some simple lines to one particularly unreceptive panman and making rough weather of it. Look Roy Harper here, said Roach in exasperation. He does only play pan once a year and I sure he could beat that. Roach turned to Harper. Take that pan and beat it, he ordered, and thats how Harper got on the bands stage side. On the night of the competition Harper borrowed his older brothers trousers and played with Sun Valley, which came first. After that his mother relented and he was allowed to openly be a part of the band. Sonny Roach was a gifted tuner and a hard worker, but he also had a streak of ignorance about him. Once the band was playing some African mas and Roach slit his own dogs throat so they could get the animals bones. And when Harper saw Ellie Mannette playing a second pan and told Roach, the captain replied, I eh have that to study. When you see we come down with we ping pong and we baylay we go run them off the road. It didnt work out that way, though. Come Christmas Sun Valley was moving down Bournes Road just when Invaders passed along George Cabral Street, and all the St James people left Sun Valley to jump with the Woodbrook band, including Harper. Roach flew into a rage and the following day he banned them from entering his yard where Sun Valley was based. Harper and some others played mas that Carnival.

After that relations got worse and worse until Roach gave up the band and threw them out his yard. Harper relocated down the road in the Polydors Shango yard, taking with him the bands best players, one of whom was the young Anthony Williams. Eventually Roach decided to take back Sun Valley and informed them that Bournes Road was too small for two bands, so Harper moved to Kandahar where they renamed their band after a Farley Granger movie called the North Star. Like many other panmen at the time Harper got involved in a fight or two, no big riot like what took place in Port of Spain but enough for him to be brought before the magistrate on a trumped up charge. The police bring about four bags of bottle, conch shell, stone, all kinda thing, and they put it there for the magistrate. I could see the magistrate laughing, he recalls. Lennox Pierre, who pleaded on his behalf ridiculed the police. Your honour, said Pierre, He would have to be an Indian god to pelt this amount of bottle and stone and conch shell here as evidence. Harper was reprimanded and discharged. Shortly after the newly formed Steelband Association and began picking a team to play with the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) at the Festival of Britain. I was the captain and it was the captains who picked who did the picking, says Harper, who was working at the time and was reluctant to give up his job. The fellas who captain a band, as long as they could play they went. I must be was the only jackass captainI could play and I send a man. Im the person who picked Tony Williams to go Taspo. After Williams returned from Britain, a friction developed between him and Harper, until Harper, whod learnt both to tune and to be ignorant from Roach, decided one Las Lap to leave North Stars. I take up the pan and t hrow them in the St James river and walk away, he says. Thats how I leave North Star. He moved to Tripoli where he remained for a while tuning and sometimes arranging, until he fell out with captain Big Boy Inniss. He couldnt even play a toc toc and he want to rule, says Harper, who left to form the short-lived Starniks, taking the young Othello Mollineux went along with him. Starniks didnt last long, and Harper joined Curtis Pierres Dixieland in the 1960s, and there he has remained, staying with them through all their metamorphoses from Dixieland to Texaco Dixieland, to Sky Chief and finally to Pan Vibes, where he still is today.

WITNESSING SPREE
Why they dont put Lara Promenade in Santa Cruz? said Neville McLeod vehemently. If they could name a little park what nobody could see in John John after Spree Simon. And McLeod, 71 years old and better known far and wide, because of his flat profile, as Bake Nose, began talking about the man John John claims was the first to put enough notes on a pan to beat a full tune.

Bake Nose explained that Spree was a tenor singer. Hed sing only classics like Ave Maria, said Bake Nose. He had a good voice and he always humming, always singing. Winston Spree Simon, Bake Nose explained, was practically his half-brother. When he come from the country he come and live by wemy mother married to Sprees brother, he says. We sleep on the ground together. He was but a child at the time, not joining in the John John military mas SS Oregon but seeing it all from the vantage point in Tamarind Square where his grandmother sold souse and mauby at Carnival. There was no music in those days other than the tamboo bamboo, and that was hardly mobile. The SS Oregon sailors had to make do with a mouth band, or try to jump with someone elses music band. Come World War II and Carnival was banned for four years, and the John John youth would have to make do with quick forays up Laventille, dodging the police. By wars end, according to Bake Nose, Spree was putting notes on his pans. It was in 1945 right on Broadway near Cipriani Statue, said Bake Nose. On the right had a stand and the Governor was there when Spree beat God Save the King. I know from the first pan he make in 1945 with four notes. Then he make another one with five notes. Those were days when the John John band had now got its name from a movie theyd seen in theh Odeon cinema about an American secret serviceman on a wartime mission to Japan. And when VJ Day come, said Bake Nose, We paint we chest and back on we skin: Destination Tokyo. The captain of the band was Dudley Rouff, who was chosen because his father was well-off and Dudley was able to pilfer the old mans money and buy paint for the caustic soda drums theyd stolen from the soap factory near the abbatoir. For his part Bake Nose used to beat the caustic soda drum whose face was divided along the diagonal to give two tones. One time I even had a band what used to go up Picton Road up by the fort where the Yankees had they camp, he said. To have a band you only have to get four or five drums, carbide and caustic soda drumsthe carbide sound a little finer so its the tenor, the caustic is like a bass. You have the iron and an angle iron make out of steel. And we go by the fort where the Yankees give we money. It was rudimentary, but by the time they reached up the hill thered be about 60 people jumping with them because in those days anything that gave a little rhythm attracted a crowd. You take up one tenor pan...I remember Broko take up a violin and Abraham had a cuatro and we went over the hill with about 150 people, he recalled. Still, Bake Nose wasnt so much into the pan business as its corollaryfighting. I always in the front line, he said. It eh had a man in John John with more case. If a man want to go and fight somebody, he have cutlass home but he coming to borrow mine because I going too. I eh want to know what happen, I going. It was that constant fighting, mainly over women, that led in the late 1950s to the riot between Tokyo and Desperadoes, and their respective communitiesJohn John and Laventilleuntil Eric Williams, wanting to end the warfare, called a meeting of the combatants in the old prisoners quarry in St Paul Street. What do you want? asked Williams. Donald Jit Steadman from Desperadoes shouted, We want work! Thus was born the Special Works project in Laventille and John John, which would grow to cover the entire country, its name changing to DEWD, LID and now URP.

Bake Nose was by then more into club life, however, having first bought his first club for $800 in the early 1950s. I borrow a case of beer and a bottle of rum, he said. And I start to pay the man back from the profits. The one club grew, by the early 1960s, into four, and Bake Nose, being the ignorant man he was, never had to hire a bouncer. As he put it, I never employ villainists. Still, he was beginning to feel uneasy. His wife was studying nursing in London and kept asking him to come, and one Christmas he realised it wouldnt cost him a cent. I used to buy presents and almanac for all my customers, Bake Nose explained. I realised the money I was going to spend could pay my passage. And I was fighting too long and winningthe day I lose I felt I might dead. He packed his bags and went off to London where he remained for 18 years, and London, which could tame a lion, taught him that it made more sense to avoid a fight than to go in bold and brave.

CLASH OF THE TITANS

The story was first told to me a year ago by Joseph Baird, who recalled an incident in the Basilon Street quarry when some Invaders men and some Renegades men sought to settle a feud between the two bands in the manner of the cowboy movies: by individual, hand-to-hand combat. In Bairds account, Stanley Ponehead Hunte from Invaders beat Stephen Goldteeth Nicholson from Renegades. He made Stephen look like an ass, admitted Baird, a Renegades supporter from the bands inception. Next, Harold Fowl Lewis from Renegades was chosen to grapple with Invaders Leonard Slim Joseph, but Fowl chickened out. I feel shame for Renegades, said Baird, who felt a bit better after he decided to personally take on Nathaniel Monster Martin from Invaders, and Monster, like Fowl before him, demurred. Next time Slim come down, said Baird, Ill put him on to you and you could get the story from him too. And very much a man of his word, Baird told me last week that Slim was in town for Carnival, and offered to make the contact. And the story Slim recounted was much the same, only from the Invaders point of view, and starting further back. Born in 1930, Leonard Slim Joseph grew up on Tragarite Road, opposite the Big Yard from whence emerged Alexanders Ragtime Band, the seedbed of Invaders. His grandmother didnt allow him to hang around the Big Yard, however, and Slim only caught stolen glimpses of the men there gambling, fighting with sticks, and beating their old dustbins and paint pans. And when she died, things got even worse, because he was sent to live in Barataria with his aunt, who was even more strict. Seven oclock, he says, they have their gate lock. So as a teenager he ran away to lime in Woodbrook and hang around Invaders. For a home, he moved into an abandoned house near Roxy, along with three or four other wayward or homeless boys, hustling whatever they could, cooking whatever was available. They called it The Ship and from there theyd sally forth to lime by Invaders or to gamble in a place near Roxy. Everything was going alright until we put up a sign marked Off limits to police, he says. They come and mash up everything, beat up them guys.

