if yuh iron good you is king

If Yuh Iron Good You Is King

Kim Johnston


The Pan Pioneers

Kim Johnson — Pan PioneersIV

© 2006 Kim Johnston

ISBN 978-976-8054-66-2

First Edition, 2006

All rights reserved. Except for use in review, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Published by Pan TrinbagoP.O. Box 910Port of Spain, Trinidad and TobagoEmail: [email protected]

Book design by Paria Publishing Company Limited (www.content-providing.com)Cover painting and frontispiece by Sarah Beckett ([email protected])Printed by Caribbean Paper and Printed Products (1993) Limited (www.cppp93.com)

Other publications by the same author:• Fragrance of Gold: Trinidad in the Age of Discovery• Renegades: The History of the BP Renegades Steel Orchestra

Forthcoming: • The Soul In Iron: The Origins of Pan 1939-1951 • They Came From The East: 200 Years of Chinese Presence in Trinidad & Tobago

Kim Johnson has also published numerous scholarly articles.

Kim Johnson — Pan Pioneers V

Contents

The Pan Pioneers IIIContents VPreface VII

If Yuh Iron Good You Is King 1Pan in 3-D 1Body music to sweet pan: 17The badjohn roots of pan 17They tamed a clear and robust sound 20The saga of South pan 24East Side story 28The steel pulse of Port of Spain 32Invaders, king of the iron men 36The legend of the first white boy steelband 39Casablanca, the greatest 42The hill boys 45The Chinese connection 48All Stars shine forth 51I love you, Raja — but on pan 54When Tokyo ruled the hill 58The band they couldn’t ban 60Deep South pan 63Saga of a flagwoman 66The master carver 72Return of the Muffman 76A soft touch on the iron 79The pioneer who sought musical revenge 83Swedes have a go at tuning 86The man for whom the steel sings 90Eric’s impossible love 95The time a fish band conquered town 98All Stars versus All Stars 101Back to Bataan 104A man for all bands 107It was 50 years ago today 110Lieutenant Griffith taught a band to play 110Man from the hill 114Tripoli, the great St James steelband 117If you play the chords the right way 120

Kim Johnson — Pan PioneersVI

The Sampsons of Sun Valley 123The ping pongs of Pearl Harbour 127The rising sun of Belmont 130When the Jack was king 132A Daisy amongst the thorns 134Red Army’s reluctant soldier 137The iron man in the engine 140The Bigger the better 143Blanca’s bugle boy 146Arthur Tramcar, king of the flagmen 149Milton Lyons, pride of Marabella 152The Wolf at the crossroads 155King Xavier, a voice of the past 158Hercules in the crossfire 162Garvey’s ghost 165Hellzapoppin’s secret weapon 168Days and nights in the boom town 171Queen of the steelbands 174Renegade realities 176Fighting among the Japs 179Requiem for Wake Island 182The coconut head man 184Mr Pamp and the sound of steel 187Strike the iron 190When Hamil went unheeded 193Breakadoor from the Dead End Kids 196The man who formed North Stars 199Witnessing Spree 202Clash of the Titans 205The Light in Sun Valley 208Leo Warner 211The last biscuit drummer 213The great Bonaparte 217The universal cycle of music 220Appendices 231Appendix I 232Neville Moraldo - “Bassa” 232Appendix II 235Trinidadian Words and Phrases Used 235Appendix III 237General Steelpan Glossary 237Index 240

Kim Johnson — Pan Pioneers VII

Preface

If Yuh Iron Good Yuh Is King is an extraordinary work of profound effort, a work which brought together several services of expert authentication and first-hand narrative.Kim Johnson has been doing in-depth studies of the Steelband Movement, and his research is the most repeated to date. To do this work, for which he was commissioned by Pan Trinbago, Kim Johnson worked with a team which comprised Oscar Pile, a historian who has seen the Steelpan evolve from the tamboo to the modern-day instrument, Sidney Gollop, an actor, social worker and first President of the Steelband Association, and Melville Bryan, a retired school principal who co-ordinates research and documentation for the Steelband Association, and who is an ex-President of the Association.Melville Bryan, Oscar Pile and Sydney Gallop spent three years doing further research in order to authenticate the work done by Kim Johnson. Their research work took them through the length and breath of Trinidad and Tobago.The stories told between the covers of If Yuh Iron Good Yuh Is King present the History of Pan in ancedotal form and makes very interesting reading, more than that it presents an authentic work, which would be of great assistance to any student from primary to tertiary level.Paria Publishing has been selected to produce this work in order that the essence of the work be not compromised in any way, they being a publishing outfit which has an eye and ear for history.The Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has been very pro-active in their thinking by providing initial funding for the work to be processed.

This work is a worthy presentation of fact.

Kim Johnson — Pan PioneersVIII

For Steve StuempFle and eddY odInGY, who led the waY

Kim Johnson — Pan Pioneers 1


Pan in 3-D

he steelband I shall speak about is something which only exists in one country: Trinidad and Tobago. There are steelbands all over the world today, and some are quite good, especially those in New York and London, and many are affiliated to steelbands in Trinidad; and there are virtuosos who play jazz, such as Othello Mollineux and Rudi

Smith. But the beating heart of the steelband movement can only be found in T&T, where there are miraculous organisations which are known as “conventional steelbands” and which are as different from other steelbands as their majestic symphonies are different from the elevator muzak performed for tourists by most small pan ensembles.

In Trinidad the word “pan” is used to refer to three different aspects of the steelband music, and in deference to the wisdom of my people I shall present my overview along the lines of those three categories. They are, first, pan as the overall steelband movement, which includes everything and everybody to do with steelbands; second, pan as the instrument itself, a tenor pan, a bass pan, etc.; and third, pan as the music produced by the conventional steelbands I mentioned above.

Good. Now let us begin.

T

Kim Johnson — Pan Pioneers2

I. IncluSIon: the Band

“It brings people together, both playing and listening, in a way no other kind of music seems to,” said Lady Berkley, wife of the twentieth Baron Berkley and member of the London Melodians, in the Times of December 7, 1994.

Lady Berkley, an Englishwoman and at the time a recent enthusiast of pan, was a novice. She knew nothing about pan in its Trinidad and Tobago context, its history or contemporary significance. Her statement in the Times was, therefore, to us of the Caribbean, exaggerated, trite and obvious. For that reason, it is the most fruitful place to start my presentation to this audience, which is undoubtedly more familiar with pan: because, usually, the fish don’t see the water.

The first thing to note is that the steelband that Lady Berkley was enthusing over was the London Melodians. That is a branch of a band I knew well, the Melodians. It is a small steelband based in Arima. You don’t have a New York branch of the Rolling Stones or a London U2 or a Trinidad branch of the Wailers (although there were at one time a few Jamaican Lord Kitcheners).

This trans-national spread of the not-particularly-good Arima band is far from unique. There are New York branches of Desperadoes, All Stars, Phase II Pan Groove, Invaders and other Trinidad steelbands. In Japan, I think, there is a branch of Renegades.

Those are real branches of the main tree. At Carnival their members come to Trinidad. Sometimes a few players may perform in the mother band. Often they assist in fund-raising. Reciprocally, the arrangers for the main bands visit New York or wherever to assist their satellites in their music. Renegades had one member who lived for months every year in Japan. So we can make our first obvious point:

a steelband is more than a musical ensemble. It is a community.

Think of a steelband as a series of concentric circles. If the outermost circle is the overseas members or supporters, the innermost circle comprises the core players. I say core because the number of players in a steelband waxes and wanes. At Panorama, if we take one of the large bands, there would be up to 120 players on stage. These players might change for the three rounds of the competition. So if we include reserves, there might be 140 players in the Carnival season. But in the rest of the year, the figure is much smaller. Usually it shrinks to around 20 or 30 members of the “stage side.” These are the players who play at gigs outside of the Carnival season and who usually tour with the band. They usually include the leaders of the big band’s various sections.

I located the players at the innermost circle because ultimately, a steelband produces music. Music is the glue that holds the band together; music brought these groups into existence and the production of music is their raison d’être. But I could have put at the centre another group, who are often not musicians. What to call them? The die-hards, the hard-core members? Usually they are older – because music-making is a time-consuming young-


people’s business that detracts from more domestic obligations. Yet these hard-core members are, in another sense, the continuity of the band. Most were at one time players. Now, they comprise what might be considered the executives and stakeholders of the band.

If you use the analogy of a limited liability company, the players are the workers who produce the goods the company sells. The other core groups are the executives and the shareholders who own the company. It’s not a one-on-one analogy, because in this band-company the directors were all once workers, and many workers will in time become directors, and all are shareholders.

An analogy can help us to see, both in the likeness it brings to light, and in the dissimilarity. For instance, the “shareholders” in this company, those closest to the inner circles, also have functions to perform. There are clear-cut functions: public relations, fund-raising, building racks, painting, designing costumes, or T-shirts. There are also amorphous, ad hoc and unspecialized functions, such as cleaning up before a function, loading the racks on trucks, preparing food for the band, and so forth.

The wider circles comprise supporters, who range from the fanatic to the fair-weather fan. My cousin Wayne, known to the Renegades inner circle as John Wayne, was a player thirty years ago, and is now a fanatic supporter. He listens only to the Renegades. Every year before Panorama he goes to church – he is a devout Catholic – and lights a candle for the Renegades. At the competition, after the Renegades plays, he leaves, whether they appeared first on the list and early in the evening or last in the wee hours.

The importance of such support cannot be underestimated. I have likened it to love, because of its non-rational, distorted perspective. My band is my band, whether they are first or last, good or bad, large or small. It is akin to a mother’s unreasoning love for her child, because in both cases it is based on giving and self-sacrifice which is necessary for the helpless infant to grow. In the case of a steelband this dependency is not an initial phase but a continuous need. The continued existence of every steelband is permanently contingent on this support. Every steelband exists on the brink of collapse. Since the birth of the steelband movement in the early 1940s countless steelbands have come into existence, grown, matured, wilted and suddenly died. Many were small (I won’t say insignificant because they were significant to their members) but others did so after blossoming with tremendous panache and beauty. Indeed, if I were to list the top ten greatest bands ever I would include Sun Valley, Tripoli, Casablanca and North Stars, none of which exist today. I can still recall the deep sadness I felt one year in the 1970s when I visited Casablanca’s panyard before Panorama and found it silent.

The miracle, then, is that the movement endures, that bands continue to endure. Indeed, some have done so since the birth of the movement. All Stars, Invaders and Desperadoes were formed (under different names) as early as 1941. It would be a remarkable thing to meet a person who is strong and healthy and 140 years old, but it is even more remarkable how the species has evolved and thrived. Similarly, the continued existence of the steelband movement is more remarkable than the longevity of individual bands. Let me give some facts which might illustrate how remarkable is this steelband movement:


• T&T has a population of 1.5 million, 19 large steelbands which can each field 95- 120 players (14 have the full 120) for Panorama. Then there are 21 medium bands

of 60-90 players (13 have 90) and 29 small bands of 35-55 players. That does not include the school bands.

• London has 10 million residents, five symphony orchestras and a dozen chamber ensembles.• No symphony orchestra is larger than a medium-sized steelband. A small

steelband is at least three times the size of a chamber ensemble.• The Panorama finals has an audience of around 10,000 in the North Stand and 8,000 in the Grand Stand, in addition to at least as many who prefer to hear the bands on the track. Thousands of players, tens of thousands of patrons – no other

art form in T&T involves as many people

This is remarkable because although they have survived for a long time, every steelband is permanently poised on dissolution. Steelbands are large and expensive to maintain. Expensive in terms of hard cash and expensive in terms of sweat. Many people must give long hours of labour and many others must give dollops of dollars to keep a single band alive. Yet they earn not a fraction of their keep. They are voluntary non-profit high-maintenance organisations (and hence different from companies). Their continued existence is fed by the only force which is greater than commerce and: love.

As opposed to eros, this is not the romantic love a man may have for a woman (and vice versa), such as the poets and pop singers rhapsodise about, but something equally profound and seemingly more long-lasting. The Greeks called it storge, the love of siblings or comrades-in-arms who have together endured much. It is this love which made the steelbands such fearsome organisations in the 50s and 60s. Now it fuels the intense rivalry of the Panorama competition.

What is the attraction which draws Trinidadians into steelbands? What is the source of pan love? When we discover that we would have discovered what animates a band; what sustains its life and promotes growth.

Here let me quote one of the most evocative and incisive answers to that question, given by the mighty poet David Rudder:

Hear the tenors rollingPeople on the floorThe guitar pans grumbleThe crowd in an uproarAll of a sudden everything just up and chillEverything just gone to a standstillThe crowd start to cussThey say: “Whe wrong with the band?”It was the rack with the iron gone and fall


The vibration bus’ way the weldingWhen the iron fall it humble the panAnd everything start to crawlEverything start to fallAnd the truth was plain to seeThe Engine RoomIs down there whey does cause the bacchanalPan is the body but rhythm is heart of the thingThe Engine Room is the soul of CarnivalKorey did damn well say if yuh iron good you is king.(Engine Room)

I could talk all day about that calypso and not exhaust the richness of its insight. But I shall not. Rather, allow me to focus on Rudder’s central point, the truth he makes so plain see (and hear), and make it our second obvious point:

pan is the body but rhythm is heart of the thing.

The pans in a steelband are all melodic instruments, they play the range of tones which constitute the melodies of a songs, whereas the iron, formerly the brake hub of a car, is purely a producer of rhythm. It is also the loudest instrument in the band. As such it controls the entire band. Many of the great steelband captains, such as Ellie Mannette from Invaders and Bobby Mohammed from Cavaliers, even when they were gifted on other instruments, played the iron. When yuh iron good you is king.

In Cuban music the same central role is performed by the man knocking together two pieces of wood, which are significantly called “claves”: keys. (In Trinidad they are called the “toc-toc.”) The claves lock the music together by providing the central timing, which is vital because there are many different rhythms going on at the same time.

Rhythm brings us together. As individuals it brings our bodies together, coordinates our muscles, our legs, arms, heads, hearts. We dance because we walk. As a collectivity it brings us together, coordinates our collective movement. We dance or, to a more mechanical un-syncopated rhythm, we march. Rhythm moves us; both emotionally and physically. In Trinidad this was quite literal: steelbands used to be means of transportation on Carnival day. People far away from home waited until a band was going in their direction to take them home. Many people have told me: “I was waiting for a band to take me home” as if they were referring to a taxi or a bus.

As its volume increases so too our minds are taken over by our bodies’ urge to move. More and more people are drawn in. Much West African traditional drumming is intended to draw a wider audience through an overpowering volume and rhythm. If a village is conducting some ritual everyone, man, woman and child, is expected to join. Abstention is meant to be impossible.


To counteract the centrifugal force of Trinidadians’ natural anarchism, the gravitational force of a steelband’s rhythm has to be all the stronger. In the early days, when two steelbands met each tried to drown out the other and disorient the other’s players, and each tried to take away the revelers following the other. This often caused bands to clash violently. (When that happened the mark of courage, almost never attained, was for the band to continue playing throughout the melee.)

The power of a steelband’s music is manifest in its tendency to expand. The earliest bands had around fifteen players. They grew larger and larger until they embraced communities and, finally, collectively, they included the entire nation. This process has taken place again and again in different countries. For instance, in the early 1960s there was a small garden party organised for underprivileged children in London by a woman of Polish Jewish background. One year, she invited a small three or four-member steelband to play for the party. As the band played on the road leading to the party more and more West Indians joined in. Some thought it was a demonstration. A moving crowd congealed around the tiny band and tramped along to the party. Thus was born the street parade that is now the single largest street festival in Europe: the Notting Hill Carnival.

Such a strong gravity does not discriminate. It is found in all black music of the Americas, which was able to break down the apartheid in countries such as the USA. In the steelband movement this inclusiveness is especially apparent because people from all spheres are not only drawn to the music but are also drawn into the music-making itself.

It is not uncommon to see in a band pre-pubescent children, octogenarian men, and young men of African, Indian, Chinese, Syrian, or European stock. There are upper, middle and lower class members. There are members from the US and from England, from Japan and from Holland. Phase II has about five or six Japanese. One black girl from New York is around 12. One white boy in Renegades, the first year I saw him playing, had to stand on a box because he was too small to reach the tenor. A Belgian woman who teaches music in Amsterdam used to play for Phase II but now she has moved to Desperadoes. And so on. That those players can be seen on the finals night of Panorama means that they are the cream of the crop.

No other institution I can think of anywhere else in the world has so thoroughly broken down every major social barrier: sex, age, class, race, and nationality. A perfect meritocracy. As Lady Berkley put it: “It brings people together, both playing and listening, in a way no other kind of music seems to.” She too, apparently, discovered that “When yuh iron good you is king.”


II. ImprovISatIon: the InStrument

The African-derived music of the Americas is improvised. That much is well-known and it doesn’t apply only to jazz. There are the other obvious examples: the lyrical extemporisation of calypso and the non-lyrical vocals of scat. But the improvisation runs deeper. For instance, at a famous concert in Berlin Ella Fitzgerald forgot the lyrics to “Mack the Knife,” so she extemporised and made a hit. That would be considered an abject failure within a European aesthetic. But the African aesthetic emphasises that every song should be different every time it is performed, even by the same performers. Every musician is expected to bring their own interpretation of a song, and that should change (within limits) every time it’s performed. (That ideal, of course, is compromised by nightly repetition and by recording.)

Such improvisation is not restricted to melodies and lyrics, however, but characterises the African approach to every aspect of music-making. Instruments, for instance, are used in different ways. James Brown turned the whole band into a rhythmic instrument to back up his screams and screeches. On his first great hit, “Please, Please, Please,” he pushed to the forefront the rhythmic backup lines from the standard “Baby Please Don’t Go” and relegated its melody into the chorus.

dancehall performers have turned even the voice into a percussive instrument.