Slim also began to beat pan for Invaders, playing the tune boom, which was a biscuit drum with three notes, but only on the road for Carnivalnever on the stage side. His role, rather, was in the bands other division. We, he explains, was the riot side. Invaders was a Woodbrook band, theyd always had the sweetest pans, they enjoyed a following of many prominent middle-class people, and perhaps thats why they were resented by many town bands. Tokyo beat them up and took Mannettes state-ofthe-art ping pong named The Barracuda. The first year we try to come in town a Carnival Monday morning, the furthest we reach was by Edward Street, says Slim. A band they call Salome, Norbert Greenidge was the captain, they mash up all we pans. The next year we reach a little further, we reach St Vincent Street and Red Army come out from a corner there and mash away everything. It was Stanley Hunte (better known as Ponehead from when he used to carry on his head the pone his mother sold for a living) who decided enough was enough, and led them into battle the following year, mashing up bands like a flood through kitepaper. The Mannette brothers were fully in the forefront of those battles, as were other top players such as Francis Peacock Wickham. But, according to Slim, the side which carried on the war before, during and after Carnival the gang which limed by Roxy, the Purple Hearts, wearing their short black jackets and armed with iron bolts for throwing and short cutlasses for chopping. The guys in Woodbrook wasnt bad guys, a lot of them come from decent homes, says Slim. We (Purple Hearts) was young guys not working nowhere, we had time to go and make riot in the day. It was hell but we used to have fun, we didnt really call it dangerous, and we riot with Casablanca and Renegades and Desperadoes and Tokyo. The only band in town we didnt riot with was All Stars. The chain of events which led to the fight in the quarry began with a fight between Carlton Blackhead and Zigilee over Muriel Little One Granger. Blackhead wasnt an Invader but he was from Woodford Street, and Zigilee was a Casablanca, and the domestic squabble poisoned the friendship that had existed between the two bands until it grew into one of the bitterest feuds in steelbands early history. After many heads were bussed, many men chopped, and scores from either side jailed for affray, the Invaders/Casablanca war eventually ended. But not before it had spilled over into an Invaders/Renegades riot, for Renegades, led by former Casablanca fighter Stephen Goldteeth Nicholson, had become perceived as a young Casablanca. And it was this new feud which led to the incident Joe Baird described to me. One day we was in town when the riot was going on and we meet some Renegades by Park Street and bottle and thing start, says Slim. Ossie (Campbell from Casablanca) start shouting, Listen, listen, I want to tal to allyou! We wasnt annoyed with he because the Casablanca thing was done. He say, Listen, let we settle this thing, let we go in the quarry and a man take a man. So the two sides went in the quarry, accompanied by Ponehead and Joe Baird. Carlton Blackhead was there too and he whipped out a knife. Na, na, said the Invaders men. No blade. Harold Fowl Lewis arrived, ignorant of what was going on. A body-builder, he was muscular, and as he was there looking big and bad, the Renegades decided hed fight first. Slim stood for Invaders. Na, me eh fighting Slim, said Fowl. He eh do me nothing. And he quickly departed.

Slim does not mention it, but according to Joe Baird, he (Baird), feeling the Renegades humiliation for Fowls cold feet, stepped forward and challenged a brawny Invaders man, Nathaniel Monster Martin. Monster was no more in a mood to trade cuffs than Fowl had been, however, and he too refused to fight. The sides were even in their shame but nothing was being accomplished. Look, them guys eh want to fight so what we go do, we go make this thing settle with two fellas: Goldteeth and Ponehead, says Slim. And so the fight started. They circled one another and then the titans clashed. The Invaders warrior was in the evening of his days while Goldteeth was big just like him but younger, thick just like him but stronger. The Renegades captain sought to rely on his strength, but Ponehead was more experienced. Quickly the Invaders man tripped up Goldteeth and began to pummel him on the ground. They were separated and faced one another again. Goldteeth was hoping to catch Stanley standing up because Goldteeth was a better standing fighter than on the ground, recalls Slim. But Stanley take him and put him on the ground. Stanley use he brain. They separated and began again. And again Ponehead got the better of Goldteeth. Three or four times that happen and I stopped the fight, says Baird, who had to grapple a furious Goldteeth and pin him down. Stephen eye getting red, Ponehead was making him look like an ass. Thus victory was in one sense given to Stanley Ponehead Hunte of the Woodbrook Invaders, but because the fight ended one of those senseless riots which had had done the steelband movement such a disservice, in a wider more profound sense both bands were the winners.

THE LIGHT IN SUN VALLEY

For years I have circled the late Sonny Roach from St James, hearing that his greatness as a tuner was second only to Ellie Mannette in the early days. Tony Williams spoke of his inventiveness, Noel Nooksin Sampson recalled his hot-headedness, Cecil Ward related how they won the first Islandwide Steelband Competition. Born August 6, 1924, Carlton Sonny Roach unfortunately died in 1986, thus putting him beyond reach of journalistic enquiry. Recently, however, Norman Darway, an historian of the St James steelband movement, lent me a taped interview between Sonny Roach and George Goddard, dated around 1980. What influenced you to become involved in steelband? asked Goddard, who spoke in a surprisingly formal tone throughout the entire interview. Roach replied that it was just mischief that had him beating old pans around 1933 when he was 11 years old. There was this Shango tent in Guthrie Street, St James, and going to the Shango on afternoons it turned out that I cannot come inside, he said. We decide if we cant go inside we going to get old pans and make noise so they cant hear the drums. The reason they chose to make noise on old pans was because the Shango drums were loud and old pans were the loudest thing they could get their hands on. From that perverse beginning, the youths around Roach began to knock on their tin pans on afternoons when they were idling. A few occasions they paraded with the tin pans up to Belle Vue, but soon the police stopped them and that was that.

That group in Guthrie Street became Harlem Nightingales which brought out the mas St James Sufferers in 1946, the first Carnival after the Second World War. By then Roach was tuning the bands pans, and finding he hadnt been paid what he felt hed deserved, he left to open Nob Hill in Kandahar. Again, however, he fell out with the captain after Carnival, so Roach went off to form Sun Valley, taking along the most talented players such as Roy Harper, Tony Williams and Addawell Sampson. By then pans were playing simple tunes, and Roach, knowing no music, tuned his four notes from the sound of the bugle revilles at the nearby St James barracks. Despite his musical ignorance, Roach rose to prominence after he invented the alto pan forerunner to the modern second panon instructions from Bajan Cecil Ward, Sun Valleys arranger. I spoil about six tin pans before I could get this alto, recalled Roach. They wanted to enter their arrangement of Home Sweet Home in the first Islandwide Steelband Competition, but the single alto pan counter-melody was always drowned out by the rest of the band. Roach reduced the band to about nine players, removing the loudest instrumentsthe iron and the bugle which were standard in every steelbandand ran away with the first prize in the first islandwide competition. The next competition was between the four top bands in the country: Casablanca, Trinidad All Stars, Invaders and Sun Valley. Each band was to play three tunes, but the organiser Norman Tang said, Beat one tuneit getting lateand finish. Sun Valley beat a calypso, as did All Stars and Casablanca. Invaders, however, played a rhumbaIts Magicand was given first prize, much to the chagrin of the other bands. I get vex and I say from that I not going back to no competition, said Roach, and he never did compete again, contenting himself to have the band sing: Sun Valley coming down/Invaders bound to run/And when they see the sun/Its the valley coming down/Invaders only farse/With they dutty sailor mas. It was this impulsiveness which would exclude Roach from much of the glory that he deserved, and would make some of his most talented players leave him to form North Stars, reputed to be the greatest steelband. But first outrageous fortune had to deal him another blow. Come 1950 the Steelband Association decided to send a band to the Festival of Britain, and began selecting members for the famous Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra: Taspo. Included were Ellie Mannette (Invaders), Andrew de la Bastide (Hill 60), Dudley Smith (Rising Sun), Orville Patsy Haynes (Casablanca), Philmore Boots Davidson (City Syncopaters), Theo Stephens (Southern All Stars), Belgrave Bonaparte (Southern Symphony), Winston Spree Simon (Fascinators), Sterling Betancourt (Crossfire) and Anthony Williams (North Stars). Roach couldnt attend the meeting which chose the team, however, because he was tuning pans in Siparia. Normally that would have been the end of that, but according to Roach, the Steelband Association was finding difficulty in establishing their legitimacy for sponsorship of the Taspo band, when Sonny Roach wasnt on the team. They approached him again, and he agreed to join the team which sailed for England on July 6, 1951. Things turned sour, however, and Roach fell ill. When the ship first docked in Martinique he left them and returned to Trinidad alone.

Sonny Roach began to fade out of the steelband movement after that, staying home to play tenor pan by himself, one of the steelband movements earliest and brightest stars to burn out in solitude and resentment.