Pan music is not improvised. But it’s not a great leap from using an instrument differently from how it was intended to be used, such as beating on the side of a drum (or the box of a guitar), to making an instrument out of an object not intended to be one, such as the brake hub of a car, a schoolboy’s desk, a gin bottle, a dustbin or an oil drum. When the teenaged James Brown was in reform school he formed a gospel group with a paper-and-comb harmonica, a drum kit of old tins, and a broom and washtub bass. With this approach the squeak of a hand sliding along guitar strings can become part of the music, like the intake of a Baptist singer’s breath, or her moans and groans, Brown’s keening wail or the foot-shuffling of an audience.

Now, get one thing clear. Such instrumental improvisation is not based on an idea that any sound from anything will do. Rather, it’s a functional aesthetic which accepts that the right sound can come from anything. That is an important distinction because an imagined “right sound,” insofar as it exists platonically in the musician’s mind, guides his search for the object that would produce it.

Because it was formed in the crucible of plantation slavery people conceptualise Afro-American music as a syncretism, a sort of alloy created by European hegemony over Africans and resulting in a bit of this and a bit of that all mixed up. That idea rests on a vision of slaves being compelled to learn European instruments and music, perhaps to play for European masters.


I differ, based on my research into the evolution of Creole music in Trinidad and other parts of the New World. You can make someone learn an unfamiliar music but you cannot make black people adopt a music they don’t like; their musical aesthetic is too deeply rooted for that. More likely, as history shows, they will take what they find useful and can fit into their aesthetic, reject the rest, and turn around to make you adopt their aesthetic. If Africans heard European sounds and instruments which fit into the evolving vision of music they sought to produce, they stole them. “Stole” in the way that a good artist steals (whereas a bad artist borrows), according to T.S. Eliot. In other words, an important aspect of the African musical tradition involves using whatever is considered useful. So if an African composer steals a few bars from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it doesn’t make the composition less African because those bars are spliced into an African framework by African means.

Take, for example, Anthony Williams, the greatest all-round panman in terms of developing the instrument, arranging the music and leading a band. Very early in his career Williams decided that he needed to know more about music, how it worked, the relationships between notes, the theory behind it. So he signed up for voice classes. He didn’t want to waste time learning the fingering necessary for an instrument. Williams also studied European art music. Not because white people claimed that was the highest point of musical evolution (as they still do), but because European art music has wonderful things to teach us that cannot be learnt from simple three-minute folk songs and popular music. There’s no compromise with cultural oppression and no serendipity involved: just a rational quest for artistic transcendence inspired by a vision of genius.

Interestingly, one of Williams’ brilliant innovations was his placement of notes on the pan he named the spider web. He took the twelve outer and inner rings of notes and placed them in the following order, starting at the bottom (counterclockwise):

C G D A E B F# C# G# D# Bb F

Without knowing it he had arranged the notes of the tenor pan (which is actually soprano in range) in a circle of fifths, with each note being five tones away from the next (moving counter-clockwise), which represents the basic principle of Western harmony.

Comparative musicologist Eugene Novotney, for instance, told me years ago: “It is no new idea, this circle of fifths. It’s the way music theory has been taught for

generations now. I don’t 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 somebody’s head and I’m playing. My God, I’m playing it. I feel like I had a natural affinity to the tenor pan...When I first saw a tenor pan I absolutely saw the tenor pan as my friend. 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 it’s taught in Western music theory, is it’s a tool. It’s a philosophical tool to help students remember how to form scales.”

So we can make another obvious point:

afro-american music-making is a rational improvsation towards an aesthetic goal.

Again, let me quote David Rudder:After yesterday’s rejectionOn towards a new perfectionFrom a hunger came a feelFrom the feel we shaped the steel(Dedication)

What was this hunger? How did they shape the steel? The hunger of the early panmen was to create a music that could represent and respond to the world in which they lived. That is the ideal of African music, at least what came of it to the New World: to absorb and turn into art the environment in which it finds itself. This is no art that floats above the lives of people. The sheer persistence of that aesthetic is what makes its fruit differ in different places. It is a seed whose tree produces fruit, which varies with the soil in which it is planted. If Africans lived on Mars their music would be like nothing on earth because it would be shaped by and for life on Mars; yet it would only be so because of the aesthetic brought from Africa. It changes because it remains the same. Syncretism is no part of the equation.

Before 1940, when young men suddenly become obsessed with metal percussion, Trinidadians drummed as we do today. Schoolboys drum. Excursionists drum. Orisha devotees drum. At Carnival they pounded bamboo stalks on the ground or knocked them together. Percussion was pervasive. But it wasn’t enough, not for the young generation, the first to be cut off from the French patois or their parents, and they hungered for something more or something different. Why? Because their world was different from that of their elders. The old structures of colonial domination had been shaken. The Second World War had begun. Even before the servicemen arrived, American dock site workers were flooding the island and introducing their brash, loud culture. People were moving, families resettling in new neighbourhoods. Organised labour was flexing its muscles. Avant-garde artists were challenging the stasis of middle-class culture. Even the physical environment was changing, was becoming littered with metal debris. The pace of life and communications was faster. Dance music, influenced by swing, was different, louder, more complex and totally modern.

The adoption of metal percussion was instantaneous, love at first sight. In 1939 the all-metal band that inspired the others first appeared, and by 1940 all-metal percussion could be described as “the real native music that is so characteristic of the Trinidad Carnival.”


Those percussionists drummed bits of metal: dustbins and a wide range of other metal containers and parts of derelict automobiles. Their rhythms were louder, sharper ones which contained tonal variations, but otherwise the bands were beating rhythms much like their predecessors did. It was not different enough, they hungered for more.

Today a steelband comprises several different pans (in addition to the Engine Room of percussion). Its main pans are:

1. Lead Section: tenors, double tenors, second pans, double seconds.2. Mid-Range: guitar pans, etc.3. Bass: Cello pans, bass pans.They are called the main pans because there are slight variations between bands, with

some having certain pans, mainly in the mid-range – say, triple cellos – which other bands may not. All are made (“tuned” is the word used) the same way, however, although some tuners specialize in making only certain pans.

The process of tuning a pan involves choosing the drum, sinking it, marking the notes, backing and grooving them, leveling the drum, cutting the skirt, tempering it in fire, tuning it, boring holes for hanging it, fine tuning, finishing, blending, and making sticks. Every stage of this is a highly skilled craft whose mysteries I can only hint at, but maybe a hint is enough to excite your wonder and curiosity at what two heroic generations of Trinidadian tuners have wrought—by inventing and developing the instrument, expanding its range, clarifying its sound, changing its timbre, making it easier to tune, more durable and louder.

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 goes down 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 (grooving) allows the vibrations of one note to be separated as much as possible from another.

After this tempering comes the task easiest to describe and most difficult to do: actual tuning — coarse tuning to soften the metal until it vibrates at the right pitch; fine tuning, when its pitch and timbre are adjusted; and blending when the pans, having been chromed, are tuned and “blended” with the other instruments of the band.

Every note you hear on an instrument, say a guitar, is composed of the fundamental note along with several other different overtones known as partials. The partials are what allow us to identify the particular timbre of the note — that is, what kind of instrument is playing the note — and its brightness. The importance of partial overtones is indicated by the fact that small speakers such as those in telephones and portable transistor radios, cannot produce low fundamental notes, but because they do produce the appropriate


overtones you “hear” the correct sound—even though its main part doesn’t exist. The fundamental is the outline, the partials the chiaroscuro. Without overtones you get the horrible tinny sound of a cell phone melody. With inaccurate partials you get the hazy sound of pre-1950 pans.

Now, to tune a guitar you tighten or slacken the string and in so doing you adjust its tone. And all the rest, the partial overtones, come automatically and indeed can be explained by a simple mathematical formula. But the fundamental note on a pan and its partials must be tuned separately from one another.

The discovery that this could be done, indeed its necessity, was the accomplishment of two men — Tony Williams and Bertie Marshall. Yet how it is actually done today has to be rediscovered anew by every tuner on every note of 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. “That’s why every note on every pan is an experiment,” says Gerard Clark, Starlift’s tuner. It’s also why the world of tuners is full of anecdotes of how difficult notes were tuned in the zaniest ways, stories like the one, for instance, 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.

Nowadays this is done with electronic strobes which allow notes to be tuned to precise concert pitch: middle C is 220 Hertz. But it still requires a sharpness of ear which takes up to a decade to learn. How can I demonstrate the mystery of this achievement? A conductor can listen to an orchestra and distinguish if a single string on a violin is out of tune; so too a tuner can hear a pan and tell if the partial of a single note is off. It is the aural equivalent of how a painter can look at a pigment and see the colours which were blended to produce it.

Previously, notes were placed in arbitrary order. Very early it was discovered that notes could not be tuned in consecutive order: each one put its neighbour out of tune. So a tuner would put a note wherever he could get it to sound alright. An early primer on pan making, written by Hilanders founder Kim Loy Wong, recommended that the tuner “trade the note’s 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.” The genius of Tony Williams was, first, to discover the partial 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 cycle-of-fifths arrangement of notes has made adjacent notes either an octave or a fifth apart, so that their partials support one another in harmony.

That king of the iron brought his notes together in placing and tuning them in a way no other tuner did.


III. ImmedIacY: the muSIc

The hunger in those youths drove them to shape the steel into a new instrument, a melodic one, so that from banging noisy rhythms on old dustbins, they moved within ten years to, for instance, Chopin’s Nocturne, which Casablanca essayed in a 1950 recital with a pianist and lyric tenor.

This Casablanca example raises again the issue of white hegemony. When it comes to pan many writers have considered Afro-Trini liking for European art music to indicate some sort of subservient betrayal of black culture or mark of European cultural dominance. (Would this be said about the great jazz tenor saxophone virtuoso and innovator Coleman Hawkins, whose hero was Pablo Cassals, and whose record collection was entirely of classical music?) The truth is, if you asked the panmen, as I have, you would discover that they liked a wide range of musical styles, because it was part of their environment, which was in some ways more varied in the 1950s than it is today. In other words, before African music is nationalistic, hegemonic, even before it is functional, it must work as an art. This art really knows no boundaries, the artist steals whatever he comes across and thinks might be of use, and this is especially true of African musicians, who respect no boundaries other than aesthetic ones, which is why the music cannot be itself bounded.

(I say this in the light of modern Trinidadian music, soca, which is often incapable of working in aesthetic terms and instead is determined by its function to induce collective frenzy, largely through a simple pounding beat and aerobics instructions. Such music, I would argue, is a betrayal of African principles of music-making.)

The hegemony paradigm has a mirror image, which is equally misled. If Afro-American music is not the product of white hegemony, neither is it the result of black (or Creole) “resistance.” True, it grows and is shaped by its environment, including the psychic environment of oppression, which it transcends, but by which it is also limited. The stoic austerity of the blues and the revolutionary message of reggae are both a result of the influence, and a transcendence, of the oppression of black people in the Southern USA and Jamaica respectively. They were also a product of other traditions such as the spiritual traditions in gospel music and Rastafarian drumming. Music created in an environment of black resistance will reflect the politics of the community. But the reason that music can reach anyone anywhere is that its integrity and beauty is a works of art.

“Resistance” is reactive, a response to something; the elaboration of an art form can never be resistance alone, unless by that you mean a resistance to the human condition of mortality and absurdity. It may be influenced or limited by circumstances, but ultimately it is a positive striving to absorb and reshape everything in the environment, including the beliefs of the musician.

In the case of pan, it was the product of the African aesthetic as nourished by the cultural ambience of Trinidad from the 1940s onwards. Rather than reacting to their highly circumscribed lives, the young inventors of pan, who boldly went where no man had gone before, were driven by their need to improvise an instrument, an ensemble and a music


that related to their thoroughly modern lives. They didn’t just want a louder, more resilient drum to back up their singing, they wanted one to encompass the full range of their musical environment; they wanted an instrument that could play melodies as well as rhythms. Let me state this fact boldly and then move on:

african instrumental improvisation has generally transformed melodic instruments into rhythmic ones; pan, however, moved in the opposite direction. But the impulse was the same, that is, to produce a music that reflects the environment.

What is this environment? Some of its components I have mentioned: the other kinds of music that is heard; the social, economic, cultural, and political conditions faced by the musicians; the musical traditions they have inherited. But ultimately the environment which creates, and is created by, African-derived music is the most immediate: the community where it is being heard at any moment in time. It could be at a funeral, in a party, at a football match, on the streets during Carnival, on the corner. That is the environment where it will succeed or fail, that is the acid test.

African-derived music creates communities. Every youth movement since WWII has gelled around some type of popular African-derived music. Early in December, in France, for instance, 200 politicians petitioned to French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to take legal action against several French hip hop musicians whose music had inspired the exploited migrants to riot all across France a few weeks ago.

Steelbands came to represent neighbourhoods and eventually the entire nation. Recall Lady Berkley: “It brings people together.” But the real community which the music creates is the ephemeral community of people within earshot, those swept along by its rhythms, the mobile and transient community of now.

That community is generated by the music. The party, the concert, in the case of pan in the early days, the Carnival band on the road, and now the audience at Panorama. This is not just people within earshot but people who have been transformed from being individuals into a group of people moved by the music performed at that moment. Moved both literally and figuratively. This is achieved through two main modalities.

The first is the various forms of musical improvisation, in which the musicians shape the music to suit the audience of the other performers. This is a two-way relationship, and the better both parties are at it the tighter the relationship. This relationship is between the musicians and the audience, but also within the audience itself. We are all here grooving collectively to the beautiful sounds produced specifically to evoke and touch the mood we are in at this moment in time.

This includes more than the melodic improvisation of jazz and most African-American music in performance, where every performer is expected to give his particular interpretation of a song; it’s also the lyrical improvisation of extempore and the non-lyrical vocal improvisation of scat. Jamaicans inject this immediacy into recorded music through the improvised chat of deejays, who have themselves become the artists and created their own art form.


The second is the visceral compulsion of rhythm and volume. (Lesser artists such as disco musicians of the 80s and soca musicians of the present rely on a simple pounding beat; additionally, soca musicians use aerobics instructions – wave something, move to the left or wherever – and deafening amplification to achieve the community they are unable to generate through their art.)

Whatever the method, the intent is the same: to match the music and the mood of the moment so performers and audience fuse into a single community. Steelbands on the road used some improvisation (Cobo Jack made Invaders famous for that) in the late-50s, but mainly it was the rhythm and the slow foot-scraping chip of the followers, which fused the crowd and the band. Now that bands are no longer on the road and their music is often too complex and too orchestrated for improvisation, the togetherness and unity is generated through competition, which, today, means Panorama.

Even that has changed. Steelbands no longer flood the roads of Port of Spain with rivers of music and all their eddies and rapids, sluggish shallows and dramatic cascades. That swirling, rolling sound suited a time when the huge, awkward bands were themselves mobile, and trundled along the streets, powered by the pan-pushers who were in turn powered by the music which also whisked the vast crowds like they were no more than the leaves in a flood. Indeed, when Panorama first started in 1963 the steelbands performed on the move. “But them days done.” Steelbands now remain firmly anchored on the Panorama stage, shaking furiously until each one’s ten minutes has expired.

Instead of pouring torrents on to the streets, steelbands now erect Baroque cathedrals, each vibrating stone individually carved and embellished. It is an elaborate, ornate style, intricate motifs within intricate motifs, a music which in the 1990s suited Jit Samaroo’s genius and Renegades more than anyone else’s, until that gave way to the slower, rougher power of Clive Bradley and Desperadoes, and the stylish elegance of Boogsie Sharpe and Phase II Pan Groove.

This competition is a sublimation of the older warfare and street clashes, which were in turn an outcome of informal street competitions. How does this generate the immediacy of improvisation?

Great music is the creation of surprising inevitability. Where will the piece go next? And when we hear we are surprised at first because we didn’t foresee that. But immediately or even simultaneously the surprise is resolved by the correctness of what follows. Ah yes, we feel, it had to be that.

Today steelband music cannot surprise you through improvisation. So it has turned itself into something akin to a sport, with its supporters and exciting finals. They say football is the greatest sport because it offers the most scope for surprise, for the underdog to win. (Watch out Munich!) Most sports began as war games, and so too Panorama is a battle, only here the armies are musical ensembles, their generals the arrangers, and their weapons are music.

Let me conclude with David Rudder’s commemoration of Exodus Steel Orchestra’s victory in the 1992 Panorama, “Dus in they face”:


Big fete, like the whole of the East gone madPeople -- the traffic police had it hardPrancing, some man get on like leggo beastBoasting, how proud they is to come from the EastThey say tell Port of Spain we coming again, that was a warm upAnd then they went down to Point, mash up the joint, the lick-up was non-stopRespect now is what we want, they cyar take we light againWe eh taking no prisoners, so sorry, we soakin we belt in cut-tail peeSo when we reach it go be: Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap!

When you see we come downTell them war declare in townDus in they faceGuns will be blasting for sure in this musical war Dus in they faceWe looking for fight it’s trouble tonight We feeling all rightIt’s a panman war We come out for war to settle the score The tenors sawed offAnd it’s doy doy doy doy doy doy

All Stars, Desperadoes and RenegadesQuiet, but they sharpening their musical bladesFonclaire, the Phase and the Humming Bird,Waiting for the judges to give the word.And Lincoln and Bertie and Birdie and companyThey love the bacchanalThem who tune the pansNow they watching the jamIn this pannist CarnivalNow it come to this after two months of labourLiving on nuts and corn from dusk till dawnWe must refuse to think bout loseNobody could beat we, I tell you: na na na na na.

(David Rudder)


Body music to sweet pan:

The badjohn roots of pan

ne 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 Singh’s club, they began to get on bad, until Boysie’s 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

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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 man’s 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t up to mark. Once, a story goes, Spree got fed up with the band’s progress and flung an iron into it—who 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 gun’s 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 thieves—remember pans were stolen from businesses—and 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 Programme” 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, Invaders—why 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 decades—until 1980—before 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 Starlift’s 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 Marshall’s 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 bottles—Old 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 trophy—their only first prize—in 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?


everal 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 Humbugger” 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 “dudups” 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 that 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

They tamed a clear and robust sound

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a different key,” recalls “Ocean” from Tokyo. “It didn’t have no styling—wherever 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 iron—something about its clear and robust sound—has 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 Spree’s, 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 Narrell.

“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; Ellie’s was lush, a fatter, smoother sound, and it was sweeter.”

Invaders wasn’t 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. “Othello Mollineux used to come to Invaders to play, Shadow would come from Symphonettes in Benares Street, Dove—good 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 Ormond “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 didn’t 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 bass—they 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 bass men to play three pans at a time; he organized the band’s 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 Valley’s progeny wasn’t limited to North Stars, which in turn spawned West Side. Sonny Roach’s 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 Johnny’s” 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, Hollman’s 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.


ho 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 steelband—Pearl 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 Hire”—two of Spree Simon’s 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, he’d also brought along the John John band’s infamous touchiness and, according to Seon, “as a result was killed by a blow in the head from a rival steelbandman.”

Contrarily, 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 didn’t really know about pan—they 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

The saga of South pan

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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 Scorpion’s yard and eventually got the pan he wanted.

Around that time Bataan—named after the Robert Taylor movie of the same name—was 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” Clarke 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 handkerchiefs—one 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 she’d 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 middle-class children sometimes joined the bands. Indeed, once a youth—wearing a mask, of course—was 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 didn’t “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 schoolmaster’s 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 train lines 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. Ormond “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 Symphony’s Alan Gervais.

Meanwhile back in San Fernando, Teddy Clarke from the now-defunct Bataan passed through Mon Repos to go home. Often he’d 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 band called Vintaitt and the Comics. “It’s said—though not by Jamaicans—that 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 Orchestra—the Coffee band—came 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 sponsor’s 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 1967—the same year they came third in Steelband Festival playing “Revelation from Beyond” and “Gallopade” composed by Mohammed, the first locally-written 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?


n 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 Wallerfield—it was war time—and bring some small drums and they end up making kittle drum, dudup.”

“Red” Vernon tuned them and made ping pongs— “I don’t know where he learn”—and 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 was Mother Gerald’s 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 Zorro’s nephew Kenrick Thomas. “Everybody 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.

East Side story

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With the Tacarigua Orphanage nearby, Boom Town had access to a pool of musicians—bands 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 1946—the first band to travel abroad—when they were known as Russian Symphony, and fought more Guyanese 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 Island—which might have been the band Jit Samaroo’s older brothers played for. Carlos Rose hadn’t yet migrated from Fyzabad to St John’s Road to nurture Flamingos, Exodus’ progenitor, but in Tunapuna there were already Boys Town (later Sunland) on Green Street, the Zigilee brothers’ Nob Hill on Maingot Road, Toro’s Frenchman’s Creek on Back Street, and “Madman” Jordan’s 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 Hell’s Kitchen.

“You got dice, wappie, Mastife and them, Pess, Lance, Manto—real sagga boys, Domni changing his clothes four times a day—liming with their jamettes by Sapodilla Street, beating iron and jocking their waist,” recalls Cyril Goddard who was then a schoolboy. “That was Hell’s Kitchen.”

Those older men attracted Goddard into the iron band underworld, but the first band he actually joined was the younger Times Square. “A Chinese fella named Hing—we used to pitch in he yard—he 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 (Victory in Europe) Day Goddard’s ping pong drew crowds to Times Square, including some Hell’s Kitchen badjohns, and Genie—Bhadase Sagan Maraj’s bodyguard, who played bass kittle—was stabbed by Joe Murray.

Hell’s Kitchen eventually dissolved with police assistance, and Sullivan was formed in an effort to shake off the band’s 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.

Goddard’s parents, getting wind that their son planned to beat ping pong in the competition, hid his clothes.

He borrowed some 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 to 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 Syncopaters.”

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 J’ouvert 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 Potential—1992 Pan Ramajay winners—but 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 Syncopaters, 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 didn’t 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 happening—it 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 1968 and 1974, 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 region’s blight and given a chance to the many contenders from Morvant’s Harmonites to Sangre Grande’s Cordettes.


or Carnival 1946, the first after World War II, Kitchener composed “The Steelband”:Port of Spain nearly catch afireWhen the bands were crossing the Dry RiverZigilee, master of the ping pongHad 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 stick fighting, 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 rhythms—a 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

The steel pulse of Port of Spain

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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 BarkerBar 20 leading kittle beatersWell they sure made us understandThe 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 l’il 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 band’s captain, fell into the Dry River and died, his funeral drew hundreds of villains to the Lapeyrouse Cemetery, all drunk, sporting the jackets they’d 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 calypsos for, among other things, beating a policeman. And she was chanting, “When police come, don’t 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 alternating—six months, probation, six months, probation, six months...

“I was in a six months spot, so I try to exchange but I couldn’t,” 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 men—that’s what they were called in those days—behind 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, Kendolph 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 Willie’s 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.

Just like it 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.

Ormond “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 La Bastide.

De La Bastide 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 La Bastide 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 at my band, I was too involved playing for Hill 60.”

This band had only recently been called into existence by Henry “Patcheye” Pachot, a youth whose love of drumming had made him one of the master Shango drummers. On VJ (Victory in Japan) 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, like Tokyo’s 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.


hey’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. Since the Oval was across the street they used their facilities. 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 [sic] background rhythm. It wasn’t no tune you playing, you couldn’t play none. Only ‘Tutie’ (Victor Wilson) from Alexander’s 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 Wickham’s 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 Simon’s Destination Tokyo from John John.

Invaders, king of the iron men

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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 McBurnie’s embryonic Little Carib Theatre around the corner, and was part of the theatre’s 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 too 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 couldn’t fight big John John men. They take Ellie pan—the barracuda—and hang it from a tree in John John and tell him come for it.”

He didn’t, but they began to fight back as they grew up and were joined by fearless men from the former Alexander’s 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 from the band, he beat an American serviceman up Chancellor Hill and raped his girlfriend, along with six men. Emmanuel “Cobo Jack” Riley, Invaders’ lead tenor player, formerly of Green Eyes, barely escaped the hangman’s 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 J’ouvert 1950. The Mannette pans were the best by far—and 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 back—I 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, more so because they were far out of Port of Spain where they weren’t welcome. Instead they concentrated on J’ouvert, which the Woodbrook middle class supported in their numbers. And there was Ellie.

Although his tenors were better than anyone else’s in volume, range and timbre, and his cellos sounded like pipe organs, every J’ouvert morning Ellie put on his cork hat and joined the rhythm section alongside Drayton, Wickham and Oswald “Nicker” Best. Strange that some of the band’s best players preferred the iron section, but remember Ellie worked at the foundry.

“Me and Ellie used to heat the irons—it had good brakes then—and 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, if you iron good you is king.


The legend of the first white boy steelband

erhaps it was because they weren’t truly considered white French Creole; or maybe it was because they owned many of the rum shops 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, Dixieland 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 Duval’s father had a hardware store at which Jules worked, and Duval was Ferreira’s 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 hid 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 son’s 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

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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.

After a few months Boys from Iwojima 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 Ferreira’s parents weren’t too keen, they allowed the boy and his friends to play pan; the school they went to, St Mary’s, 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 Mayben’s 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 I’d 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 father’s 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 who’d 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.

“I’d heard of St Mary’s 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 a damaged and repaired Ellie Mannette pan named “Fairy” for $13.

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 we’d discovered a new note, it was a Columbus mood.”

Also, 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 Jeffrey’s Beer: old


man de Montbrun worked at Grell and Co, agents for Jeffrey’s Beer, and he had arranged to help out the boys.

That was the year the 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 I’d heard triple cellos and 6-bass— ‘Boots’ was on bass—and my pores raised to hear ‘God Save the King,’” says Pierre. Four years later he would 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 Ferreira’s 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.”

They’d 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 Moyou’s sister would look down from his room on their practice sessions and occasionally give them advice. He drove a Buick and worked for the Caribbean Commission: his name was Eric Williams.


f Desperadoes, with its eight Panorama victories, is definitely one of the top steelbands today, without doubt the greatest in steelband’s early years was Casablanca, 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 Boys—a group of youngsters who limed by 42 Steps and used to follow the Gonzales Tamboo Bamboo band. Kendolph “Cokey” Mason, Arnold Agard, Cecil Osbourne, Ormond “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 Pile’s 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 run—as you hear a pan fall, we gone!” recalls Augustus “One Man” Mark, who served three terms as Casablanca captain. “Sometimes an accident—a little cord might burst—and 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

Casablanca, the greatest

I


Campbell. James “Batman” Anderson, for instance, was known to beat an entire van of policemen—they didn’t 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 Blanca’s importance came from the music they played. To start with, part of the band’s power was its aggressive, driving rhythm and its martial buglers. But Blanca was more musical than that and, significantly, three of the TASPO players—and TASPO represented the cream of Trinidad’s panmen—came 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. Boots’ 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 Couteau 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 band—you 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 Chopin’s “Nocturne in E Flat Minor” and “Bells of St Mary’s.” Art de Couteau tuned the iron especially for the bells, and Casablanca won, causing their neighbours Trinidad All Stars to take the classics seriously.

It wasn’t enough for de Couteau. 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 recital—the first ever. They also included tenor singer Victor Soverall, so the band’s tuner Randolph “Croppy” Simmonds tuned a special small high tenor pan for Patsy Haynes to balance Soverall’s voice. And when, after months of rehearsals, the show was put on, the Victoria Institute was sold out—at $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 band’s 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 Highlanders’ Bertie Marshall would invent the canopy to shelter the pans. Blanca’s 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 rum shops closed half day and “water lock off.” “The first time we went to Point we went to Fyzabad to dance for New Year’s,” 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 isn’t 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.


erhaps Pat Bishop was awarded the Trinity Cross for her efforts with the Lydian Singers. It couldn’t be for working with the band which has won eight Panoramas—more 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 (Desperadoes from a Glen Ford and William Holden movie) they weren’t 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 steelband’s greatest rioters, Desperadoes were naturally good with war mas such as To Hell and Back, Sands of Iwojima, and Morocco. Their head sailors were famous for introducing the crab in 1952. But their innovation was the historical band 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 Noah’s 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.

The hill boys

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“All them time Laventille people did support we — police couldn’t come ask Laventille people to say they going to get information, never,” recalls Crabby. “That’s 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, Crusaders—they 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 didn’t 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 TASPO was picked in 1951, and Carl “Bumpy Nose” Greenidge was chosen, he couldn’t 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 band—all 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 wasn’t afraid to manufacture bombs for it. If they wanted to steal a bale of sugar, he’d 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 we’ll beat you up and mash up your pans.

The Charles family was a respected one on the hill. Rudolph’s 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 Jack’s 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 who’d gone on to become an extremely gifted musician in the Police Band.

Shaw had never had anything to do with steelband — he didn’t 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.

“That’s 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 didn’t show; and Shaw was certain they’d lost. But Rudolph tuned the pan quickly behind Queen’s Hall and Shaw allowed a newcomer, “Dougla Kenny,” to take Greenidge’s part. That Sixty Seven Desperadoes won the Champ of Champs Prime Minister’s 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.


veryone 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 “Sing-co” John.

Sing-co, whose Chinese name was Assing, was one of that early group of Dead End Kids that became Desperadoes, and Sing-co was the band’s 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 Marshall’s 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 Stars—which another Starland captain, George “Whitey” Lynch, helped out—that got the reputation as the Chinese band.

They were, however, a group of mainly Chinese table tennis players whose club, the Valiants, practised upstairs in the Kuomintang Association in Charlotte Street. The club included Petal Lee Loy, women’s table tennis champ at the time, and Hamil Achim, the male champ. It was Hamil’s immigrant father who, as chairman of the moribund Kuomintang Association, had allowed the youths to play table tennis on the third floor of the Association’s headquarters. And it was Hamil who decided one day to bring out a steelband.

The Chinese connection

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Petal Lee Loy didn’t 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 didn’t know,” recalls Valentino Lee Loy. “When the band was going through the Savannah I’d 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 Williams’ brother-in-law, was there, as were Wilson Owen, and even, briefly, Kim Loy Wong.

Moyou—whose father was an immigrant Chinese, the lifetime president of the Chinese Society, but whose mother was second generation and mixed with Creole—as 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 Grande’s Cordettes who also built Peter Minshall’s first half-dozen kings. Even Kim Loy Wong’s Highlanders started mainly as a mas band.

So it was Dixieland’s mas that drew the Chinese in their numbers. “Our supporters were 90 per cent Chinese,” says Ernest Ferreira, Dixieland’s 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-line 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 we’d play cards—the 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.”

Chan’s father was a Chinese immigrant who was very involved in Chinese culture—he made the papier-mâché dragon head for Double Ten dragon dances. The girls built the dragon’s 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 Dr. Eric Williams’ adviser on steelband; Aldwyn Chow Lin On was briefly acting president of Pan Trinbago; and his brother Ellis became manager of Charlie’s Roots, just as Dixie Stars pannist George Ng Wai continued playing for many years abroad and is now the manager of his son Joey’s band Second Imij. Ronnie Chan, then the managing director of Scotiabank, took 20 St Francois Girls College pannists to the bank’s annual general meeting in Canada.


n 2005 Trinidad All Stars celebrated 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-and-spoon bamboo bands that came out for J’ouvert 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 Alexander’s Ragtime Band which hit the streets in 1939, a few months after the movie of the same name played in Port of Spain. “We’re not trying to say we were the first steelband or anything so,” he explains. “It’s just that that’s 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 ship’s crew (not fancy) black-and-white sailor band in town and they’d 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

All Stars shine forth

I


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 brothers—Herbert, Cecil, Steven, Leonard, Ralph—were 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 generation’s 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 Alexander’s Ragtime Band left its Newtown yard on J’ouvert 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 band’s 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 captain—the 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 wasn’t quite true.

Jules wasn’t 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 couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 TASPO that went to England in 1951.

Still, although the band would win four Panorama crowns, it’s in classical music that Jules’ tuning genius and orchestral talent, and Batson’s 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.


n 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 Mohammed’s Cavaliers changed the sound of steelband in the mid-sixties. 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 best-managed 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 20’s 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 players—including the young Len “Boogsie” Sharpe— participated in the Hosay.

Later, when Starlift’s 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 Sharpe’s Phase II, however, which translated the tassa experience into his 1986 Panorama arrangement on “I Music,” rolling the tenors like the martial Hosay rhythms.

I love you, Raja — but on pan

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It wasn’t 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 festival—arranged for Bobby’s cousin’s 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 Mohammed’s. That was late 1957 when two days later Taitt brought a tenor for Bobby to accompany and they began playing together.

It was Bobby’s 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 and 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 Mohammed’s 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 out—the band which would win Panorama in 1965 and 1967 with the sweetness of Mohammed’s 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 Bobby’s 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 his 1972 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 and—to show that the culture mixes in both directions—the Hindi Nidhi steelband chutney competition a few years later. (Surprisingly, the second runners-up were the Laventille Sound Specialists). And no wonder, given Samaroo’s 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 couldn’t afford it, so he turned to pan and in 1964 joined that early Scherzando which used to be called Boys Town—a band that straddled both Afro- and Indo-Trinidad.

The Tunapuna band’s pans had been donated by Pt Cumana’s Boys Town, winners of the first steelband festival. But it attracted both African and Indian boys. “We didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 couldn’t 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 skeptics 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 synthesizer – set to pan mode.


hey gave a great performance, and their elimination from the Panorama semi-finals 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 wasn’t 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 Paul’s Street, keeping an eye out for the police, the Despers boys—they called themselves Dead End Kids in those days—looked on enviously.

Even as late as 1951, when the TASPO was formed to play at the Festival of Britain, John John’s 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 J’ouvert 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 didn’t 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 experimenting—like Ellie Mannette in Woodbrook and Neville Jules in Hell Yard—with 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 band’s 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.

When Tokyo ruled the hill

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The John John band wasn’t 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 you’d 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 didn’t 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 they’d 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, ‘Yes—give 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 band’s 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 gone—we have the permit but them beating the pan,” says George. “Casanovas didn’t 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 die—Tokyo.


oday it’s 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 didn’t 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 Pierre’s 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 band’s stalwarts of that day the boys went down Frederick Street to lime. “And we come across this Russian flag—we 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 be 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 that’s 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

The band they couldn’t ban

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weren’t 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 Spain’s saga boys—snappy 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 Workingmen’s 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 of 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 money—twenty dollar notes, ten dollar notes, five dollar notes—all 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 hadn’t a chance to introduce them to his ideology 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 fighters—they had to be to control and defend their many women—and 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 couldn’t 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 Year’s 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 lawyer—Edgar 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 strike—we 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 two’s 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. “Don’t say I fast and I don’t 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 Stand—them 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 around—Ellie Mannette from Invaders, Sonny Roach from Sun Valley, Neville Jules from All Stars, the big boys of the steelband world—and argued they should call for prize money and appearance fees or boycott.

They didn’t 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.


t might seem strange that our main pan-on-the-road festival should take place in Point Fortin’s Borough Day celebrations, quite down in that distant outpost. But it isn’t 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, 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 Casablanca’s Philmore “Boots” Davidson, whose mother had a house in Canaan Road so the Point youths called their band Casablanca too, but under James “Bumpy” Neverson’s captaincy the name was changed to Morning Stars. There wasn’t 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.”

Deep South pan

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These two bands mightn’t ring any bells in the ears of northerners, but Starlight produced Leo Coker, one of today’s 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, Point—just 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 Neverson’s polishing.

“We was going to play in a competition and we wanted to practice—Alan 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, Alan’s brother, played guitar and when we were practising at their home in Egypt Village he told us we weren’t 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 band’s martinet leader, arranger and tuner—a 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 don’t 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 Starlight’s leading tenor player.

St Louis didn’t join Southern Symphony but Belgrave inveigled Rodney and Gervais to join them for festival competitions. Belgrave got Casablanca’s virtuoso Kenny Hart to play with them while he visited Point. He got Ivan “Skull” Henry—who subsequently formed Arima Melodians—to 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 Rodney’s 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.


he 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 she’d lost weight she wouldn’t 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 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,

Saga of a flagwoman

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one of the men who went to school with her and later enjoyed the pleasures she sold on the streets.