LEO WARNER
To connosseurs Leo Warner is one of the foremost intuitive artists in the country, a Baptist leader whose artistic inspiration is profoundly spiritual. But to me his name was first associated with the steelband Commandoes which he captained in the 1940s. The pleasant surprise was to discover that before Commandoes was formed Warner had been in the great pioneering band from Newtown, Alexanders Ragtime Band. Born in 1922 he grew up with his grandmother on Frederick Street and was schooled in Richmond Street RC Boys School. In 1935 he apprenticed at Craigwells Joiners Shop on the corner of French Street and Robert Street, Woodbrook. There he met Roy Buddy Colston who limed in the Big Yard at the bottom of Woodford Street, where Alexanders Ragtime Band was formed. That is the band which many claim to have launched the steelband movement in 1939 when Carlton Forde, also known as Lord Humbugger, led them through Port of Spain that Carnival drumming only on metal percussion: biscuit drums, car brake hubs, a gramophone horn, paint pans. Warner beat the large biscuit drum, which gave the band its bass. Peche, Police, myself, were the bassmen, he recalls, in addition to two others. When the three of us came together we had a special skill so that everybody sounded like one, he says. But the main men were Victor Tutie Wilson and Frederick Mando Wilson whose virtuoso instruments were the two-note paint pans. And here was Warners real contribution to the band, for he was the one whod got the paint pans for them from a dump. How did that came about? It all began when he was offered a dollar a week by architect James Howard, and thus left Craigwells Joiner Shop. With Howard he worked first at the Jews prison on Serpentine Road, and then at the American camp on Wrightson Road where the deep warter harbour was being dredged. Thosetwo tone we used to call themthose pans came from the base. It had the Harbour Scheme when the Americans came and occupied the area, he explains. We had a hell of a dump on Sea Lots but they used to dump certain things like clothing. But paint pans and things like theat they used to dump down there by Mucurapo. So since I had access to the whole place I saw the pans were a special steel hardand they were five gallons. I used to take the paint pans from there and I walk over because Woodbrook at that time had some long alleys, some of them are still there, and I used to walk through the alley and come right up. After three years Carnival was banned in Trinidad because of wartime austerities and Alexanders Ragtime Band swiftly declined. As the war progressed some members drifted westwards to the young Oval Boys band, which later became Invaders. Some drifted east to Green Corner where they eventually formed Red Army. And some

gravitated to the Edward Street home of the Alphonso brothers, Reginald Alphonso, also known as Popo, having been Alexanders Ragtime Bands main iron man. There in Edward Street was formed Commandoes under Warners leadership. In 1946 Carnival was resumed and Commandoes were hired by sailor bandleader Diamond Jim Harding. Nobody ever know about thatthe first steelband ever beat for a sailor band. And those boys what beat with me at the time, they saw the sailors nose was made out of cardboard. Capn, they said to Warner. You could do better than that. Two of them took a piece of wire and bent it in the shape of a cobra and showed him. He knew he could improve on it and the following year, according to Warner, the first bent-wire cobra-nose appeared in the Commandoes sailor band. By the 1960s Warner had begun to shift out of steelband and into mas. Now living in Belmont he began bending wire for fancy sailor bands, one year producing the costumes for Desperadoes and thereafter judging mas for the CDC, until he withdrew from even that in favour of full-time art.

THE LAST BISCUIT DRUMMER

The last day I met Henry Pachot he was leaning on a cut-down broomstick, shuffling through a crowd along Independence Square south of the Cathedral. The exact date and time was Saturday, March 18, at 10.30 in the morning. Archbishop Pantins funeral was supposed to begin just then. Patcheye, I hailed as he approached George Street. Oy, he replied in his rapid stammer, h-help me to g-get home on Nelson Street please. The 71-year-old Pachot, who followed Pantin three months later, was better known (in the steelband world) as Patcheye, owing to the coincidence between his French name and a permanently closed-down eye, which gave his face a sort of twisted grimace. One of the greatest biscuit drummers ever produced by the steelband movement, Patcheye founded Hill 60 steelband at a time when bands were all born out of gangs of youths who limed together, either as neighbours, through school or some club. Y-you ever hear of a one man steelband? Patcheye asked me years ago. Well, that was me and me alone. Around 1938 hed seen a well-known character named Cook beating one in Gonzales and in 1940 when Patcheye was 18 and living on Clifton Hill, Laventille, he found a cement drum which he began to beat. Even then Patcheye was no neophyte. As a child he used to take a knock in the yard of the Clifton Hill bamboo band. And although he was a Catholic, Patcheye graduated to drums. It had Shango tents all over. T-they had in Belair Road, they had in St John Street, they had in John Johna woman called Miss Thompson, he had recalled. When they have feast I as a little boy would go because they sharing food. A-and I learn to beat the drum. So I become a very good drummer. When he first began beating that cement drum on Clifton Hill, Patcheye was already an experienced percussionist, and like the pied piper he drew the youths from the

district, starting with Errol Mummy Anderson, who was followed by other little boys, all coming for a knock in Patcheyes yard. One youth who knew them but never touched a pan, George Blackman, lover of the famous jamette known as Bubulups, told them about a place bitterly contested in the First World War, now the Germans capturing it, now the British winning it back. The place was known as Hill 60, and the Clifton Hill youths took it for the name of their new band. VE (Victory in Europe) came, and Patcheye decided to catch up with the times by replacing his old cement drum with a new-fangled biscuit drum. He stole one from Destination Tokyo in John John. Unfortunately, he was spotted. Later Winston Spree Simon boarded Patcheye with some Tokyo badjohns. When Spree saw the youths in the band he calmed down. Keep that biscuit drumIll tell you where to get them and when youet one give me back mine, he told Patcheye. Go Duncan Street in the Sunrise Biscuit factory and get one for $2.50. It was a small fortune in those days but Patcheye traversed the neighbourhood, cap in hand, begging for contributions until he had it. The Lawrence brothersRaymond, Kenneth and Geraldjoined. One talented Casablanca youth, Andrew Pan DeLabastide, joined. By VJ (Victory in Japan) Day the band was bigger. And like every other steelband they had to steal drums. Once, they stole a mans water barrel and he investigated and found out it was the Hill 60 boys. He went to the Besson Street station and returned with a policeman for Patcheye. But they had three good tuners de la Bastide and the two Lawrences. By the time the police arrived they had already cut, sunk, burned, tuned and painted the drum. If we thief the pan, Patcheye indignantly asked the officers, Where it? Hill 60 was a small band of youths, well-loved by the community. Elders passed by the cocoyea tent in Patcheyes yard and requested favourite dance tunes. And to return the compliment, the band learnt many foxtrots and waltzes. They began to play out with the Invaders when the latter had engagements in San Fernando. Patcheye, the captain and elder of the band, was responsible for them all. Once I had to beg Gerald Lawrence mother from eight in the morning till she gone to work to let him come South with we, he told me. When she come back home I gone back begging. The train was leaving at 4.00 p.m. and at 3.00 the churchy Mrs Lawrence hadnt budged. You take Ray, you take Kenneth, she complained. Now you coming for Gerald? Then, at 3.30 she relented. Just make sure ou bring him back safe, she said in time for them to run all the way to the station. In 1951 the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) went to the Festival of Britain, and De Labastide was on the team. Weeks later he returned, filled with the the musical knowledge hed acquired from playing and liming with the best panmen in the world, under the direction of police bandsman Lt Joseph Nathaniel Griffiths. Patcheye handed over the leadership of Hill 60 to the better musician, although they worked closely together. Patcheye was a genius with the Shango drum, the bl drum, the bongo drum, and he was the top man when it come to the biscuit drum, de la Bastide once told me. Patcheye was the only man I knewand you would find a lot of people that would tell you the same thing that would take his right hand and play a drum and it seems to me the fingers would work and it sounds like it playing a whole drum set.

He had that kind of a beat that was so beautiful. And the funny thing about it, it might seem to be some kind of a joke but when Patcheye tune his drumhe used to also tune it, maybe he was making a joke out of it but it was a very very good joke because you would hear. When he stop you know he wasnt playing. Around the early 1950s he changed instruments, moving from the biscuit drum to a three-note bass. For the stage side, however, he played percussiontimbales. With de Labastide and another friend, John Kittler Austin, they drummed for the Les Enfants dance troupe that practised in a Piccadilly Street school.Thus, when a Brazilian impresario came to Trinidad in the Fifties to hire an act to carry to Brazil, the band and the troupe combined for the audition. The competition was stiff. Julia Edwardss group was there, and drumming for them was Andrew BeddoePatcheyes erstwhile schoolmate, the best in the island. Dont worry, Patcheye reassured de Labastide. I go mash him up.On the night Patcheye had the band play Brazil. When the impresario heard it, he jumped off his seat and began to dance. Hed planned to hire a dance troupe and a band separately but here was a talented all-in-one outfit! They left Trinidad for Brazil in 1958, about ten dancers and eight panmen, and spent the next two years playing their way through Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico. They crossed the Rio Grande into California and headed for Hollywood. For months we try to join the musicians union but they wouldnt accept we, Patcheye told me. They say its only garbage can we beating. Once the band began to get gigs, however, the union changed its mind and ordered them to pay $3,000 and join. Things went well for a while but after some time the jobs dried up. Once you had no job you had to leave. An immigration officer, who had taken a liking to these easy-going Trinis, told them, Ill give you three months graceyou can get married or youll have to leave. Immediately all man Jack married American women. Some of them still married, said Patcheye. I married a young girl. The woman who fix that up used to do it for money. He returned to Trinidad to apply for a new residency permit. It had a fella there, you give him $100 and you get the visa, he said. But I didnt know that. Instead, he tried to go through the proper channels, and there his past caught up with him. Years before hed got in a fight over some gambling winnings and was convicted of wounding. I think he threw acid on the other man. When the police report went to the Consulate they turned down Patcheyes visa application. He let his bucket down here, the only one from the band to do so, never to play in a steelband again. When I interviewed Patcheye three years ago I was struck by the squalour of the Nelson Street planning where he lived. In a sort of matter of fact way he complained about the pipers, their 24-hour cursing and stealing. From the third floor you could see them lurking in the shadows below, and I thought that life had brought low this warm, unassuming man. Fate had more knocks for Patcheye, though, and when I spotted him fumbling by the Cathedral in March, my heart went out. With one eye shut from birth, a cataract had now darkened the other eye. He was blind.

Desperation had compelled him to feel his way to central market, and returning home he had missed his turn off. I took his bag and we backtracked to Nelson Street and headed north. You could make it from here? I asked hopefully. I had to report on the Archbishops grand funeral, not traipse around with an old ragged panman. I woulda appreciate the help on account of the weight, Patcheye replied. I knew his market bag must have indeed been heavy for this small, frail man. So we continued our agonisingly slow way across Independence Square, up to Queen Street, on to Prince Street. Y-you see the Seamoss place? said Patcheye as we approached a bright yellow wall advertising curry and seamoss. From that I know we near home. Thats why New York taxis are painted yellow: it is the brightest colour. Even people very close to being completely blind can see yellow objects. About three buildings up the street Patcheye and I swung into the planning. Young men were openly selling and buying tiny rocks like bits of gravel in a crown cork. Crack cocaine. I felt edgy but Patcheye knew his way. We slid past a knot of pipers gathered to smoke in the dark stairwell, and climbed two flights. Nothing of the funeral pomp and ceremony just two blocks away penetrated into these parts. Yet here is where I felt His Grace would have wanted to be. Henry Patcheye Pachot, born November 7, 1921, died June 3, 2000.

IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY

Lieutenant Griffith Taught A Band To Play Actually, it was yesterday. On July 26, 1951, the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) opened in Southbank, London at the Festival of Britain. It looked like junk. The pans had deliberately been left unpainted and, after six weeks at sea, were rusty. The crowd was barely curious. Then, by one newspaper account, jaws dropped and eyes widened as the first sweet notes were struck and the band swung into 'Mambo Jambo'. This was the most important steelband in history and its impact still reverberates in Britain. As for its significance back home, nothing would ever be the same, neither musically nor even politically, for Taspo, the first modern steelband, paved the way for independence. These pans were the first to be real instruments. All were made from oil drums, and thus had a more consistent timbre. More important, all were tuned on The chromatic scale at concert pitch, which allowed them for the first time to play full chords and to harmonise with any other instrument. Taspo also introduced the idea of multiple drums, which allowed the 3-bass and 2-cello pans to play full scales. Yet the inspiration for Taspo probably came from Antigua. On January 21, 1951, before the thought struck anyone here, the Guardian reported that: Hell's Gate Steel Band of Antigua is likely to represent the West Indian steel bands at the Festival of Britain which will be opened in London on May 3.

A month later, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Steel Bands Association Sydney Gollop, a member of Crusaders, was heading for solicitor Lennox Pierre's office in which the Association met, when he was hailed by Albert Gomes. I want you to act now! Gomes urged (according to Gollop). Go and set up a committee or something to get Operation Britain. And so by March the Association had decided to send a representative steelband to the Festival. Government refused their request for $6,000, so the Association decided to raise the money, and a team of the most gifted panmen was chosen: Theo Black James Stephens, 17, from Free French; Orman Patsy Haynes, 21, from Casablanca; Winston Spree Simon, 24, from Fascinators; Ellie Mannette, 22, from Invaders; Belgrave Bonaparte, 19, from Southern Symphony; Philmore Boots Davidson, 22, from City Syncopaters; Sterling Betancourt, 21, from Crossfire; Andrew Pan de la Bastide, 23, from Hill 60; Dudley Smith, 24, from Rising Sun; Anthony Muffman Williams, 20, from North Stars; and Granville Sealey, 24, from Tripoli. Sealey dropped out. He claims that he was snubbed by the other players, but popular belief has it that being recently married he wanted and was refused money to support his wife. Either way he was replaced by Carlton Sonny Roach from Sun Valley. This was at the height of the riot years, when respectable society recoiled from the steelband movement in fear and loathing. You think they would ever send a steelband to England with them set of hooligans in it? sceptics told Tony Williams. Boy, you're only wasting your time. But committees were established. Fundraising began. And the steelband movement, riven by warfare between bands, closed ranks. Bands held benefit performances all over the island: Fantasia and Mutineers in Princes Town, La Lune in Moruga, for instance. The musical director of the band was Lt Nathaniel Joseph Griffith, the steelband movement's greatest unsung hero. Born 1906 in Barbados, he joined the police band at 14. He left Barbados in 1932 to play clarinet and sax with an American jazz band, but was soon in Martinique arranging for the Municipal Orchestra. In 1935 he took over the St Vincent Government Band and founded the St Vincent Philharmonic Orchestra. Then he led the Grenada Harmony Kings, before joining the Trinidad Police Band in 1938. Here he taught at the Tacarigua Orphanage and led its band, and conducted the Royal Victoria Institute's orchestra. In 1947 he was appointed bandmaster of the St Lucia Police Band, and there he was when he was asked to lead Taspo. If I going to England with you, you can't play any sort of wrong thing, he warned the panmen. You have to play real music. And he set about teaching them. He put numbers on the notes and wrote scores. Spree queried one note on a Negro spiritual. I said to roll that note! You want me to roll your balls? snapped Griffith. And so he taught them a repertoire that included a waltz, a rhumba, a samba, light classics, a foxtrot, a bolero, calypsos, mambos. He made them tune an alto (second) pan with 14 notes. He also insisted the bass have at least 14 notes. When told that they couldn't fit, he replied to everyone's surprise, then use three drums.

Griffith's knowledge leavened the genius of men like Williams and Mannette, and they produced better pans than they ever did before. Williams invented the oil drum 2cello, and discovered the technique of tuning two tones in one note. 'Come down an afternoon when we practising,' Ellie told us, recalls Maifan Drayton, then in Invaders. When we went we were shocked to see one man playing two pans. Boots was on bass, Sterling Betancourt was on guitar and Tony Williams on cello. We were mystified. The public was even more dazzled. After a concert at Globe the audience emptied its pockets into the pans. Now that Trinidad realised what a steelband could accomplish, even the elite supported them. Bermudez donated drums, Fitz Blackman offered uniforms, the Himalaya Club, the Little Carib, and the Jaycees held fundraising dances. The Tourist Board and Sir Gerald Wight each offered $500. Governor Sir Hubert Rance's aide de camp organised an auction: Winfield Scott bought a case of whiskey and returned it to the auctioneer, who promptly sold it again. Edwin Lee Lum, a non-smoker, bought 2,000 cigarettes. Thus Taspo, and by extension the steelband movement, forged the multi-class alliance which seeded the nationalist movement and ultimately, the PNM. The band left on July 5, spent a week in Martinique where almost all the players picked up new girls and old diseases. Sonny Roach got a sore throat and returned home, but the rest went on to Bordeaux, Paris, London. Taspo's first engagement was at the BBC, after which they performed at the Colonial office, and at the Festival. A revolution in music reached London today, and experts predict it will sweep the country in a new craze, reported an English paper. Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra sat outside the Festival Concert Hall? and tapped sweet, swingy music out of rusty pans still with steamer labels stuck to them after their trans-Atlantic voyage. Londoners, hearing a steel band for the first time, passed the verdict: 'The music is sweet and liquid similar to the xylophone but not so harsh'. They rehearsed in the basement flat of musician Edric Connor (Geraldine's father), and held a dance for Jamaica's hurricane relief fund. They got a two-week contract with the Savoy, after which they toured Edingborough, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester. They performed with Kitchener, with Connor and with Boscoe Holder's dance troupe. (Holder had actually been playing pan in London since the previous year.) Late November Taspo returned to Paris for a two-week circus engagement and to catch the boat home. Betancourt, Bonaparte, Davidson, Haynes and Williams had plans to stay in England, but homesickness, an oncoming winter, and a fight between Bonaparte and Davidson changed that. Only Betancourt, with tears rolling down, returned to cold London, having found an Irishwoman there to keep him warm. Fifteen years later Betancourt and two other panmen would transform the small, private Notting Hill garden party into what is now the largest public street festival in Europe. By then Trinidad and Tobago was an independent nation able to boast of having created the century's most important acoustic instrument.

THE PAN BEHIND REGGAE

Nearlin Taitt enjoys the distinction of being famous for being not famous enough. Having created the sound of modern Jamaican music, Taitt is well-known to cognoscenti as the musician who deserves more credit than hes been given. He has been the subject of a prize-winning documentary, Lynn Taitt: Rocksteady; and Lloyd Bradley in This Is Reggae Music, The Story of Jamaica Music, points out that Lynn Taitt, is given the most credit as the man who consolidated the various musical advances and solidified the rocksteady style. Yet reggae historian and author of The Rough Guide to Reggae Steve Barrow describes him as, one of the great unsung heroes of Jamaican music. And Wikipedia states that Taitts contribution to Jamaican popular music includes his often-overlooked role as arranger and session leader for many, if not most of the recordings that he appeared on. Perhaps this is because Taitt is Trinidadian born in 1934 in San Fernando and cut his musical teeth as a panman. In the late 1940s Nearlin and his brother Cedric Taitt and the other boys of the neighbourhood hung around Bataan, a nearby steelband, until its leader Herman Teddy Clarke gave them a few old pans. Mrs. Taitt threw the pans in the ravine, because those days steelband was considered a form of delinquency. The boys recovered the pans and took them to the house of their friends Stephen, Angus and Kenrick Lalsingh. Mr. Lalsingh threw them in the ravine, so the gang returned them to the Taitt home. And thus the band, now named Seabees after John Wayne movie The Fighting Seabees, moved back and forth while fighting for acceptance. At Christmastime the boys put aside their pans to go paranging, Kenrick, Angus and Cedric had harmonicas while Nearlin played a cuatro. Small gigs at school fairs gave Seabees enough respectability for Mrs. Taitt to tolerate them although she never approved until Nearlin won the 1956 Music Festival prize for ping pong solo. By then he was a committed musician. My mother couldnt stop Nearlin, though. She coulda stop me but she woulda have to kill Nearlin, says Cedric Taitt. He decided from small that music have to mind him. He was also playing guitar with another group of neighbourhood friends, the Dutchy Brothers: five sons of Surinamese immigrant Leonard Dutchy DeVlugt. DeVlugt had a club on the wharves, the Dutchy Club. One night a drunk sailor had left his guitar there; or maybe someone stole it from him. Either way the guitar was given to Taitt to hide. He immediately began to teach himself to play. When they came back for the guitar I was playing it, Taitt told music writer Jim Dooley, so they sell it to me. Taitt played electric guitar with the Dutchy Brothers for two years in the late 1950s until he formed his own Nearlin Taitt Orchestra, and in 1962 they were hired by some calypsonians for a Caribbean tour culminating in Jamaica. Alas, after the tour the calypsonians absconded back to Trinidad without paying the musicians. Taitt, whose solid-body electric guitar was new to Jamaica, was snapped up by the astute businessman and bandleader Byron Lee, who had to lend him clothes to perform in.