A willful 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 to 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 went 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 was facing trial for a murder in a rum shop.

Perhaps Bubulups, barely a teenager, felt she couldn’t 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 a lot 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 she’d entered, though—maybe by then she wouldn’t 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, don’t 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 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 can’t 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. I’m telling you. You couldn’t 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 she’d 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 salt fish 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 wasn’t 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 Blackman’s 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 Bubulups’ 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. Jean-in-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’ formidable willfulness 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 she’d left the streets for good, she’d exaggerate to her Clifton Street neighbour, Velma Denbow, that she’d always earned a fair amount of money, always had nice clothes—as if to justify the life she’d 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 back—a 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 Chalkdust’s 1992 “Trinidad ent change” in which he names the prostitutes as the standard of middle class corruption:

Trinidad ent changeJust re-arrangeProstitutes like Jean and DinahBubulups and Bengal TigerThey now Mrs ClarkeAnd Drs Doris MarkIn Federation Park.

Perhaps when Kitchener celebrated flagwomen in his calypso of the same name, this first flagwoman felt a surge of pride, but it’s unlikely. By then she’d already forsaken the streets and Carnival for good. More likely she felt stung on hearing in 1946 Kitch’s gloating “Ding Dong Dell” with its unspoken rhyme, “pussy in the well”:

Well the Yankee leave them sadAll them girls in TrinidadAnd the course is getting hardPort of Spain to FyzabadDing Dong DellThe girls in the town they catching hellDing Dong DellStarvation in town, they must rebelBubulups and Elaine PowEvery night they making rowWell the thing is not the sameThey gone in the poker game


Small and wiry Tepoo 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 Tipoo’s 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 Nella’s 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 hadn’t 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 Battoo’s 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.


t is debatable whether it was Lewisito “Cito” Velasquez’s greatest band, but Flowers and Fruit was certainly the perfect choice for Leighton James’ sculpture, Day of Glory.

And it was Cito’s first band. Formerly, he made costumes for Old St Joseph Road’s Fascinators, the kings of fancy sailor mas, although he didn’t play in the band himself,

opting instead to play dragon mas. In 1957, for instance, he was Lucifer’s Crown Prince in Legislators From Hell.

1958, 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. Fascinators’ Looking To Retrospect incorporated selections from previous portrayals but were edged out by the velvet-suited sailors and short-skirted majorettes of Starlift’s 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 Cito’s idea was grander.

His family were all craftsmen. Who couldn’t paint could carve. During World War II when imports were severely restricted they operated a toy factory making dolls from paper maché. 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.

The master carver

I


“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 nearly 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 Bailey 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’ tableau of this band is 17 by 4 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 easily—teak 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’ 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 enough—people tried as far as San Fernando to get, and they complained—so 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 James’ 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 gravity—the 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 what’s required to see the genius of James’ epic masterpiece—a hybrid midway between sculpture and mural, reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel’s 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 moment—the instant before it was destroyed. Thus the tableau 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.

In James’ tableau, none of this has happened yet. Only one San Juan All Stars man is throwing a bottle, while another flees from a Desperadoes man. Only the band’s 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 Noah’s 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 Starlift’s Greatest Show On Earth, and emerging from New Street is Flowers and Fruits. Behind them is the small St James band Crossroads. Cito’s 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 Caruso’s “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’ sculpture, they are halfway into Charlotte Street. With the band is a Midnight Robber; at the back a Jab Jab cracks his whip. Also there’s an Indian— “possibly looking for his tribe,” suggests James—and 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 harm’s 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 steelband—you do something without ever knowing where it will reach.”

In beginning with the steelband, already James’ 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 Noah’s 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.


t’s 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, it’s Tony “Muffman” Williams’ “Fourths and Fifths” arrangement of notes

which has become the standard design on most pans. It was also him 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 doesn’t 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 Roach’s Sun Valley—winners of the first island-wide steelband competition.

Already Williams’ 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 didn’t 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.”

Return of the Muffman

I


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 he’d 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 four—not including Williams—were 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 what’s now standard practice for all tuners. “I heard the sound of the octave C in the lower C—it 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 it—nobody really said anything about it.”

Although they had long known that you didn’t place any note next to any other note, different tuners in those days had different styling. For every note on the outside circle, Williams was placing its octave on the inside circle. He didn’t 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 didn’t 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 pan—I didn’t 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 Stars—the 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 wasn’t chromatic because they couldn’t 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 band’s 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 he’d made himself of sheet steel.

In 1979 the Princes Building was destroyed in a fire and with it went Williams’ experimental 36-note pans on which he’d 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.”


nce again the Pan Ramajay competition broke new ground in 2006. This time it wasn’t in the nature of the competition, however, nor its venue; rather, it was in the bands, in particular one band—the 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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 both of them was Daisy James who 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.

A soft touch on the iron

O


Sonny told her to play and she did, but when the rest of the band fell in—pan in those days just repeated simple rhythmic counter-melodies—Daisy froze. “I was amazed and shocked,” she says. “Sonny said, ‘No, continue playing—the 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-and-seek 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’ 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 couldn’t 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 had planned a show which the Education Minister John Donaldson Sr 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 McBurnie’s Little Carib, Henley 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 must have 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 in—two 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 weren’t allowed to play in a panyard. Robertson, for instance, had brothers in Dem Boys from Belmont but she couldn’t play there.

“We were all friends, their parents knew mine, so it was all right,” explains Henley. “We played softly, we were in my house—not a panyard—and 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 Pierre’s 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 it—what could? And soon the band began to play at parties, at the US base in Chaguaramas, in the Little Carib. In 1951, the year the band was formed, they visited Guyana, and Jamaica in 1952. And they would have travelled more if the Education Department hadn’t 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 Pat’s pans. And at Carnival the Mannette band passed by the Henley house on Picton Street to take the girls out for J’ouvert. “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 Henley’s greater musical knowledge. One afternoon he heard them playing an Invaders tune and getting right a note he’d 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 didn’t 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, Henley’s 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 couldn’t be a band without all of the others.”


he steelband movement, particularly in Arima, lost one of its firmest pillars when Frank Bernard died of heart failure at age 63. Known affectionately as “Skip” Bernard, the fourth of eleven children, he captained Melodians Steel Orchestra, Arima’s oldest surviving band, from 1961 until his death.

He didn’t 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. It’s 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 dudups.”

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 wasn’t in Atomic in the days during and immediately after World War II, but Vernon “Papite” Andrews used to hang around the yard near 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,

The pioneer who sought musical revenge

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tramping with their heavy pans as far as Tamana, Cumuto, Valencia and Sangre Grande to serenade.

“When we leave for parang we didn’t 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 I’d 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 notes—we didn’t know about sharps, just the scale they taught us in school: do, re, mi, 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 pan—ping 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 Aleong’s 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 Bernard’s 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 Alexander’s 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 couldn’t 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 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 there—life 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 earlier Skull had already hidden out in Arima, also 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 led 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 Bakery 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, tenors—they 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.”


o 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 people’s respect for the instrument.”We have come far from the TASPO days when that band went to the Festival of Britain

with instruments which were deliberately left unpainted and rusty, surprising the Europeans all the more at the sounds they produced.

Published by the National Music Museum in Sweden, whose Director Krister Malm set up Trinidad’s folklore archives in the early 1970s, Kronman’s Steel Pan Tuning is something of a grab bag: part practical tutor, part description, part theory, part speculation. “A tuner would laugh at what I’ve written, he’d say ‘I don’t 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 shouldn’t worry that I’ve publicised 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

Swedes have a go at tuning

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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 tuning—coarse 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 can’t teach this, it still manages to effectively convey the complexity of what two heroic generations of Trinidadian tuners have wrought—men 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 note—take a C tone for example—and several other different overtones known as partials. The partials are what allow us to identify the particular timbre of the note—that is, what kind of instrument is playing the C—and 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 tuners—mainly 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. “That’s why every note on every pan is an experiment,” says Gerard Clark, Starlift’s tuner. It’s 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 don’t 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 sound—even though its main part doesn’t 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 note’s 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 wouldn’t 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 note—the 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 Kronman’s book—the acoustical theory of the most significant acoustic instrument of this century.

Kronman’s still incomplete research follows two main clues. First is the fact that the pan note moves in different ways, vibrates along different waves, to produce the fundamental and its harmonics. With a stringed instrument it’s simple: the string vibrates to look like a wobbly snake slithering. With a drum it’s also simple, though less so because even if the


drum face moves in crossing waves, the partial overtones are not harmonic—hence you cannot play a clear melody on a drum. (The face of the table 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 you’ll hear is a higher pitch of the same note—it’s octave overtone. If, of course, it’s 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 contact—which 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 Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, observing whenever possible Rudy “Two Lef” Smith at work. He has visited Trinidad every two years since 1979 when he first heard pan. And while he’s 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.


eep in West Virginia University’s 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 that’s 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 note’s floating, it’s 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 Stradivarius of steel.

Mannette was giving the finishing touches to his latest invention, the Quaduet he’d 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 steelpan — the most significant acoustic instrument invented this century.

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

The man for whom the steel sings

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on old paint tins and dustbins since he saw the prototype steelband Alexander’s 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 rubber—cut from a bicycle inner tube–around 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 didn’t play no mas—we 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 it—they eh want we in town, they mash we up flat... That time we was little, we didn’t know nothing about no cutting up man. So we had to run.”

Mannette shouted, “Hold on to your pans.”He wasn’t 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 Mannette’s 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 Casablanca—one 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 father’s backyard I spied a rusting 55-gallon barrel...”

With hindsight it’s 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, Mannette’s friends protested, the ping pongs made from 35-gallon drums were held aloft in one hand and played with the other hand—you can’t 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 he’d 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 else’s. 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 Brahms’ “Lullaby.” And the world of culture gently shifted orbit.

Soon the Invaders were famous for Mannette’s “sweet pan” and when the great TASPO was selected in 1951 to go to the Festival of Britain, Mannette was the band’s designated tuner, even though every 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’ band room 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 Williams’ “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 Appalachians—Morgantown, 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 he’d 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 he’d 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 Faini’s offer to become 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 it—I’ll 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 built—its 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 it’s 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 tuning—so far he’s only mastered the building of pans.

Every note you hear on an instrument, say a guitar, is composed of the fundamental note—take a C for example—and 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 C—and its brightness. And they’re 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 note—they 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 down—until they marry at the right spot.

“I’m trying to get a darker sound here. I created some rings on this outer C and now I’m 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 harmonic—yes, 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 don’t hit the fundamental note as you used to long time.

“You can hit around it and change everything—the 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.


t 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 Tobago’s arts from early—perhaps he’d inherited this from his father, an ardent Dame Lorraine performer.

“The family’s 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 cause—he 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 didn’t 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.”

Eric’s impossible love

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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 he’d quickly grown attached—the 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 Moyou’s sister Soy in 1950, the same year Rolf became involved in Dixieland—the 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 he’d 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 Crichlow’s invitation to the Steelbands Association meeting, and despite pouring rain, he got there early. Kenrick Thomas, captain of Tacarigua’s 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 didn’t 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 aid—first time I see a man with a hearing aid. I didn’t say anything to him, he didn’t 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 don’t 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 wouldn’t like the Association to get involved in politics. Although Williams was already gathering strength to storm the political stage, it wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 Williams’ 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 he’d 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 didn’t have no discussion, the meeting just broke up.”

Today Procope hardly remembers the incident, but doesn’t think Williams’ 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 Hamel-Smith 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 didn’t 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 Programme around the Desperadoes and Tokyo, he twisted businessmen’s 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 couldn’t 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.


t the Steelband Festival preliminaries, a fixed pattern is followed. Every band’s tune of choice is most likely a faithfully rendered classic with what Pat Bishop referred to as “a flowing melody”—that is, she explained in a Festival brochure, “the listener had to

be able to whistle a part of it easily.” The piece is also “technically challenging” or, “Sticks must be flying.” And, finally, it concludes with a “long and charismatic coda”—end with a crash and a bang.

But it wasn’t always so. The first Music Festival was organised by the Trinidad Music Association in 1948 and adjudicated by foreign musicians. Although several vocal and instrumental categories were adjudicated by a Barbadian musical expert, Gerald Hudson, there was no steelband. One had been sent to him at the Queen’s Park Hotel, but he hadn’t been impressed.

By 1952, however, things were different. During the decade beginning in 1952 steelbands became simply part of the Music Festival, By then, the watershed TASPO had made steelbands fully chromatic, capable of playing every note from tenor to bass—alto 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 weren’t yet tuned to concert pitch and couldn’t blend properly with other instruments.

The time a fish band conquered town

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A compromise was made: the preliminaries were 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 rumba 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 members—Dudley 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 selection—Boys 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, May’s 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 Handel’s “Largo,” Southern Symphony chose Strauss’ “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 Trinidad Guardian. And when the Globe stopped ringing and the applause died down, Northcote announced the winners: ping pong soloist Dudley Smith from Rising Sun—no 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.”

The band to whom Northcote gave the first place 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 week’s festivities in the tiny fishing village of Point Cumana.

Steelband had begun in Point Cumana early—since Alexander’s Ragtime Band came to the St Peter’s 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 hadn’t a radio—he had to rush across with the band to his wife’s cousin’s 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 Heart’s 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 rum shop to the panyard to sing it for the band.

Long after his victory, Bellerand discovered that Henry hadn’t remembered the entire tune and what Boys Town had played left out part of the chorus. But perhaps Northcote didn’t know the whole thing either. “And the point is what we played was well-played and it pleased Dr Northcote,” Bellerand recalls proudly.


ven before Trinidad All Stars placed first in Pan is Beautiful VIII, the Duke Street band had already won more Steelband Festivals than any other. Their total of six Festival victories was twice that of the next runner up, Desperadoes. And at first it didn’t 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 half—from the second Festival in 1954 until 1968 when they came first—all because their captain Neville Jules couldn’t tolerate the adjudicators’ unpredictability in the early days of the Festival.

It started in the first 1952 Festival with the upset victory of Boys Town. Jules, who now lives in New York, was Trinidad All Stars’ main man at the time. As captain of the band, he 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 hadn’t 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 wasn’t difficult insofar as Jules was concerned. He’d always preferred orchestration to individual improvisation and would discourage men such as Claytis Ali—the Mighty Dougla—from showing off his ping pong skills. “It’s a band you have,” he says in explanation. And as the time drew nearer, he began drilling the band, finally not going

All Stars versus All Stars

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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 solo-ing,” 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 constellation—Southern All Stars—had 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 they’d 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 TASPO, and he and the other youngster, Anthony Williams, learnt the most from 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 Maker’s 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 o’clock 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 Stephens’ mother in for free. As they argued outside, Theo Stephens insisting his band wasn’t going to perform if his mother couldn’t enter, the other stars arrived: Trinidad All Stars. And their 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


Handel’s “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. He’d 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 Belmont’s 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 great—and appropriate—compliment to Jules.

Ahhh! murmured the crowd as the players began to celebrate backstage.But the adjudicator was Dr Herbert Wiseman, for Northcote didn’t 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.


t was a glaring omission that the Eighth City Day Anniversary in San Fernando focused mainly on business or urban planning, and left out the city’s 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 city’s cultural

history while perusing Belgrove’s 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 couldn’t 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 couldn’t reply at all,” recalled Belgrove. “He say in Indian, ‘Go on you dutty dog—you 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 couldn’t answer. I hit him the same thing: ‘Go on, you dutty dog.’”

Back to Bataan

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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 King’s Wharf.

Belgrove was nine years old and Nickerdee eight when they saw RAF come out for the 1940 New Year’s 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 sweet drinks.

“Tarzan was a tall fella, a fisherman,” Nickerdee said, laughing as he related Tarzan’s 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 Nickerdee’s aunt’s yard that the elegant cuff boom player Rudolf Xavier—a trade unionist who was shot in the 1937 Butler Riots—formed Coffee Street’s first band, the short-lived Buckingham Boys, in 1942. But Nickerdee’s 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” David—whom Nickerdee called “a minister of ignorance”—destroyed all the pans one day in a rage.

Pepe’s lover had a habit of using The Snow’s 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 they’d 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 Belgrove’s band, Bataan, which wasn’t 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 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 that’s how the name stick.”

Next to Bataan’s panyard lived one Mr Forde, an OWTU man who helped many of Bataan’s 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 Madeleine—a 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 pretty—knee 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 mas—Bataan didn’t play mas—but 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 he’s trying to acquire a second-hand drum kit.


lthough 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 Alexander’s 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 wasn’t 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.

“That’s why I always say pan is a gift from God,” surmises Jones. “Hamil couldn’t do that by himself—he never used to go to school, but he get it through his mother who was always praying.”

Hamil’s inspired vision, as Jones recalls it, wasn’t 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.

A man for all bands

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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 skeptical about it when in the mid-thirties as they were liming at their spot on Charlotte Street, Hamil said contemplatively 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 couldn’t 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 Hamil’s 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 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 didn’t have no name, it wasn’t 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 betraying him with his lady friend Lilly. Sagiator was a powerful man, and he bested Stowe easily, but Stowe wasn’t 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 didn’t want any of the noisy pans in the Hell Yard bamboo band. “The people couldn’t sing,” explains Jones. “Nobody would hear you because the pan was so loud, and Sarge say: no, the revellers can’t sing the lavway.”

It was then that the Newtown youths broke away and decided to do their own thing, thus creating the famous Alexander’s 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 wasn’t 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 law’s 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 arrest—consecutively.

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

Lieutenant Griffith taught a band to play

ctually, it was yesterday. On July 26, 1951, the 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 Trinidad 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.

A


“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?” skeptics 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’m 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 rumba, 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 2-cello, 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, and 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 Edinborough, 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 in 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 father’s family to build a house on a little end of the many acres of Pacheco

land, they refused and the young Pacheco renounced his father’s name and adopted his mother’s: Forde.

Ah, but on that side of his family, too, blood ran thinner than water, and when his mother died during one of Wilbert’s 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 one big family of the hill known as Laventille.

If everyone is familiar with the Desperadoes, few know about Wilbert, either Pacheco or Forde. And, perhaps significantly, to evoke that flicker of recognition you’d 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 he’d hang around the older men who allowed him to go cut bamboo for the side which tumbled down from the Hill every J’ouvert 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 community-based 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 (Robbie’s 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 bands—two of the most fearsome fighting machines—which 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 wasn’t 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 weren’t to hot on the pans, they concentrated on mas anyway, Talkative organising the masqueraders and Be-eh doing the designs for the band’s head mas. Then he moved from sailors to design war mas: Sands of Iwojima, 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 Noah’s 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 Belmont’s 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, the great St James steelband

ounger people mightn’t 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, and 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 can’t explain the origins of “lawa,” perhaps it derives from the old batonnier’s

Y


boast, even if the Big Yard didn’t have stick fighting: I, lawa (French, “le roi”—the king) “with stick, with fight, with woman, with dance, with song, with drum, with everything.”

Despite his grandmother’s 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 Alexander’s Ragtime Band.

“Even though these were wayward guys, they never encouraged little boys around their yard—you had to keep a distance,” says Butcher. “It was something to see them and hear them, they used to sound great: they’d 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 the place where the fellas limed down by the water’s edge where the fishermen moored their boats continued to be called The Shores of Tripoli much longer.

“The pans used to stay under Joe Crick’s mother’s 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 Butcher’s father was indulgent, Tripoli’s captain, Joe Crick—Joseph Christopher—wasn’t. “He was drastic,” is how Butcher describes the authoritarian leadership style of the man who, for example, banned Granville Sealey, the band’s main tuner and leading ping pong player, for 99 years because of a minor argument. “The ban didn’t 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 Crick’s 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 wasn’t 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 Crick’s 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 didn’t know this and they used to grumble and they leave the band.”

Butcher’s instrument was, first, the boom—the 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 didn’t 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 Roach’s 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 Sparrow’s “Jean and Dinah.”

By then Butcher, however, was on the way out. After TASPO, steelbands had 3-basses 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 it’s time to step aside and let the younger guys take over.”


studied pan 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 Place—right 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 he’d hang around a bass player named Ralph. “When music bands came to Arima to play in dance halls I used to get a tush—they 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 didn’t know anything about pan at all until I returned in 1962,” he says, perhaps forgetting he’d met men such as Sterling Betancourt in London. Still, he continued writing tunes for steelband and many a pan pioneer those days when they waited anxiously by the radio on Carnival Sunday for Kitch to “send down” a road march from cold England in time for J’ouvert.

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 Spain—Neville 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.

If you play the chords the right way

“I


“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 pan—it was a lower pan than the second pan. We already had the second pan and I didn’t want a pan strumming in the same range so I made it a little lower.”

In those early days, Jules’ cuatro pan (which Philmore “Boots” Davidson copied and gave it the name which stuck—guitar pan) was the lowest tuned pan in the steelband. So it wasn’t mid range, it was the background pan.

“It was before it had bass—you had tenor, second and guitar, and all the rest was dudup, biscuit drum and stuff like that,” says Jules.

That situation didn’t 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 Jules’ 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 they’re playing Kitch’s “Guitar Pan” for Panorama they’ll 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 pans—a lot has to do with how you voice the chords between them,” explains Bartholomew. A full musical chord 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: that’s what we have to do in Panazz because it’s such a small side.”

Playing double guitar for Panazz and triple guitar for All Stars, Bartholomew says that it’s an easy pan to learn—especially 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 pan’s 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 there’s an emptiness in the arrangement, but if a tenor or a bass player can’t make 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.


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 island wide 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 band—they 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 boom—a biscuit drum tuned to provide the band with a bass. His younger brother Noel “Nooksin” Sampson was beating a baylay—a four-note caustic soda drum with a slightly higher range than the tune boom. Butcher’s 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 that—don’t lend nobody, it too difficult to tune!” Roach instructed Addawell, handing him the tune boom he’d 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.)

The Sampsons of Sun Valley

“A


“Sonny Roach put in five notes on a Sunrise biscuit pan and we called it tune boom—I 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 River—it’s 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 the pioneers of pan in north St James long before Roach. 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 they’d go peep at the seminal Alexander’s Ragtime Band. And when in 1938 they met Frankie Soyer and other Newtown youths who’d also moved to St James, the gang decided to bring out a band in the west too. “We had the most appropriate yard and it’s so the whole thing start with a tarpaulin what we get from a shop,” recalls Nooksin. “That come like we tent—we 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 J’ouvert. “We had them little small pan with the bamboo,” says Nooksin. “We hadn’t 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 Sampson—Miss Hetty to the youths—didn’t 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 Lord’s service but Fr Currant even carried Addawell, who rang the church bell morning, noon and night, to serve in high mass at St Theresa’s. 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 church—you is Mary?”

On one occasion, however, he was able to use his knowledge of church to the benefit of the youths. The boys wanted to go to the cinema, Rialto, but 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’s son, and 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 scrunter’s burlap mas in 1946: St James Sufferers.

Mayers’ 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 who’d been hanging around Harlem Nightingales—Sonny 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 island wide 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.

Roach’s 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, they were coasting a Shango rhythm “Ogun la la olaylay,” when they bounced up Belle Vue’s Five Graves to Cairo at the bottom of Long Circular Road. As with the Tripoli episode, Sun Valley passed by and all Cairo’s 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 D’Abadie—we run from Arima to D’Abadie. 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 band under the leadership of Roy Harper, who’d learned to tune under Roach. The new band’s 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 hard—something not allowed in Sun Valley’s glory days.

“Look how the band change,” Roach’s 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.


ven 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 Williams’ 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 Belmont—Julian “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. “They’d 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 days—a “street of chance,” 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 couldn’t see the yard from his home.

One day a neighbour visited his grandmother. Williams, around 14 now, was doing blacksmith work in his stepfather’s shop nearby, and the lady recognised him. “He does do blacksmith work, too?” she said.

The ping pongs of Pearl Harbour

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The grandmother, pleased, pointed out the boy was talented.“Yes,” agreed her guest. “And he’s the best beater in the yard, too.”To Williams’ 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 Williams got his hands on a proper ping pong and learned to tune. Here’s 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 Joseph’s 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 weren’t 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 thousand—it 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 didn’t know but she’d 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 band—Mucurapo 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 couldn’t make the grade. Williams and


two others left to join Zola’s 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t up to the tunes Williams had chosen: Perez Prado’s “Granada Mambo,” and “Gold and Silver Waltz.” Free French was still suffering from Stephens’ 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 it—too 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

ambi 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 up market side of Belmont bounded by the Circular. As a youth he’d go look at the stick fighting by Yeates rum shop 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 it—I did that,” he says. “That was before the war.”

Their band, which came to call itself Rising Sun—the Japanese emblem—was 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 couldn’t stop the Carnival,” says Maximin. “It’s when they start to share licks everybody start to run.”

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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 the house, some in the 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 boys—sharp 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 they’d 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 the best—Desperadoes, Red Army, Tokyo, Casablanca—and if Maximin’s many bus heads can’t 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 the 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 couldn’t last and in the forties the Warner’s 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 Maximin and his brothers Monty, Tony, Tyrone Mike and Rawle went into a college boys side named Stromboli. Valmond and Neil Jones were in that side as well. 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, Maximin’s brother Mike sponsoring Sunland, then 5th Dimension—both the band and the football team—then Am Boys. And as for Maximin, he says, “The steelband built my character. And the street experience, well it’s helped me with Rebirth House because there I have to deal with people from the streets.”


When the Jack was king

n 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

he’s better know to the steelband world as Cobo Jack.Not only was he one of Mannette’s 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 learning to play. “When I look back now it’s more amazing what he was doing then. He really motivated me to try to improvise, he was the father of improvisation.”

Jack didn’t begin as an Invaders man, though. Born on Christmas Day, 1934, Jack’s 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 wasn’t 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 island wide 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.

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“The way the community was, everybody knew everybody and ‘Chick Macgrew’ asked my parents,” says Jack. “It was during the war when they didn’t have Carnival. There was only a Discovery parade.”

Hellzapoppin didn’t last too long, and Jack began moving to different houses, staying a while in St Vincent Street, and in Bournes Road. “My father lived in Bournes Road and up there I used to listen to Sun Valley but I couldn’t play because he didn’t like steelband,” says Jack.

Moving back into Woodbrook in Gallus Street, Jack and some youths decided to form a little band. That was in the late Forties. “We begged for pans. Invaders wanted to charge us 36 cents a note but we couldn’t 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 [Renegades captain, Stephen “Goldteeth” Nicholson] ask me to try to make a tenor pan. I got a good B note,” he says.

That didn’t 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 band’s 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 didn’t 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.


y 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 she’d 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 riot—which they did perhaps more than any other band in the forties—Sonny made sure to walk with his slim, sharp, stiletto-like shoemaker’s knife.

A Daisy amongst the thorns

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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 Payne’s 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 wasn’t 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 she’d borrow this toy and practice

whatever she’d heard him playing. She didn’t care if Sonny heard, though—it wasn’t his pan—so he knew. And one Saturday Sonny carried his little sister, without their mother’s knowledge, to Casablanca’s 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 didn’t 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 he’d 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-coordinated 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 sister—a lot depended on her—and 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 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 she’d put her money under. “It’s 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 wasn’t really a panman. She’d 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 couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 James’ 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 couldn’t let she see me.”

As before, she’d 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, hadn’t 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 frightened—good 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, he’d 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

lfred “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 he’d see the Cobo Town tamboo bamboo players.

“From lunch they’d 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.”

Mayers’ father kept his sons away from the Cobo Town bamboo yard when there was stick fighting, though, and besides, the young Sack wasn’t keen on it anyway.

“Every Saturday used to have bamboo and stick fighting,” he says, admitting, “It used to be nice but the bussin of the head—I didn’t like to see that.”

He wasn’t 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. “It’s a really

noisy thing, and in those days the more noise you make the better because it’s the further away from you people will hear and they will come. But I couldn’t take it. This thing was terrible and I didn’t used to go nowhere near it.”

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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, Sack’s 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 play—we couldn’t come on the street at all, you had to get that written permission from the police,” he explains. “It didn’t have no tuning. If you feel to play bass you walk with your biscuit drum. Some people come with them sweet-oil tin—O 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 don’t 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 didn’t 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,” she’d intercede for the son who’d 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 didn’t 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 island wide steelband competition was held later in 1946 at the Mucurapo Stadium (where Fatima College is now), Sack didn’t try to get into the Red Army stage side, even though he was good on the ping pong.

“I was scared to go and play—I 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 couldn’t 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 band—which 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 passed by the yard and couldn’t 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 Army’s 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 Sack’s 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 Mary’s College boys like Ernest Fereira and Curtis Pierre.

“They used to come in the yard when we practising and they’d come and stand up by me because I’d 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 Theatre’s 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

hese days, or indeed any of the past 40 years, if you looked in Starlift’s engine room, day or night, you’d see a tall dark man beating iron. His name is Carlton Drayton, but he’s 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 bugles—Casablanca, Hill 60, Tokyo, Red Army and Fascinators. Desperadoes didn’t 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 McGrew—Ulric Springer was his real name.”

That was 1946, when Maifan was ten and Springer won a bicycle in the first island wide 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

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were rudimentary in the extreme—eight notes on a ping pong, two on a dudup—the iron, a car brake hub, was there already, and it would remain almost unchanged to the present.

“Gerald Gittens used to beat that,” says Maifan. “I’d be amazed at how he could do that. It looked so difficult, he beating and in time. It was very strenuous.”

He didn’t 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 boom—the biscuit drum with a few notes that was the bass in the band. But pan was soon to change, when Lt Nathaniel Griffiths, an accomplished musician from the St Lucia police band, was chosen to take charge of 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 Griffiths’ 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 that—that 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 he’d left Invaders in 1956 to help out a tiny new band called Starlift.

“It was about seven of them in Eugene Peter’s 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 weren’t. They’d joined forces with another small band, Saigon, and had organised to get some more pans from yet another small band, Starland. “That was Brian Griffith’s 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 Starlift—all the rest was Chinese, French Creoles, like Silver Stars.”

Monday they played “Rock Around the Clock” and Tuesday “Undersea Kingdom,” but their rhythm section wasn’t 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 bell—All 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 west—they 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 Holman’s 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 else’s 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, heis 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

n 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 he’d 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 MacLean’s music band Broadway Syncopators,” Bigger explains. “We used to go down by the sea and practice to not disturb anybody. It didn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t

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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 flour bag 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 weren’t any good, though, and the bottoms began bursting off. Pans weren’t 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 don’t 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 wrestle—he showed me all the points on the human body—but 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 Vincent’s grandmother had a room where we used to lime after she died. We called it Hatter’s Castle, after a horror picture,” says Bigger. “So we called the band Broadway Hatters.”

Bigger was playing bass for Hatters on J’ouvert, but once that was over he concentrated on making the band’s mas, putting the decorations on hundreds of naval costumes.

All the while Bigger was also involved in dancing—he came third in an island wide dancing competition in 1946—and 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 Braithwaite 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 they’d 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.


Blanca’s bugle boy

nce someone bet Kendolph “Cokey” Mason a bottle of scotch that steelband never had bugles.

“Come by me,” Mason said. “I’ll show you something.”It was a foregone conclusion, for not only was Mason a bugler for the band with the

greatest bugle side—Casablanca–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 band—about seven of them and two trumpet-bugles,” recalled Mason, calling to mind one of the band’s pioneers. “I don’t 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 country’s 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 didn’t play mas but they would give me money to play,” said Mason. “So even though I was an acolyte in the church, it wasn’t no problem to have the pans under my house.”

It wasn’t 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, 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 Chamberlain—he was tall, big—blasting the bugle.”

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“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, Tripoli’s Joe Crick carried a bugle with his admiral’s 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, it’s 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 base—the bigger trumpet-bugles.

These instruments came into the steelband movement when panmen began to aspire to playing melodies but their lead ping pongs couldn’t yet make the grade: they had too few notes and, besides, they weren’t 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 he’d 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 J’ouvert 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 mas—Casablanca once played Dante’s Inferno and Satan’s Kingdom—which Mason became known for, and which he played until 2004.

“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 half-scale 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, king of the flagmen

ow 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 wasn’t 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 Mischievous, through the more benign influence of his mother’s mother, Alphonsine 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, it’s 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 head—I 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

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didn’t 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 lady’s face with this hand it was so hard. I used to stick pins in it and they’d stand up.”

Calloused hands didn’t 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 vehicle’s 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 competition—I’ll 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 rail—goodbye!” 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 flag-waving which steelbands began in earnest at the end of the Second World War. “It was on VE 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 enough—six foot for the pole, the cloth just under a yard wide—anything 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; that’s 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 fall—no 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.”

It’s an art hardly seen today—only perhaps in Exodus or Invaders. But even in his era there weren’t many whom Arthur Tramcar felt were 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 here—you 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. Barker’s 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 Corby’s historical band from Belle Eau Road but his Carnival days were effectively over. “Rising Sun was unlucky—other 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 flag-wavers in steelband history.


Milton Lyons, pride of Marabella

f 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 Casablanca’s 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.”

They’d 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 don’t 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 one—from school he coulda sing and was taking some music lessons, piano or guitar. He wasn’t 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.”

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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 they’d 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 Pointe-a-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 weren’t at all warlike like Port of Spain panmen, though, and indeed their parents and other village elders such as one Mr Griffith—an accomplished mouth organist and singer—managed 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 didn’t 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 prone—a 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 wasn’t 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 Sonny’s new wife. “Hug him in the night and tell him he cyar let me down like that,” he implored.

Nothing worked. But Milton reckoned Sonny’s loss would have weakened the band more than Fitzroy’s, 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 Atwell’s “Saronata.”

Southern Marines wasn’t 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 band’s matriarch with whom he’d lived all his life, died. Depressed, Milton felt he couldn’t cope and he passed leadership to the band’s present captain Michael “Scobie” Joseph.


The Wolf at the crossroads

ell’s 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, dustbin—anything 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 can’t say. He summons Ralph French, who lives in the same compound and was also in Hell’s 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.

Hell’s Kitchen (an early Tunapuna band had the same name) was taken from a film, says French. King’s 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, someone ventured. “No,” said French, “’Affair in Trinidad’ with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth.” He disappeared to get proof and King continued his narrative.

“Hell’s 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.

King’s father liked his involvement in steelband, even though he’d sent him to music classes before the war. “Every evening my old man wind up a thing that does go tick-tock and all the children have to sing: ‘White sand and grey sand,’” recalls King. When steelband

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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 hadn’t 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 Savannah—it had fair and dance after in the Princes Building—and 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 Street—Stone 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 they’d use cocoyea stems on which were stuck tiny, round green mangos.

“Then take any old bowl—‘tensil and all we used—and put about six layers of brown shop-kite paper and soft breadfruit across the top,” he says. “We also used to take OK keg butter—salt butter pans—and stretch motor car tube over it. I always liked percussion.”

Cole’s introduction to real pan, however, was from Arthur Joseph—popularly known as Short Arthur—living 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 gatka—the Indian form of stick fighting 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 I’d 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 thieving pans from all about.”

Crossroads was formed around 1950 in Short Arthur’s yard but the neighbours complained of the noise, so they moved to Wolf King’s yard in Quamina Street.

By then King was a good tuner and a good tenor player and so he was invited to practice with TASPO. His wife had recently given birth, however, so he didn’t 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 that’s 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t play pan but he made the mas,” says King. “He’d use pitch oil tin instead of copper to make the helmets of the Toltec Warriors.” Another year they dug up the pauper’s cemetery to retrieve the skulls for their costumes.

Then King started to arrange for them, drawing on what he’d 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 didn’t 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 they’d 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, Scaramouche—they 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 James—that 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 Cito’s 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, a voice of the past

t’s well known in this country that a man’s mouth can get him into trouble, and of none is this more true than of Rudolph Xavier, one of Trinidad’s 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

mother’s seven boys and one girl. As an infant he moved 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 flour bag jail clothes, in their belt every one have an enamel or galvanize cup, and they carrying tools—shovel, pickaxe, crowbar, sledge hammer—marching from the Royal Gaol to the quarry.”