Although he helped Taitt in the difficult period, even lending him clothes to perform in, Lee sought to keep him on a short leash, having him reapply every year for a work permit. Nonetheless Taitt took to ska like a hog to mud. He swung the music away from acoustic to electric guitar and was soon able to establish his own band, The Comets. Striving for the sound of a tenor pan Taitt developed a percussive bubbling style of guitar picking, which is now standard repertoire for Jamaican guitarists. He became a highly-demanded session musician, working with all the important producers to provide music for every important musician at the time: Derrick Morgan, Desmond Dekker, Lee Perry, Ken Boothe, Bob Marley, Joe Higgs, Alton Ellis, Phyllis Dillon, Delroy Wilson and the Skatalites. Over the five years he would arrange and record over 1,500 songs as session leader. Such phenomenal output was only possible because Taitt possessed a singleminded focus on music that bordered on the obsessive, practically sleeping in the studios and when he wasnt playing music, composing it. Asked if during those years he played dominoes, the Jamaican national pastime, he replies: I dont play any games, it doesnt teach me anything in music. Once offered leadership of the Skatalites Taitt refused because he thought it should be led by a Jamaican. Yet it was precisely his Trinidadian background which gave him such prominence (in addition to his considerable appetite for work), and in 1966 it put him in leadership of the whole music scene. It happened one day when Hopeton Lewis came to record in Ken Khouris studio, where Taitt and his band the Jets were working. Lewiss song was Take it easy, a message perfectly in keeping with the times, when the urban unemployed rude boys affected a cool, laid-back menace. But the song wasnt right at skas fast pace. I tell Gladdy Anderson, I say: Gladdy, slow down that pace, let's hear how it would sound, says Taitt. But as you do that, the song get longer and slower, so there is a lot of spaces because it's not fast any more. Take It Easy sold 10,000 copies in a single weekend. This was not simply a slower version of ska but a completely different, new sound, whose influence we hear in todays reggae. For instance, the electric bass plays clusters of notes rather than a continuous line which are followed by the guitar that them all to the fore. Other songs are claimed to have launched rocksteady: Alton Ellis Girl Ive Got a Date and Derek Morgans Tougher Than Tough. It doesnt matter: Taitt arranged and played on all. Everybody loved what Lynn Taitt was doing. It caught on like wildfire, guitarist Ernest Ranglin told Lloyd Bradley. The entire music industry fell in line behind Taitt, whose band backed almost every important rocksteady hit, including Desmond Dekkers first, 007. In countless sessions Taitt would first lay out his slow, cool guitar chords, giving room for the other musicians, organ, saxophone, trumpet and especially the vocalist, to produce the sweetest melodies. Ernest Ranglin explains, Lynn Taitt was keen to try new things. Everybody wanted something new the musicians, the crowds, the producers but it hadnt come together as such until he start to organize the sound. Taitts innovativeness was also deeply ingrained in his personality. Focussed exclusively on music, he was and remains continuously trying something new, attempting to take things higher. As a boy, after he learnt pan he taught himself to read music. After he learnt guitar he taught himself piano. Nearlin was always trying to improve, recalls

his brother Cedric. If he do one thing today, by tomorrow its better. Once he tried to retune a music box; he opened it up and was pulling the wires because he didnt like the key it played in. Prince Buster, singer, producer and maestro of ska, says, He was an excellent player and was never a man who was satisfied with how things were if they stayed the same for too long. Even though he was the person who really bring in rocksteady as we know it today, he was always looking for ways to move it on as soon as it was established. Then in 1969 rocksteady was abruptly supplanted by reggae. There were several reasons, such as the rise of new producers Lee Scratch Perry and Bunny Lee, engineer Osborne King Tubby Ruddock; the new artistes they had to groom; and the new sound they discovered. Scratch Perry signed a group of rebels avoided by other partners, the Wailers. King Tubby moved in another direction by omitting vocal tracks and having a DJ, U-Roy, chant in their space. But central to the demise of rocksteady was the sudden abdication of its king, the restless Lynn Taitt. At the peak of his fame Taitt was invited set up a band in Toronto for the West Indian Federated Club. It was meant, like his 1962 sojourn to Jamaica, to last a fortnight. Instead he stayed a year and then decided he liked the place. Today 74-year-old Taitt lives in Montreal, still writing and arranging and creating new songs. Another documentary is being made on his life and times. He is unwell but until recently jammed with La Gioventu, a group which plays from Motown hits to Jewish traditional music at parties and weddings. In 2002 he performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival, where the sets were mainly ska but Taitt dazzled audiences on the tenor pan. It was as if he had never left home. Nearlin Taitt died on January 20, 2010.

THE GREAT BONAPARTE

Nowadays everybody is being honoured for their contribution to pan. Even Tony Williams, the greatest panman ever ignored by this country, got a passing mention by Pan Trinbago. Sterling Betancourt received an honorary degree in London, Sydney Gollop name get a plaque and plenty pictures in the papers. Of course Ellie Mannette, having been recognised in the US, is now flavour of the month here, where he hasnt deigned to set foot in 33 years. Down south they form a whole organisation to honour pan pioneers. And the wake of the Pan Festival week is a good time to recognise the man and the band who together introduced real music to the steelband movement. Because Belgrave Bonaparte and Southern Symphony, his band from La Brea, introduced properly-arranged music to steelbands. Southern Symphonya very very musical band they were actually reading from musical arrangements at that time when nobody else was, Junior Pouchet once recalled. A very, very musically talented band and I was particularly, particularly impressed with them. Although I belong to the West and I love Invaders... I think they were particularly impressive in those early Fifties, going on to the Sixties. It was Bonaparte who demonstrated how steelbands should play chords, how they must harmonise their sections. Southern Symphony whose members included talented

panmen and tuners such as Earl Rodney, Alan Gervais and Lincoln Noel introduced the practice of playing with three sticks. Living today in the over the hill slums where Bahamian black people have been coralled, Bonaparte leans back in a rickety porch chair and explains with an immodest laugh: My uncle on my mothers side, Uncle Oscar, was a bad saxophonist. And then his brother, Uncle Victor, he used to play guitar or bass. And my grandfather used to play either saxophone or clarinet and violin. Thats how my father really did get in with my ma, by joining that band, so I born in the music. I born with the music, because while in the early pan days I used to sit down and think about scales. Bonaparte sits shirt undone, smoking. People coming in and going out of the yard greet him. Some beg a cigarette. He continues telling his story in his slow drawl, blending graphic detail with a peculiar amused detachment. Born in 1932 in La Brea into a musica family, both grandfathers were musicians, as were his maternal grandmother, his mother, his father and most his uncles. Their house rocked. When you pass by our house you will think they have a dead now, and the next time you pass you will think its a big dance inside of there, because all they used to do is drink that white puncheon rum and they switch from, they will... start singing different hymn, and they used to have a man with a big baritone named Mr Cudjoe. They used to go for him because he was blind, and he used to do the bass. When he was six and his brother Clifford (better known as Block) four, they went to live with their paternal grandmother in Carapachaima, to attend St Marys primary school. The old half-blind lady was Catholic, so Bonaparte sang in the church choir. He became popular and was asked to sing at weddings. But the matriarch was also an Orisha, so he also drummed at Shangos feasts. Around 1944 when he was 12, Bonaparte returned to La Brea with Block. Together with Julian Collymore and a cousin, they formed a small steelband to tramp around at Christmas and serenade for handouts from the houses of the oilfield managers. In the late-1940s panmen visited La Brea regularly. There were jobs for unskilled labourers, and it was a good place to hide from the law. And in 1949 Invaders, one of the countrys leading bands, was invited. We start to play So Deep Is the night. First time when Ellie Mannette hear pan playing chord, recalled Bonaparte. Ellie Mannette fly upstairs. He say he have to meet me, he have to meet me. And then he ask: How you do that? How you do that? I tell him. I say, Well, I always had my musical knowledge so I used the scale from C from this pan, and I gone with C from this one, going down in the other pan. That is how second pan and guitar pan and all them thing come out. Is the first time they ever hear that. That time I experiment and bring out all that already in La Brea. So when the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (Taspo) was chosen, Bonaparte was there amongst the other greats, such as Ellie Mannette (Invaders), Tony Williams (North Stars), Sonny Roach (Sun Valley), Andrew de la Bastide (Hill 60), Philmore Boots Davidson (City Syncopaters), Ormand Patsy Haynes (Casablanca), Winston Spree Simon (Tokyo), Theo Stephens (Southern All Stars), and Sterling Betancourt (Crossfire). Ranking with the best and better than most, Southern Symphony remained small. From its humble beginnings when the four boys serenaded white folks homes for apples and drinks, it became great without ever ceasing to be a stage side (akin perhaps to the Samaroo Jets, another country band).