He couldn’t have guessed how close he’d 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.

As a teenager Xavier moved to San Fernando 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 brother’s 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

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spot where the trucks dropped them.” They’d 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-mountainResponse: High land deyCall: She gone for yellow plantainResponse: High land deyCall: Hooray, Miss MaryResponse: High land deyCall: What you going to cook today?

There were songs to drag sheets by, shorter ones to lift rigs by, staccato spoken call-responses for threading pipes—every 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 I’d 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 he’d 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 it was the Thirties by then and he was living on Coffee Street, 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 didn’t care if he died, and when he died to bury his clothes. Xavier took the exclamation and turned it into the chant which would become the most famous:

I don’t want no one to wear me clothesWhen ah dead bury me clothesNot even me brother must wear me clothes

Today he isn’t 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. “Pointe-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 moneyHooray, hurrah!Monday morning give we we moneyHooray, 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 rioters—one count for each street—and eventually sentenced by a magistrate to three months hard labour.

Xavier didn’t 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, I’m leaving homeI’m going to take a chance on the battle zone(repeat)


I can’t remain in La TrinityI mean for Hitler to reign king in GermanyGirl, I’m going to fly to AmericaDarling, I’m 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 didn’t keep the pans by his Toll Gate bamboo yard, however, but at his bachelor apartment in Coffee Street—a place noticeable for its neatness and the long row of potted palms he’d 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 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.


Hercules in the crossfire

teelband, 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 were more skeptical 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 Benedict’s at the time (now Presentation College). “As for taking a knock, I couldn’t do that—if somebody see me knocking tamboo bamboo and tell my mother, all now my tail red. My mother a nurse and I beating tamboo bamboo—you 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

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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 dudup because it was the easiest thing to play, that’s all.”

Liming with youths such as the Theodore brothers “Shark-bite” and “Vatican,” Emmanuel Camps, Granville Sealey, Sam and Gandhi Boodhoo, Sterling Betancourt, Hercules fell into the outcast world of pan, and that is where VE 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 noise—steelband coming,” he recalls. He’d set out that morning with six cents and already had won nearly two dollars. “I say that’s 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 band’s 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 leader’s famous discipline. “Any young fella coulda learn from Joe—self-reliance, how to deal with manhood, he was a true leader.”

And yet, just as Hercules’ love and respect for his stern mother didn’t stop him from breaking away once he got the chance, so too his admiration for Joe Crick didn’t stop Hercules from joining the bunch of young men who broke away in 1949 because they couldn’t bear the band’s 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 TASPO and stayed there. Then, on Coronation Day, 1953, a foreigner, one Mr O’Connor, 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 we—he say bass don’t 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 J’ouvert morning of their greatest musical achievement—bettering 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 Beethoven’s “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 he’d smashed a bottle in a player’s face for querying the $15 Hercules was paid as a non-panman. 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 skullduggery 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 Nathaniel’s 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.


Garvey’s ghost

hatever Pan Trinbago’s problems today–and they are as wide as they are deep–there’s 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 in August 1999 by Pan Trinbago for his contribution to the steelband movement, was a 30-year-old member of Crusaders steelband in St Paul’s 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);

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Charles Espinet (Folklore Society); Bertie Thompson (Colts); Mortiner Mitchell (Friendly Societies); Beryl McBurnie (Little Carib Theatre).

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 rum shop. 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, Casablanca’s Oscar Pile Vice-President. Crusaders’ captain John Slater, and Hill 60’s captain Patcheye Pacho’t, were there too. But for some unknown reason Blake’s Association never took off.

Gollop’s suggestion that night in the Public Library in favour of an organisation wasn’t a repeat of Blake’s 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 Garvey’s 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 Council’s Health Committee.

Accordingly, Gollop’s 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 La Bastide from Hill 60. “I was standing in a strategic position—I will be truthful with you—I 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 don’t 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 don’t 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, Casablanca’s Nathaniel 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, I’ve 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.


Hellzapoppin’s secret weapon

he offspring of the great progenitor bands of Gonzales, Newtown and Hell Yard are 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 Chinese-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, Lavina’s son, and when he carrying his nephew he was Charlie Chan’s 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 out—you 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 wasn’t easy—when 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 Casablanca’s Art de Couteau, eventually led him out of the steelband movement.

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“Around 1942 the elder fellas phased out and the type of thing coming in with steelband—jersey with print, fighting—that 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 Hellzapoppin—another movie name—and 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 sland-wide steelband competition in 1946.

The venue was the Mucurapo boxing stadium, located where Fatima College now stands, but Hellzapoppin wasn’t 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 we’d 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 he’d tuned from a CGA pan.

In those days the ping pong was rested on the seated player’s 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 hadn’t 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 couldn’t talk—everybody 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 didn’t come on the road, they didn’t 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 he’s played ever since.


Days and nights in the boom town

eville Jules always admits it: the first time he saw someone 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 him—that come like a big joke, the theatre cracking up laughing at that man. Three months later it’s everybody using that.”

Well, in Kenrick “Daba” Thomas’ marvelous, 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. “Kenrick’s father was in that group,” says Wiltshire. “They called theyself Boys from the Centre and on excursion they’d be dressed in raja shirt and flannel pants—real 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 he’d 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 they’d always ask him to play that steelband lavway “Alan Ladd, this gun for hire.” Hence the additional nickname, Ladd.

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It’s not surprising, then, that Wiltshire became involved in the Tacarigua’s 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” Thomas—a 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. Wiltshire’s parents disapproved strongly, for the family was a respectable one in the neighbourhood, but the boy persisted.

Notwithstanding Wiltshire’s 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” Skeete’s palais that the youths were introduced to state-of-the-art pan. The palais was next door to Zorro Thomas’ 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 doesn’t 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 Wiltshire’s account. “We cut it and heat it and pound it with a hammer—no grooving—and 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 members—yellow 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 Wiltshire’s musical flair and Cyril Guy’s 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 Thomas—Zoro’s sister—and Eva John. This early presence of the fairer sex didn’t 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 Arouca’s Wake Island steelband.

Boom Town’s 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 didn’t come to fight so I say it’s better we go home and by 2.30 we were back in Tacarigua. But the fellas say they eh taking that.”

The excursion buses 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 ir with bottles. Some fellas came out of the bus to fight and they were chased away so they couldn’t 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.

The loss of the bugle was bitterly resented by band members and at a competition in Tunapuna Cyril Guy 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 Blanca’s 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 cane field tracks, all the way to Tacarigua. It was due to that incident Cyril Guy also got the nickname that stuck with him ever since, Snatcher.

“Boy,” Penco later commended him, “You is a real snatcher.”Guy’s 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 Hell’s 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.”

Wiltshire’s 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, Tacarigua’s boom fizzled out, and all was left was for Snatcher to move to Arima where he joined Atomic.


Queen of the steelbands

ot many women played pan in the early days, a mere handful, but don’t 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 they’d 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 sagga girl—fancy 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

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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 o’clock, fus’ stone pelting,” says

Muriel. “That was when it had gang fight between Desperadoes and Renegades—you 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 White’s 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 around gambling 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 gate—I 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 Spain’s 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

t’s 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 discovered—he was a joiner—he 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 they’d moved from Lennus Simms’ tamboo bamboo band in Basilon Street, to Ethelbert Serrette’s 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 quarry’s 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, wasn’t a Basilonian, though, but rather hailed from La Cour Harpe, and when I spoke to him last month, he told a very different story.

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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.

“One 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 here—nobody 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 Ako’s 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, a still 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 band—we sat down in Basilon Street to form our own band. East Side Kids came up and joined with us and formed one band—that was the end of East Side Kids.”

It wasn’t 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 Ohio’s destruction, to form a band.

“Renegades form under a house in Lubin Lane—Herman 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 Baird—he was the biggest one—but 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 kiln—I 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 didn’t 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

ld 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 Valley’s

Tony “Muffman” Williams in St James and Boom Town’s 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.

Ancil was born in March 1926 in Chaguanas, grew up there, lived there as an adult, and is now a bishop there 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 watch—you 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.

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“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 notes—I 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 note—six inches. Then quarter inch smaller, and so on.”

They didn’t stray far a field, though. “We never went in Port of Spain—we was fraid. Every time you turn in Port of Spain it’s fight, so we was never eager to go,” he says. “We always remain in County Caroni—Couva, Longdenville Couva. There was bands there but they didn’t 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 mother’s six children who’d 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 man’s 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 man’s eyes were closed and his neck was loose. He

called his mother: “Grandpa sleeping.”When Phillip’s 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 fight—I didn’t 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 Mary’s Junction and police had locked up the whole side. “Good thing you wasn’t there,” said Phillip’s wife. He replied, “Anytime they want to fight I move out—who get lock up it’s 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 he’d 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 a field as Germany and England.


Requiem for Wake Island

ome 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 Arouca’s 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 Mary’s and had begun working in Port of Spain as a public servant towards the end of the war, when he got interested in pan. He’d 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 out—not sink them in—and then make some indentations to make the notes.”

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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 didn’t 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 bugles—the 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 didn’t 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 shouldn’t 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 wasn’t 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

rom his full head of hair and the alertness of his mind and body, you wouldn’t think Hugo Besson has trod this earth for 73 years. And he hasn’t only preserved himself beyond the allotted 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 you’d only see them when they’ve fallen from the trees and are still lying around. Most of us know them once they’ve been collected for sale the husk is removed. However, by the time Besson is finished carving them and this friend George Hinds has painted them, they’ve become grotesque monkeys in different poses, many sitting atop a small cylindrical penny bank. Some are eating watermelon, 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 Besson’s cow horns derive their weirdness 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 weirdness 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

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just a prejudice because we see nothing weird about leather goods or tortoise shell goods. “Nobody don’t see when I’m 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 packed—a 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 grandmother’s 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 school—I was a street child,” he sighs, recalling how he hung around the demimondaine—the men who brought out the district tamboo bamboo band, the stick fighters, 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 they’d send him up a tree to sentry for police. Other times he’d go out with some of them on the bum boats—small craft they’d row out to the passenger liners anchored in the gulf—that was before the harbour was dredged to accommodate them—to peddle goods to the tourists. Besson stayed in the bum boat while the men went aboard the liner. If they wanted more stocks they’d lower a rope and he’d send it up. For that he got a small cut of the day’s 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 he’d 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 we 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 badjohn 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 Cairo’s genesis. “It didn’t have no name, it was after the war I give it the name.”

By the late forties he’d 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 he’d 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 consequences—and 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 he’s managed to make the best of a bad hand life has dealt him, and his only complaint is that he still doesn’t collect a pension—neither from the docks where he sweated for over 20 years, nor from the government—and that Pan Trinbago hasn’t 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 can’t even fix my glasses.”


Mr Pamp and the sound of steel

y 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 music—purposely 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 he’s convinced must be coming from a symphonic orchestra, so Kitchener points out that it’s a steelband he’s 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 Kitchener’s 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 Aldwyn’s father, who wasn’t 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 Pamp’s smithy, as probably in Mr Horne’s and Mr Griffiths’ and other such institutions throughout the island, the rhythms of iron drew a crowd.

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“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-tangalang—that was sweet music.”

Kitchener’s parents weren’t 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,” she’d 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, Kitch’s brother Rupert inherited that ability and once placed second in a whistling competition.

It wasn’t 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 father’s 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 isn’t 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 farm’s iron forge.

“The Native world was drawn to the forge by its song,” observed Dinesen. “The treble, sprightly, monotonous, and surprising rhythm of the blacksmith’s work has a mythical force. It is so virile that it appeals to and melts the women’s 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 blacksmith’s) 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 blacksmith’s 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 he’d ask for a “tush” on the bass. He even formed a little band and they’d 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 instrumentation—you 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 Kitchener’s 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 Pan”—it’s 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

t’s 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 Willie’s 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 can’t say for sure, even though despite his 85 years he has a memory as sharp as an elephant’s. By 1937, however, he’s 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 Harriot—Molly Ahye’s 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 didn’t 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 weren’t 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. What’s worse, if you tried to get a louder sound and beat it harder, chances are it would break.

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Killey’s 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 splayed-foot 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 Willie’s yard, going up Red Hill to cut bamboo when Carnival came around, with the “First Eleven”—men 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 couldn’t get their act together to go as a group for the bamboo.

“How I 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 aren’t playing Carnival and

then at the last minute withdrawal symptoms prove too strong 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 Willie’s yard where they limed and perhaps he recalled his cousin’s 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 strip 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 he’s 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 can’t hear your band at all—that is the kudos, that’s a feather in my cap, that when I pass you I can’t hear


you at all. It’s 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 they’d chosen a name: the Gonzales Rhythm Makers. In 1944 the band was revived for a lecture/demonstration given by Edric Connor at the Bishop’s 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

he 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.

Years later, Batson himself told me of Hamil—not 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 Hamil’s 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 Pantin’s Bakery in Prince Street. Accordingly, he grew up where most Port of Spain Chinese lived—in 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, and now lives in Diego Martin.

“Sagiator and his brothers—the Draytons—was there, and it had ‘Demsee,’ ‘Tall Black’ and ‘Short Black,’ ‘Lulie’ and Bruce— ‘Dr Rat’s’ 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 too—Tom Keane, Nigger, Brown Boy, Fitzgerald, Matura, Hamil—not me, another one—and they used to have the prostitutes with them.”

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Words tumble out of Hamil as if they’d 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 rum shop 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 badKnowing that they fought for a pack of card.But the pelting of the bottle and the throwing of the stoneThey 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 back—it had a piece of steel in it what cut me,” he says. “I eh go to no doctor, I take cobweb and cocoa—young cocoa what I scrape—and 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 couldn’t come down Charlotte Street. They had to pass the other way around to go to the market, they couldn’t 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. That’s all—only two notes I did have. It was sounding very


nice but they didn’t want to hear: when you is a floor member no character doesn’t want to hear you.”

For J’ouvert that year—it was 1939—the Woodford Street band Alexander’s 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 man—with 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 Alexander’s 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 from the Dead End Kids

here was always a togetherness on the Hill, recalls Ricardo “Breakadoor” Joseph—ever since the days of tamboo bamboo when the huge, extended Bowen family brought out the J’ouvert band from 19 Laventille Road.

“It was a set of bush in the road when the band coming down,” he says. “From J’ouvert morning we played mas right through, the same mas—trees 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 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, and it was then that Joseph and his friends decided to form their own steelband. 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 “Sing-co” John, Brooks Banfield, Wilbert “Be-eh” Pacheco, Donald “Jit” Steadman and Wilfred “Talkative” Harrison—a group who limed together. Laventillians in those days rarely came into town singly. Indeed, those living higher up didn’t come into town at all, except on Carnival day.

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“When we going in town to cinema it was a group, not one by one,” says Joseph. “We didn’t knock about town by weself. We always figured nobody in town didn’t like Laventille people.”

Of the group, Jit and Talkative were the slightly older ones and they weren’t 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 knowledge—where to go and where not to go, what is right and what is wrong,” recalls Joseph. “He was quiet but very dangerous.”

The band hadn’t a yard yet, but Laventillians didn’t 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 didn’t mind helping the youths out. After all, the Dead End Kids, for all their combative name, didn’t 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.

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 wasn’t 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. “Don’t run—we 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 John—he wasn’t 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 Minister’s 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 Curvan’s dance band.

By then Joseph was out of it, however. A biscuit drum and two-note bass player, he’d 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

t 69 years of age, Roy Harper can still be heard playing with Pan Vibes every Monday night at the Trinidad Hilton, and you’d 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 Lucknow Street in St James—Blue 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 stick fighting close by in Ranjit Kumar Street, but Harper hardly got to see it, being at the time under his mother’s jurisdiction.

“As a little fella,” he explains, “you could open a little part between the coconut branch and peep but if they see you they give you one cut arse and send you home. Sometimes you sitting here—Wap! Across your back and you can’t complain because you go get it when you reach home too.”

And, as he emphasises, his mother didn’t eat sorf. Still, on VE 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 didn’t 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 it’s licks. They didn’t carry you in courts, they just used to carry you in the

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station and lock you up, give you a cuttail 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 wasn’t too involved, until he dropped by the panyard one night when the band was rehearsing for the first Island wide 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 that’s how Harper got on the band’s stage side. On the night of the competition Harper borrowed his older brother’s 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 dog’s throat so they could get the animal’s 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 didn’t 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 Polydor’s Shango yard, taking with him the band’s 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 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 captain—I could play and I send a man. I’m the person who picked Tony Williams to go TASPO.”

After Williams returned from Britain, a friction developed between him and Harper, until Harper, who’d learnt both to tune and to be ignorant from Roach, decided one Las’ Lap to leave North Stars. “I take up the pan and throw them in the St James river and walk away,” he says. “That’s 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 couldn’t 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 along with him.

Starniks didn’t last long, and Harper joined Curtis Pierre’s 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

hy they don’t 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. “He’d 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 we—my mother married to Spree’s 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 else’s 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 war’s 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.”

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Those were days when the John John band had now got its name from a movie they’d seen in the 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 man’s money and buy paint for the caustic soda drums they’d stolen from the soap factory near the abattoir.

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 drums—the carbide sound a little finer so it’s 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 there’d 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 wasn’t so much into the pan business as its corollary—fighting. “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 communities—John John and Laventille—until Dr. 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 Dr. 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, then LID and now URP. Bake Nose was by then more into club life, however, having 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 wouldn’t 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 winning—the 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

he story was first told to me a year ago by Joseph Baird, who recalled an incident in the Basilon Street quarry when some Invaders and 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 Baird’s 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 band’s 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, “I’ll 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 Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the seedbed of Invaders. His grandmother didn’t 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 o’clock,” he says, “they have their gate lock.”

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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 they’d 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 Carnival—never on the stage side. His role, rather, was in the band’s other division. “We,” he explains, “was the riot side.”