They played at fetes, they played for mas bands. Bonaparte still plays pan for a living, in the Nassau Breezes hotel to American tourists ignorant of the stature of the man on the double second. His unrepentant commercialism, the awareness that his music should be paid for, led Bonaparte to offer to advertise for Esso one day in the mid-1950s. A US crew had landed that same day to film a steelband, and Esso was somehow involved. Southern Symphony got the job, making it the first sponsored steelband. The oil company took them up to the Normandie, and the hotel manager was so impressed he made Southern Symphony the house band. In 58 they went represented at a tourism conference in Cuba, arriving just in time for the Bay of Pigs Invasion: It had a big set of shooting and thing, people get shot all in the road, and we call Donald Bain the Tourist Bureau man and tell him we want to get out from here, because we was all under the bed hiding. Returning home through the French islands, they were stuck for months in Guadeloupe. A first invitation to Paris was scotched by the Algerian war, but they went later that same year, knocking around Europe for years, playing in the poshest nightspots frequented by movie stars, enjoying the wine, the music and the women. They used to line up in the night, yes boy, plenty, plenty woman. We used to have to duck from them. And we meet some rich one. I shouldnt be working today. I meet the woman, you know them car what mark Peugeot? That woman husband died and the woman come and I and the woman going sweet sweet. My girlfriend come and nearly break up the people house. One Swiss well-wisher bought them conventional instruments and they formed a band, with Belgrave on tenor sax, Block on alto, both on clarinet, Earl Trim on trumpet, Oliver Nelson on guitar and Lincoln Noel on bass. In 1961 the Bonaparte Brothers dance band returned to Trinidad, some of the few panmen to make the transition to conventional music. (Another was Casablanca panman Art de Couteau.) The Bonaparte Brothers became one of Sparrows bands, but Belgrave and Block continued their link with the pan world, arranging for bands such as Renegades, Dixieland and San Juan All Stars. In 1971 Sparrow had a disagreement with one of Bonapartes sons who played in the band, so Bonaparte left Birdie. That same day an old friend who needed someone to play on a cruise ship immediately called Bonaparte. Next day he was winging his way for The Bahamas, where he remains to this day, grumbling, diabetic, laughing at the roller coaster ride thats been the career of one of Trinidads greatest panmen.

THE UNIVERSAL CYCLE OF MUSIC

Eugene D Novotney 19:10:00 interview, Cascadia Hotel, Port of Spain, Trinidad. I met Eugene Novotney one Thursday afternoon at Macqueripe beach. Saskia, my two-year-old daughter, and I were there first. The two of us sometimes go when I get away from work early. We had already been in the water for some time when Eugene came down from the car park with Ray Holman, the steelband arranger. Ray waved, and when they waded into the water he introduced us. Id guess Eugene to be in his forties. Although balding, he has a youthful ebullience that is amplified by an American informality see how he has me referring

to him by his first name. His father was Czech and his mother Italian he mentioned that when I spoke at our second meeting about us all being migrants. He was in Trinidad to adjudicate the World Steelband Festival, and we chatted about it. Talk turned to Ellie Mannette, who was due to arrive in Trinidad to receive an honorary doctorate from UWI for his work as a steelpan tuner and educator. Years before I had recommended that Mannette be given the award along with Anthony Williams, although Id come to feel that Williams was more deserving. Partly because he was destitute whereas Mannette was very efficient at blowing his own trumpet and received the US Presidents Endowment for the Arts last year but also because Williams achievements were wider than Mannettes and encompassed arranging, leadership as well as tuning. Mostly I felt that his design of the Fourths and Fifths tenor pan was the pinnacle of individual insight attained by any panman. My daughter splashed around us as Eugene and I stood waist-deep in the gentle swells and he recalled his first encounter with a tenor pan. Without having seen a tenor pan before was he recognised it at first sight, said Eugene. Since sixth or seventh grade he had been taught that the principles of music were contained in the Cycle of Fifths, starting with C at the bottom and moving around a circle twelve semi-tones which was precisely how Williams laid out the notes on his tenor pan. It was after five, the sun had fallen behind the hill, and the water was chilly. Sas didnt complain, but her lips were dark and her fingers wrinkled. Eugene and I agreed to continue the discussion another time, and thats what we did that morning of Friday October 19, in Eugenes room on the fourth floor of his hotel. I began with an account of my ideas on music and its relationship to the existential condition modernity, a topic which I had explored in a recent lecture to bemused graduate students in Mona. I posited that the African sensibility emphasised transience in its arts, in contrast with the Graeco-Roman civilization, whose arts strove for permanence. African and Greek civilizations confronted the existential problem of mortality in different ways. The European sought to externalise himself in works that outlasted him, and thus gave immorality to its creator. The quintessential and ephemeral African arts of music and dance momentarily submerged the mortal individual into the enduring community. I contrasted the Greek mother of arts architecture with the African music, dance. There are few antique African buildings or sculptures because they deliberately chose to make them out of ephemeral materials. Thats not unusual. The Japanese rebuild their wooden Shinto temples every twenty years. I quoted Thelonius Monk: Writing about jazz is like dancing about architecture. Eugene quoted Goethe: Architecture is frozen music. He mentioned Pythagoras, considered to be the inventor of harmony, or at least of its mathematical theory. Pythagoras, who got his name in Egypt, discovered harmony there when he heard blacksmiths hammering iron. Eugene lifted Cy Grants otherwise dreadful book on pan, Ring Of Steel, which he had just bought, and which quoted from Iamblichus Life of Pythagoras: As he was walking near a braziers shop, he heard from a certain divine causality the hammers beating out a piece of iron on an anvil, and producing sounds that accorded with each other, one combination only excepted. But he recognised in those sounds, the diapason, the diapente, the diatessaron harmony. He saw, however, that the sound which was between the diatessaron and the diapente was itself by itself dissonant, yet,

nevertheless, gave completion to that which was the greater sound among them. Being delighted, therefore, to find that the thing which he was anxious to discover had succeeded to his wishes by divine assistance, he went into the braziers shop, and found by various experiments, that the difference of sound arose from the magnitude of the hammers, but not from the force of the strokes, nor from the figure of the hammers, nor from the transposition of the iron which was beaten... employing this method, therefore, as a basis, and as it were an infallible rule, he afterwards extended the experiment to various instruments. Hes the father of European harmony, said Eugene, and he discovered it in Africa. I added that the calypsonian Lord Kitchener, the poet laureate of the steelband movement, also had a father who was a blacksmith in Arima in the 1930s, and found harmony while listening to the smithys hammersong. Eugene said that Greek architecture was designed along the same mathematical ratios as the harmonic principles Pythagoras had discovered. I suggested that even if the principles were universal, different civilisations manifested them in different arts; or if in the same arts, then in different ways. As a matter of fact, different civilisations approach the same arts in different ways. If you snapped your fingers and tapped your feet in a Bach recital, you would be shushed. If you didnt at a Bob Marley, hed feel insulted. I recalled the point which anthropologist Barry Chevannes made at my lecture and which I accepted, that African music was not linear but circular. It could go on and on and on. That, I surmised, was one reason why Europeans first thought it monotonous, even while they were being seduced by it. I contrasted that with the linear beginningmiddle-end structure of European music, and indeed the linear concept of time European civilisation adopted in the nineteenth century. Times arrow, I felt, which emerged from the scientific theory of entropy. By the second principle of Thermodynamics everything led irrevocably to heat-death, not just the death of the individual life but the extinction of Life itself. It was the modern ontology of despair. Eugene agreed, and with a laugh pointed at his wristwatch. I live in a world that sees time as a straight line, he said, but measures it in a circle. The Greeks used a sundial. The conversation returned to African circularity. He cited Paul Berliners The Soul of the Mbira. He represents the time-line in Zimbabwe music as a circle. On the left side is a question. The right is the answer, said Eugene, drawing a diagram, so it moves from question to answer to question to answer. Eugene also referred to Kwabena Nketias The Music of Africa: He uses the term time-line but explains that its a circle. Its divided into twelve, just like the tenor pan. In my mind something fell into place. I had recently read an explanation of the appeal of the duodecimal system (using base 12), which is so unfashionable in these decimal times. In a history of zero, The Nothing That Is, the point was made that the divisibility of a number made for greater usefulness. The more times a number can be divided, the easier it is to be broken into equal segments. Thus, 60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and, of course, 60. That is, twelve divisors. Contrast that with 100, which is larger but only divisible by nine divisors: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 and 100.

That is perhaps why we created hours of 60 minutes, which in turn comprise 60 seconds. Especially as one of its divisors is 12, which has six divisors (as opposed to 10, which only has four). So we get twelve hours of daylight, 12 of night, and 12 months in the year. The thought was just a flash that was gone in a split second, while Eugene, continued talking about Nketia, who travelled around Africa studying music. It was quite some time before he realised that he had heard a song several times before. He had missed that because each musician had started at a different place. The idea struck him that there was no set beginning or end. Here was no European linear sense of an introduction, theme, restatement, and so forth. Wherever the musician started and it was always a different place that was the introduction. Nketia said that the realisation had folded his line into a circle. And that circle, divided into twelve segments, said Eugene, was Tony Williams tenor pan! Only then did I switch on my tape recorder. When I first saw a tenor pan I absolutely saw the tenor pan as my friend, said Eugene. Oh yeah. Because the model of that pan, the fourths and fifths, the circle of fifths, it had been my head since probably I was seven or eight years old and the means of, the practicality of the circle of fifths, the way its taught in western music theory, is its a tool. Its a philosophical tool to help students remember how to form scales. On the scales on the piano, we have white keys and black keys. The white keys are the naturals, the black keys are the accidentals. Sometimes we view them as sharps if we have to raise a pitch, sometimes we view them as flats if we have to lower a pitch. With the circle of fifths... Why are they called naturals and accidentals? I asked. He replied: That really goes back to some Latin usage of the formality, the terminology of music. It has to do with temperament. The piano is an instrument of equal temperament. The whole system of harmony is built on the way sound exists in nature, the way sound exists on a vibrating string, the way sound exists when air moves through a tube. The way sound is in nature is not exactly the way it is represented on a piano. To put the notes on a keyboard that would be maintained in a codified way, a symmetrical way, they have to adjust the way sound actually functions in nature. This is why, for instance, the construction of instruments is so complex. You think a violin is just a string. Who couldnt make a violin to sound good? Well, the reason why its so hard to make some instruments is because youre actually manipulating the way things naturally occur in nature, a little bit. To put them into a system where they can be transposed. In nature theres only one scale that actually is in tune. All the other scales, to our ears right now, would he out of tune, because were so used to hearing the artificial adjustments that have been made over time. Does that make sense? Im not sure I understand, I interrupted. OK, he said. Its very, very complex. This is like years of music theory study. What I can simply say is that human beings always try to manipulate nature. And in music its the same way. What we have in the piano is a very excellent representation of the way sound actually occurs in nature, but it is manipulated. It is according to a way that I can start a scale on any of those keys on the piano and have it sound the same. In nature, every different scale sounds slightly different.

How or why? I asked, thinking: perhaps this is like our 365-day year, which must be supplemented by one day every four years. The reason why is because of mathematics, he continued. We can look at sound as mathematical ratios. An octave is a relationship of 2:1. A perfect fifth is a relationship of 3:2. If you tried to do that on the piano you would need many more keys than what is on there right now. Youd need microtones? Absolutely. So what weve done is put it into a nice concise system where we can recreate it time and time again and have it be absolutely symmetrical. The symmetry of scales in nature theres only one scale and some people call that the scale based on the note G. Theres only one scale that absolutely exists perfectly in tune with the piano. All the other scales get stretched a little further as you go up, and get condensed a little flatter as you go down. Why that is, is a very complex study of ratio. Pythagoras, for instance, created his instruments to exist as sound exist in nature. We refer to that today as Pythagorean tuning. Those instruments wouldnt sound in tune with the piano that we know today. It would sound a little off, because what we have done is created a mechanical instrument that allows us to transpose. Thats the main idea. In the Western world we wanted to be able to play music in different keys. Even in the Panorama competition, a big thing is moving to different keys that make sense. Was that related, I wondered, to the ease with which the Fourths and Fifths tenor pan shifted key? You could start on any note anywhere on the pan outer ring and play a scale by following the same pattern. My friend Eddy Odingi once described to ethnomusicologist Shannon Dudley, how Williams introduced the idea of changing keys in Panorama arrangements. In 1964, he won with Mama Dis is Mas... Tony changed three keys! First time ever in a Panorama competition. Before that they used to change keys in Festival. Because we used to do calypsoes in Music Festivals. We used to change keys in Music Festival, but not on the road, because on the road is something you dance to, you just moving and dancing. But Tony changed three keys in Mama Dis is Mas. Gone again. So he set the pattern. Dudley pointed out in his PhD thesis: Tony Williams approach to form became the model that all other bands adopted for Panorama. Other elements were added to it over the years to create what is almost a Panorama formula. For example, a variation in a minor key is almost always included. A minor mood is suggested by Williams reharmonization in the second verse of Mama Dis is Mas and every winning arrangement since includes a section (usually a whole verse or chorus variation) in minor. Eugene continued: We all have different voices, we all have different vocal ranges and transposition of the piano into this mechanical, absolutely symmetrical system, was done so different singers could sing pieces in their natural voice. In other words, I have a natural voice that has a range thats different from somebody elses range. So if I play a key, maybe my key to sing in is D, and youre the pianist, Id say, Hey, were gonna do Stella by Starlight in D. And then a female vocalist comes in, her voice is different from mine, so she says, No, Im in G, Stella by Starlight in G. That pianist has to be able to take D and G and its all got to be symmetrical. In nature it doesnt quite work that way. Its very, very close, but if you were to accurately compare the two you would find that the way sound exists in nature is not the way we as a society have represented it on the piano or our other instruments.

I suggested: Instruments have discrete notes, a piano has individual keys, you jump from one to the other. I would expect nature to have an infinite number of microtones in between. There are no discrete notes in nature. EN: Thats not true, though. I do this experiment in a class that I teach to explain this to people: take a length of hose and start spinning that hose. The very first pitch that you hear, well call it the fundamental. As I start spinning it faster, I dont get a microtone. I get the octave, a 2:1 relationship. As I start spinning it faster, the next note I get is a fifth above the octave. And this is what we call the overtone series. Some musicians refer to it as partials. So what we put in a linear way on the piano, it doesnt occur that way in nature. It occurs in leaps in nature. When we then fold all that down into a line we get our scales. But in nature, no. You dont just all of a sudden start getting microtones. Mathematical relationships start appearing: 2:1, 3:2, 4:3. The Fibanaci series, which is a very famous mathematical series. Its an addition process. It goes: 1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13. Its an infinite series. Fibanaci noticed that its the way that rabbits procreate. Very famous mathematical sequence, look it up in a dictionary. Theres a ton of books written about Fibanaci, its one of the most discussed and most referred-to mathematical sequences in the history of mathematics. That series is very much like the overtones series in music. These basic principles that exist in nature have been manifested in different ways by different cultures, but when you break it down to the basics, many different cultures recognise the same things and taken them tremendously different directions. So when I say the way sound exists in nature, Im really referring to the way natural sound would occur if the wind is blowing through a little cave of rocks. You start hearing whistling, and then the wind starts blowing faster, youre not going to hear a microtone up. Youre going to hear an octave up. It starts blowing faster again, youre going to hear a perfect fifth from there. As it goes up and up and up, microtones start existing, yes. Theyd be referred to as partials or different steps to the overtones series. Thats just language, its different words for the same thing. Harmony in the Western world was based on the recognition of that sound in nature. Then, of course, different pitches come into play. With my voice I need you to play the key in B. A female needs to play it in G. Thats just different lengths of hose. If I have a hose one length, of course when I spin it Im going to get one pitch that maybe were going to recognise as B. If I cut the hose in a mathematical proportion, the same as what a scientist would be able to reveal as it appears in nature, I cut it off in a proportional way and start spinning it, I hear the pitch G. So when I say sound in nature, Im talking about the way sound comes without any manipulation by man. To take that on the piano, we need to manipulate it. Explaining this is about a two-year theory class, but what I can simply say is that human beings like symmetrical order. The early experiments in instruments like Pythagorean tuning and instruments that are called Mean Tone we didnt just go from the way it occurs in nature to where we are now, there were several steps in between. What Western civilisation decided on was to adjust those mathematical relationships from things that should be as natural as 3:2 or 5 over 4, to things that end up being like 368 over 212.5, which might be a very minor discrepancy but it allowed somebody to take the instrument to a piano and transpose in any key and have all the keys be absolutely symmetrical. I dont know if I can simplify it more than that without going into deep, deep discussion. Trust me. Ill send you my dissertation and theres a bunch of references that you can further look. There been countless books written on this topic and

they will spell it all out for you. Its a lot of mathematics and some of it, even with a PhD in music Ive got to sit back and shake my head and say, Oh my God, this is so far removed from playing a G on the piano that its hard to conceptualise. But I do appreciate the complexity of what mankind tried to do to create this symmetry that really doesnt exist in nature. And thats how we came upon this circle of fifths. The circle of fifths, which starts at the bottom with C, then as you move to the right, G one sharp; D two sharps; A three sharps. It allows us to walk up to the piano and recreate the same sound, just at different sonic levels. KJ: Starting anywhere. EN: Starting anywhere, starting on any key. This is what allows us to do so. It is no new idea, this circle of fifths. Its the way music theory has been taught for generations now. I dont know one culture that studies harmony that does not present the circle of fifths as the model. When we had our first conversation, the thing that fascinated me: when I walk up to a tenor pan and see that as an object, rather than just a theory in my head, I fell in love with it. I fell absolutely in love with it. My God, this is an idea that I thought only existed in somebodys head and Im playing. My God, Im playing it. I feel like I had a natural affinity to the tenor pan. I love all the instruments because I love the sound and Im a percussionist. I was a pianist and a drummer from five, so the steel drum for me is the marriage of the melodies that I loved on the piano and the act of physically beating something that I loved so much from the drum. So its no surprise that I saw this instrument: its mine. I claim ownership of that instrument as much anybody does. I didnt invent it but you know what? I understand it totally. I would also say that we know different panmen that have all kinds of different ideas: some can read music, a lot cant; some can talk to you about sharps and flats, some cant; but for some reason theyre all able to play that instrument. So whether they can use the language or not there is something about the logic of that particular instrument that allows them to function. What Im telling you: for me it was so easy because I knew the circle of fifths first, but theres something eminently logical about this circle of fifths diagram. In my opinion, the most musically uneducated panman also somehow must be able to recognise that logic, or they wouldnt be able to play. KJ: There were other types of tenor pans. EN: I understand that. Of course the original tenor pans had nothing to do with the circle of fifths. How come those other tenor pans have gone by the wayside, and this one has caught on? Human beings move towards this is what I said a long time ago we recognise certain patterns that exist in nature, as beautiful. This is why certain Greek structures, we recognise as having a beauty to them that we cant describe. KJ: The proportions. EN: Yes, the proportional beauty. I hypothesise that its the reason the Fourths and Fifths has become in my view the most used instrument world wide. In the United States I have an Invaders tenor, I have a tenor modelled after the Renegades thirds, and I have a circle of fifths tenor. Nobody wants to play that Invaders pan. Nobody wants to play that Renegades pan. Everybody runs to the fourths and fifths pan, because as students, just like me, if theyre music students in school they have memorised the circle of fifths from years ago. They walk up to that pan they recognise the beauty in it. It is I spoke the other day with a gentleman visiting here from Japan and he is a tenor player. I said, What tenor pan do you play? He goes, I play a fourths and fifths tenor. Why