Invaders was a Woodbrook band, they’d always had the sweetest pans, they enjoyed a following of many prominent middle-class people, and perhaps that’s why they were resented by many town bands. Tokyo beat them up and took Mannette’s state-of-the-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 kite paper. 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t really call it dangerous, and we riot with Casablanca and Renegades and Desperadoes and Tokyo. The only band in town we didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 steelband’s 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 talk to allyou!’ We wasn’t 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 he’d 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 Fowl’s 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

or 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 island-wide 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 can’t go inside we going to get old pans and make noise so they can’t 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 band’s pans, and finding he hadn’t been paid what he felt he’d deserved, he left to open Nob Hill in Kandahar. Again, however, he fell out with the captain after Carnival,

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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 reveilles 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 pan—on instructions from “Bajan Cecil” Ward, Sun Valley’s 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 Island wide 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 instruments—the iron and the bugle which were standard in every steelband—and ran away with the first prize in the first island-wide 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 tune—it getting late—and finish.”

Sun Valley beat a calypso, as did All Stars and Casablanca. Invaders, however, played a rumba—“It’s Magic”—and 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/It’s 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 couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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

o connoisseurs 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, Alexander’s 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 Craigwell’s 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 Alexander’s 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 Warner’s real contribution to the band, for he was the one who’d got the paint pans for them from a dump.

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How did that came about? It all began when he was offered a dollar a week by architect James Howard, and thus left Craigwell’s 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 water harbour was being dredged.

“Those—two tone we used to call them—those 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 that 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—hard—and 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 Alexander’s 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 Alexander’s Ragtime Band’s main iron man.

There in Edward Street was formed Commandoes under Warner’s leadership.In 1946 Carnival was resumed and Commandoes were hired by sailor bandleader

“Diamond” Jim Harding. “Nobody ever know about that—the first steelband ever beat for a sailor band. And those boys what beat with me at the time, they saw the sailor’s nose was made out of cardboard.”

“Cap’n,” 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

he last day I met Henry Pacho’t 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 Pantin’s 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 Pacho’t, who followed Pantin into the grave 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 he’d 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 John—a woman called Miss Thompson,” he had recalled. “When they have

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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 Patcheye’s 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 Day 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 drum—I’ll tell you where to get them and when you get 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 brothers—Raymond, Kenneth and Gerald—joined. One talented Casablanca youth, Andrew “Pan” De La Bastide, 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 man’s 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 Patcheye’s 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 hadn’t budged. “You take Ray, you take Kenneth,” she complained. “Now you coming for Gerald?”

Then, at 3.30 she relented. “Just make sure you bring him back safe,” she said in time for them to run all the way to the station.

In 1951 TASPO went to the Festival of Britain, and De La Bastide was on the team. Weeks later he returned, filled with the musical knowledge he’d 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 bélé 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 knew—and 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 drum—he 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 wasn’t 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 percussion—timbales. With De La Bastide 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 Edwards’ group was there, and drumming for them was Andrew Beddoe—Patcheye’s erstwhile schoolmate, the best in the island.

“Don’t worry,” Patcheye reassured De La Bastide. “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. He’d 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 wouldn’t accept we,” Patcheye told me. “They say it’s 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, “I’ll give you three months grace—you can get married or you’ll 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 didn’t know that.” Instead, he tried to go through the proper channels, and there his past caught up with him. Years before he’d


got in a fight over some gambling winnings and was convicted of wounding. It was said he threw acid on the other man.

When the police report went to the Consulate they turned down Patcheye’s 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 Archbishop’s 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.”

That’s 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” Pacho’t, born November 7, 1921, died June 3, 2000.


The great Bonaparte

owadays 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’s name got a plaque and plenty of pictures in the papers. Of course Ellie Mannette, having been recognised in the US, is now flavour of the month here, where he hasn’t 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 Symphony—a 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 corralled, Bonaparte leans back in a rickety porch chair and explains with an immodest laugh: “My uncle on my mother’s side, Uncle Oscar, was a bad saxophonist. And then his

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brother, Uncle Victor, he used to play guitar or bass. And my grandfather used to play either saxophone or clarinet and violin. That’s 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 musical 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 Mary’s 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 Shango’s 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 country’s 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 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 band (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 shouldn’t 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 Sparrow’s 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 Bonaparte’s 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 that’s been the career of one of Trinidad’s greatest panmen.


The universal cycle of music

Interview with comparative musicologist eugene d novotney, 19 october 2000, cascadia hotel, port of Spain, trinidad.

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.I’d 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 I’d 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 President’s Endowment for the Arts last year — but also because Williams’ achievements were wider than Mannette’s 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, 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.

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It was after five, the sun had fallen behind the hill, and the water was chilly. Sas didn’t complain, but her lips were dark and her fingers wrinkled. Eugene and I agreed to continue the discussion another time, and that’s what we did that morning of Friday October 19, in Eugene’s 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 of 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. That’s 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 Grant’s 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 brazier’s 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 brazier’s 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.”

“He’s 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 smithy’s hammer song.


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 didn’t at a Bob Marley concert, he’d 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 beginning-middle-end structure of European music, and indeed the linear concept of time European civilisation adopted in the nineteenth century.

Time’s 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 Berliner’s 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 Nketia’s The Music of Africa: “He uses the term ‘time-line’ but explains that it’s a circle. It’s 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, 1, 2), 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 in my head since probably I was seven or eight years old and the means of, the practicality of the circle of fifths, the way it’s taught in western music theory, is it’s a tool. It’s 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 couldn’t make a violin to sound good? Well, the reason why it’s so hard to make some instruments is because you’re 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 there’s only one scale that actually is in tune. All the other scales, to our ears right now, would be out of tune, because we’re so used to hearing the artificial adjustments that have been made over time. Does that make sense?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I interrupted.“OK,” he said. “It’s 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 it’s 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.”

“You’d need microtones?”“Absolutely. So what we’ve 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 — there’s only one scale and some people call that the scale based on the note G. There’s 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 wouldn’t 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. That’s 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’ re-harmonisation 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 that’s different from somebody else’s range. So if I play a key, maybe my key to sing in is D, and you’re the pianist, I’d say, “Hey, we’re gonna do ‘Stella by Starlight’ in D.” And then a female vocalist comes in, her voice is different from mine, so she says, “No, I’m in G, ‘Stella by Starlight’ in G.” That pianist has to be able to take D and G and it’s all got to be symmetrical. In nature it doesn’t quite work that way. It’s 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.”

[To simplify the transcription of the conversation, the initials of the speakers are used– EN for Eugene Novotney, KJ for Kim Johnson.]

EN: “That’s 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, we’ll call it the fundamental. As I start spinning it faster, I don’t 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 doesn’t 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 don’t just all of a sudden start getting microtones. Mathematical relationships start appearing: 2:1, 3:2, 4:3.

“The Fibonacci series, which is a very famous mathematical series. It’s an addition process. It goes: 1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13. It’s an infinite series. Fibonacci noticed that it’s the way that rabbits procreate. Very famous mathematical sequence, look it up in a dictionary. There’s a ton of books written about Fibonacci, it’s 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, I’m 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, you’re not going to hear a microtone up. You’re going to hear an octave up. It starts blowing faster again, you’re going to hear a perfect fifth from there. As it goes up and up and up, microtones start existing, yes. They’d be referred to as partials or different steps to the overtones series. That’s just language, it’s 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. That’s just different lengths of hose. If I have a hose one length, of course when I spin it I’m going to get one pitch that maybe we’re 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, I’m 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 didn’t 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 don’t know if I can simplify it more than that without going into deep, deep discussion. Trust me. I’ll send you my dissertation and there’s a bunch of references that you can look up further. There have been countless books written on this topic and they will spell it all out for you. It’s a lot of mathematics and some of it, even with a PhD in music, I’ve 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 it’s hard to conceptualise.’

“But I do appreciate the complexity of what mankind tried to do to create this symmetry that really doesn’t exist in nature. And that’s 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. It’s the way music theory has been taught for generations now. I don’t 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 somebody’s head and I’m playing. My God, I’m 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 I’m 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 it’s no surprise that I saw this instrument: it’s mine. I claim ownership of that instrument as much anybody does. I didn’t 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 can’t; some can talk to you about sharps and flats, some can’t; but for some reason they’re 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 I’m telling you: for me it was so easy because I knew the circle of fifths first, but there’s 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 wouldn’t 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 can’t describe.”

KJ: “The proportions.”EN: “Yes, the proportional beauty. I hypothesise that it’s the reason the Fourths and

Fifths has become in my view the most used instrument worldwide. 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 they’re 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 (...) 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 you’re dividing in twos or fours. Almost all pan music that I heard is based in fours, but the other night one of the bands played an arrangement of Jit Samaroo’s 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 didn’t 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 Nketia represents in his books, that the most ancient African music is based on threes. It’s based on four foot taps, and each of those foot taps is divided into three. So 4 x 3 = 12.”

KJ: “That’s 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 didn’t create the idea, he observed it and reported it. He didn’t invent it. Just like (Paul) Berliner in The


Soul of the Mbira, when he drew the circle and these twelves, he didn’t really invent that. He observed it. At first, when he observed with his Western ethnocentric point of view, he couldn’t understand it. He wanted to put it into a line. As soon as he folded it into a circle it made sense to him. It’s 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 don’t know the man, so I couldn’t 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 intuitive nature and coming upon the same discovery that the ancient Greeks discovered. It’s fascinating to me, it’s 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 chord—Mi, Do, So, Mi, So, Do, Mi. That was the major chord and it develop on that. On the ping pong you had So, Do, Mi there, so I counted the semitones from C to F. C F A is the same interval as So Do Mi, too. At that time I didn’t 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 I’m 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 don’t understand it. It takes two, it takes the repetition, it takes the re-coming for us to believe. I don’t want to get too deep and too philosophical here, but Christianity is based on that principle. Christ needs to come again. We’re all waiting for that second coming. To what? To reaffirm our beliefs that we’re 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, you’re 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? That’s 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 you’re saying.”

KJ: “Because what we’re talking about is existing as species-being, which transcends the individual. It’s what you also get in procreation.”

EN: “And it’s interesting you mention procreation because the Fibonacci series I talked about, it was an observation of procreation among a very repetitively procreative species, the rabbit. All these ideas you’re talking about are very much related and very much observed by others. You’re absolutely on the right track in my view. It’s interesting that — how to say this in a sentence? — I do believe that we can’t always speak about it intelligently but we certainly as human beings recognise these reoccurring things in nature that we find beautiful and harmonious.

“Again, I’m going to say that every single culture whose music that I’ve studied has within it the interval of the perfect fifth — and I’ve studied a wide range of music; I’ve studied East Indian music from the Indian sub-continent; I’ve 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 I’ve been very much exposed to that music in my life.) I’ve studied Javanese gamelan music; I’ve studied the music of Japan, which came from China of course; my dissertation of West African music; I’m a product of the United States music scene, playing jazz and classical music from five years old — every single musical culture that I’ve 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 you’ll ever find. That particular relationship mathematically is 3:2. If you look at the Parthenon in ancient Greece, if you study that architecture, you’ll 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 of African music in the States is a fella named C. K. Ladzacro, he’s from Ghana and he’s on the faculty at UC Berkley — I did some post-graduate 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 foot beat, and it is the subdivisions in between those beats that we recognise as being based on twos and fours, or being based on threes. It’s the subdivisions in between. For him, the difference is more


than just a feeling. To him, whether it’s four or whether it’s three, he doesn’t believe that any of the music in his particular culture is exact in that particular sense. He feels it’s 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 rather than more different and what he’ll also say is that the acculturation of the mechanised world is a duple phenomenon. This is a very much of a generalisation but what you’ll 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 you’re going da-da-da, da-da-da. Threes in between. Now you move to the 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. I’m 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 it’s 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 I’ve seen, and repeated to my students, is that when you go back to the way the human being functions, we’re more comfortable in threes than we are in twos. If I am picking up a hammer, I’ve got a sledgehammer and I’ve got to break this rock, I doubt that I’ll do it like: boom, huh; boom, huh; boom, huh; one, two; one, two.

“Instead, I’m probably going to be: boom, hah, huh; boom, hah, huh. It’s 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 hadn’t 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.

“It’s eerie,” concluded Judy, my companion, reading the transcript I made some days after the interview. “I don’t 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.


Appendices


Appendix I

Neville Moraldo - “Bassa”

eville Moraldo - better known as Bassa - is well known in Tobago as an able pan tuner. In fact, Neville has been tutoring would be tuners in Tobago for quite some time.

Bassa was known at a time when Pan in Trinidad was at the cross-roads. To say that Bassa came from a musical background would be to overstate the matter. One could

say that he came of a truly cultural family - his father was a shoemaker who committed himself with performing on the concertina, during his leisure hours. The concertina was more popular during those times. This instrument was played by hand. Bassa did not take to playing this instrument, but could not help his turning to the music performed by his father. His mother was a housewife, who was also a very enthusiastic mas player. While Bassa did not take to the concertina, he did take to mas playing and himself became an avid mas player.

Bassa spent his primary school years at the Scarborough Boys R.C. School, during which time he was introduced to pan. Bassa’s brother Percy, who lived and worked in Trinidad, brought a friend to Tobago. This friend, whose name cannot be remembered, taught Bassa to play the pan. “I was about ten years old when I just learned to play the pan - remember, I was born on the 4th of October, 1943. Therefore, it was about 1953 when I began to play the pan.

“For quite sometime I had a problem. I use to go under Hylton Nannis’ house to play pan instead of going to school. Once when the headmaster thought that I had remained home too long, he visited my home and asked my mother why I was not coming to school. It was then my mother found out that I was spending my time ‘beating pan’, as they used to call it.”

N


The band under Nannis’ house was Symphony Stars - Patrick Arnold was also one who pass on through that band.

“My mother was so disgusted with my truancy that one day she came to the panyard armed with piece of wood. On seeing her approaching, I quickly ran off. After that, I spent more time at school.

“I can remember that the roadmarch was ‘Drink Tisane de Bourbon’ when I played pan on the road for the first time, and I am sure that I was the youngest person playing pan on the road that year.”

Bassa and a few other members of the Symphony Stars came together to form the Our Boys Steel Orchestra. According to Bassa, Symphony Stars had a registration system, where you paid one-dollar registration fee and a weekly contribution of twenty-five cents.

“When I joined Our Boys,” Bassa said, “it was very difficult to make the side, but eventually I became good enough”.

In 1969, he went to Canada. “While I was in Canada, I joined the Steel Tones Steel Orchestra, a band formed by Nicky Inniss, and when some of the well-known locals such as Patrick Arnold and Lawford were members, I also played in the U.S.A., with an aggregation put together by Cliff Alexis”.

Bassa left the Our Boys Steel Orchestra in 1978 and re-organised the Rhythm Tigers Steelband which joined fourth placing in the National Single Pan Competition of that year.

Several years earlier. Cecil Armstrong, a well known bad-john and a member of Rhythm Tigers, had a disagreement with members of the band while they were playing on the road. Cecil Armstrong turned on the members who ran off; he then proceeded to ‘mash up’ the pans, and throw them into the sea. The band remained dormant, until Bassa revived it in 1978.


It is now twenty years that Bassa has been involved in pan tuning. Bassa speaks of the early steelbands and gave the names of the following:

- Black Swan - Whim- Invaders - Lambeau – Hugh Borde and his brother started

this band in the early fifties- Rhythm Tigers - Scarborough- Elite Steelband - Scarborough- Paramount - Delaford- Eastern Syncopators - Goodwood- Katzenjammers - Black Rock- Sputniks - Bethel- Cross Fire - Patience Hill- Wonder Harps - Plymouth- Casbah - Roxborough- Luniks - Scarborough- Wonderboys - Mason Hall- Vikings - Moriah

Bassa recalled with a broad smile the names of some of the badjohns of those times. Some of them named called were Ranny Beadlow (Pang) Cecil Armstrong and the Companeros.


Appendix II

Trinidadian Words and Phrases Used

alpagats A popular type of sandalbadjohn Quarrelsome, aggressive man, picks fightsbaylay Precursor to the guitar panbhajan (religious ~) An Indian religious songbus (to ~ on the head) Hittingcastillian A Spanish dancechantwell Former singer of what developed into calypsoeschataigne A nut-like, edible fruitchenit tree A fruit treecocorite (~ roof) A palm whose leaves are used as roofing material cocoyea The spine of a palm leafcutarse Getting beatencuttail Getting beatencyar Can’tdhantal Iron rod struck in Indian musicdougla a person of African and East Indian heritage douilettes African head tiedus Dustdutty (~ dog) dirty (from Pan Trinbago website)farse nosy (from Pan Trinbago website)hosay Muslim festivalJ’ouvert Early morning of Carnival Mondayjam(m)ette A woman of questionable morals jocking (~ their waist) Trinidadian dance movement jook (v.) to stabjumbie (a pan ~) spirit, ghostkaiso (~ music) Musical and lyrical comment on any subject


kalinda stick A hardwood stick used in stick fightslavway Calypso songlawa king (fr. French le roi)leggo Calypso songlime (v.) to hang out mang (go up in the ~) Mangrove areamarchande sales woman (fr. French)mas short for Masquerademauby A drink made of spices and mauby barkparang Trinidadan/Venezuelan Christmas music sung in Spanishpeewah Edible fruit of a palmpelt (v.) to throwpistle (bull ~) Preserved bull penis used to beat people withpommecythere Edible fruitpone Sweet cake made from coconut or cassavaramajay (v.) The sound that birds make, also used for steelpanrediffusion Former radio stationrickets A nervous problemromey Rummy, a card gameroti Indian wrap with various curried fillingssaga (~ boys) Dandy, flashy dresserscrunter, scrunting Penniless person, beggingsorf Softstevedore Person loading and unloading shipstassa (~ experience) Indian drumming/drummerstote To carrytush Backside, bottomwappie Card gamewutless Worthless


Arranger - a person who arranges music for a steel band. Bass pans - the section of instruments on which melodic and harmonic lines are played with emphasis on the root of the chord. Blend - 1. The fine-tuning of each note on individual instruments to its standard frequency. 2. The achievement of similarity of tonal quality throughout the family of steel pan instruments in a steel band. It is sometimes referred to as balancing.Blocks - Supports, usually rectangular in shape, the tops of which are covered with rubber. The steel pan instruments with full-length skirts, such as cellos, tenor basses and basses, rest on the blocks to facilitate the free vibration of the skirt and allow for the transmission of the sound. Bore - 1. A series of holes, also called bores, usually of the same diameter and equidistant, outlining or marking the separation of the note areas on a steel pan. The diameter of the holes may vary by having one size for the outer circle of notes and another, for the inner notes or higher octaves. 2. To drill or punch holes on the playing surface, skirt or rim of the steel pan instrument.Canopy - the covering or roof of the pan rack, which protects the pan instruments and players from the elements. The canopy sometimes function as an acoustic roof. Cello pans - the section of instruments on which is usually played the supporting harmony in the bass staff. It can also be used to double the melody played by the frontline pans and is used extensively for counter melodies. Channel - a concave area, wider than a groove, which is used to separate the notes areas, sometimes referred to as roads and junctions. Coast - 1. To play at a relaxed slower than normal tempo. 2. Individual playing whilst the rest of the band is otherwise Conventional steel band - a Steel band in which all the instruments of the steel pan family are chromatic. The instruments are suspended from pan racks or pan stands.Double guitar - a pair of steel pans together with a range of notes falling between C3 to G#4.Double second - a pair of steel pans together with a range of notes falling between F#3 to C#6. Double tenor - a pair of steel pans together with a range of notes falling between F3 to Bb5.Dudup - (Pronounced: doo doop) a bass pan with two notes used to augment the rhythm section. It is usually made from a smaller drum, hung around the shoulder and played with one stick.