would I want to play anything other than that? This is somebody from Japan who is obviously coming out from the same type of... we didnt talk music theory at all. I asked how he liked Trinidad. But still, by that very strong statement that he made it was obvious to me that he recognised the fourths and fifths pan as being so musically logical that it was the instrument he wanted to play. KJ: How did Nketia arrive at twelve? EN: All he did was observe, really. We have these two structures that a lot of Westerners call triplets that is sometimes represented as 12/8 time, or sixteen notes: 4/4 time. Much of the music in Trinidad is based in duples. Your foot beat is going, and youre dividing or twos or fours. Almost pan music that I heard is based in fours, but the other night one of the bands played an arrangement of Jit Samaroos that was kind of based on, I think it was based on a parang, it was in 6/8. I recalled what Andy Duncan, the former Renegades captain, once told me about their early unsuccessful years when Jit Samaroo first began to arrange for them. We didnt understand his rhythms, said Duncan, who felt that Samaroo was playing Indian music. Eugene continued: All around the world you have music based on twos and fours, or based on threes. Many people believe, and Nkeita represents in his books, that the most ancient African music is based on threes. Its based on four foot taps, and each of those foot taps is divided into three. So 4x3 = 12. KJ: Thats the bar, after which you return to the beginning? EN: Exactly. So that is this circle, and it just so happens that that same basis in African music of 12, is the same number of semi tones that we have in what we call an octave. How he came upon it is just by recognition and observation of his own culture. He didnt create the idea, he observed it and reported it. He didnt invent it. Just like (Paul) Berliner in The Soul of the Mbira, when he drew the circle and these twelves, he didnt really invent that. He observed it. At first, when he observed with his Western ethnocentric point of view, he couldnt understand it. He wanted to put it into a line. As soon as he folded it into a circle it made sense to him. Its fascinating to me that these concepts are all revealed in the circular nature of this fourths and fifths tenor pan. Tony Williams is an absolute genius in my view. For me to think he was trained in the circle of fifths music theory I dont know the man, so I couldnt say, but what I hypothesise is that in his own intuitive genius he recognised something that Pythagoras recognised thousands of years ago; that other very intelligent people over time recognised at different points in time. He is just another example of a human being using an intuitve nature and coming upon the same discovery that the ancient Greeks discovered. Its fascinating to me, its beautiful to me. Here was a confirmation of what I felt about Williams achievement. I recalled his account of how he arrived at the Fourths and Fifths arrangement of notes on what was famously known as the Spider Web pan: Before the Spider Web we had C F A, because the ping pong developed from a tenor kittle beat that was a major chord. Steelband developed on a major chordMe, Do, So, Me, So, Do, Me. That was the major chord and it develop on that. On the ping pong you had So, Do, Me there, so I counted the semitones from C to F. C F A is So Do Me too. At that time I didnt know anything about F or anything like that, I just counted the semitones from C to F and found that there were six. And I counted from F to A and found it was five, so I put B flat there, and I kept counting six all the time and work out

in the cycle of fifths. Without knowing the cycle of fifths we discovered the cycle of fifths. There was the perfect example of a relationship between collective and individual genius. The steelband movement had selected the major chord for its tenor kittle beat, sensing with no musical knowledge its fundamental correctness. In turn Williams picked it out and extrapolated into a physical object. Eugene continued: I know Im driving this point into the ground, but we as human beings universally recognise that certain proportions in nature keep recurring. A lot of philosophers say that the first time that we see something we dont understand it. It takes two, it takes the repetition, it takes the re-coming for us to believe. I dont want to get too deep and too philosophical here, but Christianity is based on that principle. Christ needs to come again. Were all waiting for that second coming. To what? To reaffirm our beliefs that were going to live forever, if you believe in Christianity. I recalled that the Hindus believed that the highest caste, the Brahmins, were twice-born. Eugene continued: This is something that religion has taken, this is something that music has taken, this is something that architecture has taken. If you really look at structural principles of what the strongest angle in architecture are for load-bearing and weight-bearing, youre going to find that they are in the same proportion that the Greeks recognised in these buildings, years ago. Did they want to create something that would outlast them? Thats very interesting what you said. Other points of view are that what they did was try to represent the strength of nature in their architecture. Which is in tandem with what youre saying. KJ: Because what were talking about is existing as species-being, which transcends the individual. Its what you also get in procreation. EN: And its interesting you mention procreation because the Fibanaci series I talked about, it was an observation of procreation among a very repetitively procreative species, the rabbit. All these ideas youre talking about are very much related and very much observed by others. Youre absolutely on the right track in my view. Its interesting that how to say this in a sentence? I do believe that we cant always speak about it intelligently but we ceratinly as human beings recognise these reoccuring things in nature that we find beautiful and harmonious. Again, Im going to say that every single culture whose music that Ive studied and Ive studied a wide range of music; Ive studied East Indian music from the Indian sub-continent; Ive studied the music of China, my wife is Chinese, her mother was a singer and played the guzang and played the cheen and the yancheen and all these different stringed instruments from China, so Ive been very much exposed to that music in my life; Ive studied Javanese gamelan music; Ive studied the music of Japan, which came from China of course; my dissertaion of West African music; Im a produce of the United States music scene, playing jazz and classical music from five years old every single musical culture that Ive observed has within it the interval of the perfect fifth. In East Indian music the tambora does nothing but with all the microtones going on and the sitar the tambora, the basic fundamental drone instrument of that culture, does nothing but play perfect fifths. The primary relationship of the gongs in Balise and Javanese gamelan is a relationship of the perfect fifth to the tonic. Absolutely. In pan music and in Western classical music and in the folkloric music of the Americas, the motion from five to one, the perfect fifth, is the most common interval that youll ever find. That particular relationship mathematically is 3:2. If you look at the

Parthenon in ancient Greece, if you study that architecture, youll find that the strongest angles in that structure have the principal mathematical relationship of 3:2. KJ: So why did they move to a 4/4 beat, and that has become pretty much universalised popular music? EN: My primary teacher in the States of African music is a fella named C. K. Ladzacro, hes from Ghana and hes on the faculty at UC Berkley I did some postgraduate work at Berkley and in his African LA sensibility he either sees the 4/4, the duples, as really coming from the threes. All the music has an underlying pulse of a footbeat, and it is the subdivisions in between those beats that we recognise as being based on twos and fours, or being based on threes. Its the subdivisions in between. For him, the difference is more than just a feeling. To him, whether its four or whether its three, he doesnt believe that any of the music in his particular culture is exact in that particular sense. He feels its a stretch of emotion. In other words, he considers the three and the four just a different emotional level. He sees them as more similar than more different and what hell also say is that the acculturation of the mechanised world is a duple phenomenon. This is a very much of a generalisation but what youll find in almost all musical evolution is moving from a feel of threes to a feel of fours. If you look at rock and roll, African-American music in the United States, the early rock and roll was all swung, it all sounded like Rock Around The Clock or Shake, Rattle and Roll. You still have that beat underneath but in between youre going da-da-da, da-da-da. Threes in between. Now you move to way most rock and roll music is today. KJ: What they call the backbeat? EN: Backbeat can exist in the other one, backbeat is just an emphasis. Im talking about the sub-divisions in between. It seems that all music starts more towards threes and ends up more towards fours. Why that is? Many people claim that its just an emotional response. Some people write these very philosophical things about moving towards the mechanicalised world, being more duple-based. Certainly one of the strongest arguments Ive seen, and repeated to my students, is that when you go back to the way the human being functions, were more comfortable in threes than we are in twos. If I am picking up a hammer, Ive got a sledgehammer and Ive got to break this rock, I doubt that Ill do it like: boom, huh; boom, huh; boom, huh; one, two; one, two. Instead, Im probably going to be: boom, hah, huh; boom, hah, huh. Its going to be more in threes. He mimed someone swinging a sledge hammer, first in rapid up-down, up-down strokes, followed by a more measured three-part motion: behind the back, over the shoulder, and then down; behind the back, over the shoulder, and down. It was mid-day and I hadnt gone to the office yet, and that on a Friday, the busiest for Sunday Express journalists. I switched off my recorder and took my leave. Its eerie, concluded Judy, my companion, reading the transcript I made some days after the interview. I dont know about the technical aspects of music, and I was lost in parts of the mathematics, but I got a sense that Williams had instinctively tapped into something universal which we all feel without knowing why or how. Genius was my word for it.