Appendix III

General Steelpan Glossary


Float (Rostrum) - a mobile platform, which contains or holds the rhythm section, along with a range of steel pan instruments. The float represent the heart beat of a steel band. Four cello - a set of four steel pans with a range of notes falling between G2 to C#5. Frontline pans - the section of instruments on which the melody in the treble clef is played. These steel pans include high tenors, low tenors (both of which are sometimes referred to as tenor pans, lead pans or first pans) and double tenors. Guitar pans - the section of instruments on which chords are played. The name is derived from the strumming effect, which is similar to that of a guitar. Groove - an engraved line or indentation, usually located within the channel, outlining or marking the separation of the notes areas. The grooves also act as guidelines to the tuning of the notes and assist in the control of the sympathetic vibrations. High tenor - a steel pan with a range of notes falling between D4 to G6. Hooks - S-shaped metal or wire rods used to suspend the steel pans from the pan stands or pan racks. Sometimes used also to connect the pan straps to the steel pan instrument. Idiophones - a class of percussion instruments in which a resonant solid material vibrates to produce the initial sound. Iron - a percussion instrument generally fashioned from a motor vehicle brake drum and played by striking with a metal rod sometimes called a twig. It is used to keep the driving tempo, which is characteristic of calypso renditions. Iron man - the person who plays the iron in a steel band. The iron man is used in the rhythm section to accentuate the rhythm ands assist in keeping the tempo steady. Low tenor - a steel pan with a range of notes falling between C4 to F6. Membranophone - a class of percussion instruments which emit sound by vibration of one or more stretched membranes connected to a secondary hollow bodied resonator.Nine bass - a group of nine steel pans with a range of notes falling between G1 to C4. Notation - Conventional symbols used to indicate graphically the pitch or frequencies and duration of musical sound.Note - a convex section on the surface of the steel pan, tuned to a specific pitch.Pan-around-neck steel band - a steel band of limited range, reminiscent of “ole time” (old time) steel bands. The instruments are single pans of which the full weight must be carried by one person. These instruments are usually hung around the neck or shoulder. The range of notes on the various instruments is not chromatic except for the tenor pan and second pan. Pan constructor - a person who does the preparatory work in the making of the steel pan instrument, prior to the tuning. This involves the sinking of the playing surface, lying out of the notes, channeling, grooving and/or boring, cutting, heating and cooling of the drums. Pannist - a person skilled in the art of playing a steel pan instrument, either as a soloist or as member of the steel band. Pan pusher - a person who assists in pushing or moving the floats or pan racks in the conventional steel band. Pan rack - a mobile support frame used to suspend the steel pan instruments for playing. Pan stands - a portable support frame used to suspend the steel pan instruments for playing. Pan stick (Stick) - a rubber or sponge tipped mallet used to strike the notes on the steel pan. Pan strap - a strip of flexible material used for suspending the pan. It is worn around the neck or shoulder. Pan yard - the abode of the steel band. The venue for the storage of the steel pan instruments, rehearsals and other related social activities of the steel band members.Percussion - a class of instruments that is sounded by striking one object with another. This class of instruments is divided into two groups, idiophones and membranophones. Percussion instruments are distinct from string, woodwind and brass instruments.


Rhythm section - a section within a steel band, comprising of a variety of percussion instruments, other than steel pans, which when played regulates the tempo of the music. Road Player - a steel pan player who performs only for the panorama competition. Runs - Rapidly playing a succession of notes or groups of notes in a scale-like or chromatic manner.Rushing-a-note - playing the note before the beat on which it should have been played.Scratcher - a percussion instrument related to the Latin American gourd. It is made from perforated galvanized sheet metal and played by scraping the perforated surface with wire prongs. Scratcher man - a person who plays the scratchier in the rhythm section. Second pans - the section of instruments which usually plays the supporting harmony. These instruments can also double the melodic line.Section leader - a person elected or chosen to manage a specific section of the steel band. The section leader is responsible for learning the musical arrangement, teaching and drilling the phrases of the music with the members of his section. His duties include ensuring that the instruments are properly maintained. He is also responsible for the dress and conduct of the members of his section. Shadow - the technique of copying the hand movements of another pannist; pretending to play.Six bass - a group of six steel pans with a range of notes falling between A1 to F3. Skate - The deceptive technique of passing one’s hands over the notes without actually playing all of them accurately.Skirt - the wall or cylindrical portion of the steel pan which functions as a resonator.Stage Side - a select group of players in a band. This core group is the performance group throughout the year outside of seasonal activities such as panorama. Steel band - an ensemble of pannists playing instruments of the steel pan family and supported by a rhythm section. The family consists of definite pitch percussion instruments encompassing a range of approximately six (6) chromatic octaves. The steel Band is often referred to as a steel orchestra.Steel band man (Pan man) - a general term for a person involved with the steel pan movement either as a tuner, pan constructor, arranger, pannist, administrator or as an assistant or apprentice in any of these categories. Steel pan - the steel pan is a musical instrument indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago. It is a definite pitch percussion instrument in the idiophone class, traditionally made from a steel drum or steel container. The metallic playing surface is concave with a skirt attached. The playing surface is divided into convex sections by channels, grooves and/or bores. Each convex is notes tuned to a definite pitch. The convex sections are played by striking with pan sticks to produce musical tones. Steel twigs - the metal rods with which the iron is beaten or struck, also known as rods, strikers or beaters. Tenor bass - a group of four steel pans with a range of notes falling between F2 to F#4. Triple cello - a set of three steel pans with a range of notes falling between B2 to D5. Triple guitar - a set of three steel pans with a range of notes falling between Bb2 to C5. Tumba man - a person who plays the tumba or conga drums in the steel band.Tuner - a person who has acquired the technical skill of transforming the steel drum or steel container to the tuned steel pan instrument. The tuner also blends the instruments. Twelve bass - a group of twelve steel pans with a range of notes falling between E1 to Eb4. Quadraphonic pans - the section of instruments, which reinforce the melody of the frontline pans and can also be used in the harmony of the arrangement. Quadraphonic pans - a group of four steel pans with a range of notes between B2 to Bb5.

240

2-cello 110, 11220 gallon coconut oil drum 18042 Steps 13455-gallon oil drum 1795th Dimension 131

AAbbott, Andre “Lulie” 194Achim, Hamil 48Agard, Arnold 34, 42Ahye, Molly 190Akow, Bert 40Alexander’s Ragtime Band 21,

36, 37, 51, 52, 84, 91, 100, 107, 108, 118, 124

Alexander, Ken 30Alexander, Renwick “Ricko” 177Alexander’s Ragtime Band 195,

205, 211, 212Alexis, Noble 72Ali, Asgar 56Ali, Claytis 101Ali, Claytis “Dougla” 53Allen, Kenneth “Diego” 61Alleyne, Elmore “Bully” 52All Stars V, 2, 3, 15, 18, 19, 20,

22, 24, 26, 30, 32, 33, 43, 45, 51, 53, 56, 62, 69, 74, 75, 77, 84, 87, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 115, 120, 121, 122, 129, 142, 147, 151, 193, 195, 206, 209, 218, 219

Alphonso brothers 212Am Boys 131Anacanoa 25Anderson, Errol “Mummy” 214Anderson, James 136Anderson, James “Batman” 43,

134Andrews, Alphonsine 149Andrews, Arthur “Tramcar” 149Andrews, Camilla 149Andrews, Vernon “Papite” 83Antillean All Stars Orchestra 26Apollon, Ray 131Arima Melodians 65Aristeguieta, Lil 41Armed Forces 48Arthur, Earnest 168Arthur, Ernest 140Arthur, Hugh 169Arthur, Val 169Arthur, Valentino 168Arthur Tramcar 149, 150, 151Atilla the Hun 39Atomic 28, 83, 84, 85, 156, 173Atwell, Winnifred 78Austin, John “Kittler” 215Austin, Milton “Wire” 26, 27

B“Black James” 151backing 87Bailey, George 73, 169Bain, Donald 219Baird, Desmond 178Baird, Joe 207Baird, Joe and Desmond 135Baird, Joseph 146, 176, 205Bakery Boys 84, 85Balalaika 21Banfield, Brooks 45, 46, 196Barker 189Barker, Daniel 151Barquain, Mervin and Everest 169Barracuda 91, 206Barracuda pan 37Barrow, Carlton “Zigilee” 29, 32,

33, 34, 37, 42, 43, 52, 54, 67

Bartholomew, Barry 121Bar 20 33, 34, 42, 46, 52, 54, 67,

68, 108, 109, 120, 134, 174, 189

Bataan 25, 26, 104, 105, 106, 146Batson, Prince 20, 32, 53, 193Battersby 34, 42baylay 118, 119, 123Be-eh 114, 115, 116Beddoe, Andrew 20, 28, 35, 171,

215Beecham, Sir Thomas 103Beethoven 8Belfast, Harold 30Belgrove, “Golab” 25Belgrove, Golab 104Bellerand, Clem 68, 99Belle Vue 125Bengal Tiger 70Benjamin, Alvin “Yankee Boy”

40Benjamin, Julian “Tall Boy” 127Berkley, Baron 2Berkley, Lady 2, 6, 13Bernard, Charles “Charlo” 84Bernard, Frank 28Bernard, Frank “Skip” 83, 84, 85Bertie 15Besson, Hugo 157, 184, 186Best, “Penco” 28Best, Ishmael “Penco” 172Best, Oswald “Nicker” 28, 38,

47, 48Betancourt, Sterling 77, 111, 112,

118, 120, 133, 141, 163, 173, 209, 217, 218

Bickerton, Derek 17Big Barker 42Big Bush 18Big Mack 20

Big Sack 41Billy the butcher 24Bird 37Birdie 15Bishop, Pat 45, 98, 115Bitterman 34, 42, 189Blackhead, Carlton 37, 43, 118,

206, 207Blackhead brothers 37Blackman, “Chicken” 25, 33Blackman, Fitz 112Blackman, George 67, 69, 71, 214Blackman, Hermia 67Black Fred 24Black Knights 26Black Power 96, 97Black Swan 30, 74, 153Blake, Harold 166Blakie 19blending 77, 86, 87, 93, 94Blue Stars 22Bobb, Knolly 31Bonaparte, Belgrave 22, 26, 64,

65, 77, 84, 99, 111, 133, 153, 209, 217

Bonaparte, Carlton “Block” 64Bonaparte Brothers 219Bonaparte brothers 64, 84Boom Town 28, 147, 171, 172,

173, 179, 183Boorman, Vincent 169Boots 21, 34, 35, 41, 43Borough Day 63Bostock, Wellington “Blues” 30,

60, 61, 66, 68, 71Bottleneck 131Bourne, Ivan “Brains” 45, 115Bourne, Ivan “Brains” 197Boyce, Ancil 33, 68, 108, 174Boys from Bernardo 138Boys from Iwojima 39, 40Boys from the Centre 171Boys Town 22, 29, 56, 99, 100,

101Bradley, Clive 14, 47, 198Braithwaite, Carl “Badgie” 18Braithwaite, Charlie and Theresa

143Braithwaite, George “Bigger” 143Braithwaite, Gerard 18Braithwaite, Norma 81Brassy 52Bristo, Eugene “Tepoo” 66, 71Broadway Syncopators 143, 144Brown, Ethelbert “TB” 43Brown, James 7Brown, Kelvin “Pelican” 176Bruce, Winston “Dr Rat” 175Bryan, Melville VIIBubulups 66, 214Burroughs, Randolph 69, 144

Butcher, Joseph 117Butcher, Lloyd 117, 123Byer, Carl and Arthur 131Byron, Claude 25

C“Cobo Jack” 14Callendar, Norma 79Callender, “Tarzan” 105Calvary Tamboo Bamboo Band

20Campbell,Ossie “Tom” 134Campbell, Ossie 42, 189Campbell, Ossie “Tom” 174Camps, Mayfield 151Cape, Jennifer 79Cape, Roy 47Carter, Pearl 165Casablanca V, 3, 12, 19, 21, 26,

30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 53, 63, 65, 79, 80, 81, 91, 99, 109, 111, 115, 131, 134, 135, 136, 140, 146, 147, 151, 152, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173, 174, 192, 194, 197, 206, 207, 209, 214, 218, 219

Casanova 59Cassals, Pablo 12Cassidy, Hollis “Piggy” 178Cavaliers 5, 26, 27, 31, 54, 55,

65, 144Central Casanovas 99Chamberlain, “Neville” 147Chan, Ronnie 49, 50Chang, Carlysle 48, 49chantwell 159Charles, Ethel 67Charles, Joseph 31Charles, Rudolph 46, 47, 96, 97,

115, 116Charles, Selwyn 67Charlie’s Roots 50Charlie Chan 132, 168, 169Chevannes, Barry 222Chicago 99Chick McGrew 169Chin, Roy 48Chow Lin On, Aldwyn 49, 50Chow Lin On, Ellis 48Christopher, Joseph 118Christopher, Joseph “Joe Crick”

163Chu Foon, “Wakyong” 49City Stars 30City Syncopaters 30, 34, 43, 80,

109, 111, 136, 209, 218Clark, Gerard 11, 88Clarke, “Jean-in-town” 67

Index

241

Clarke, Herman “Teddy” 25, 26, 105

Clarke, Ralph 58Clarke, Sir Ellis 37Cobo Jack 132, 140, 141Cocoa Boys 64Coffee band 26Coker, Leo 64Cole, John “Daddy” 156Collins, “Four Roads” 196Collymore, Julian 218Colston, Roy “Buddy” 211Comets 30Comma, Carlton 95Commandoes 211, 212Connor, Edric 43, 112, 192Constantine, Learie 166Contante, Michael “Nazi” 133Cook, Lionel and Rupert 191Copeland, Mack 185Corbin, Fred 146Cordettes 31, 49Corregidores 30Coyle, Alan 93Crichlow 96, 97Crichlow, Nathaniel 167Crick, Joe 118, 147Croppy 135Crossfire 22, 85, 111, 118, 133,

162, 163, 164, 209, 218Crossroads 74, 156, 157Cross Eye 24Cross of Lorraine 18, 32, 42, 52,

105, 108, 143, 195Cross Roads 22Crusaders 18, 46, 110, 165, 166Crystals 55cuatro pan 121Cummings, “Popoyak” 118Cummings, Sonny 147Cupidore, Michael 56

DDame Lorraine 34, 124Darway, Norman 157, 208David, Sline “Pepe” 105Davidson, “Boots” 141Davidson, Boots 77Davidson, Philmore “Boots” 22,

34, 35, 43, 63, 111, 121, 136

Davidson, Philmore “Boots” 209, 218

Dead End Kids 28, 35, 45, 48, 58, 109, 115, 172, 196, 197

Deane, Raymond “Saucy” 191Defiance 182, 183Delta Rhythm Boys 29Dem Boys 81, 109, 131Dem Fortunates 109, 131Dem Stars 109Denbow, Velma 70Denner, Sonny 43Desperadoes 2, 3, 6, 14, 15, 18,

19, 30, 35, 37, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 54, 56, 58, 74, 75, 79, 80, 96, 97, 101, 114, 115, 116, 131, 133, 140,

157, 175, 197, 198, 203, 206, 212

Destination Tokyo 17, 19, 20, 24, 28, 30, 35, 36, 46, 58, 74, 75, 90, 91

Destroyers 26, 45devil mas 147Dewa 18de Couteau, Art 34, 43, 79, 135,

168, 219de Jesus, Andre 40De La Bastide, Andrew 77, 209De La Bastide, Andrew “Pan” 22,

35, 43, 111De La Bastide, Andrew “Pan”

166, 214de Montbrun, Lance and Alan 40de Villepin, Dominique 13Didier, Celia 81Dixieland 39, 40, 41, 49, 96, 97,

170, 201, 219Dodge City 109Dollar 24Donaldson, John 80, 136Dookie, Mannie 73Dougla Kenny 47, 53Dove, Kelvin 21, 36, 38, 81, 91,

141Downs, Ben “Tabby” 168dragon mas 147Drakes, Carly 131Drayton, Carlton “Maifan” 140Drayton, Carlton “Mayfan” 38, 52Drayton, Carlton “Maifan” 169Drayton, Eric 163Drayton, Herbert “Sagiator” 52Drayton, Kenrick 140Drayton, Maifan 112Drayton, Walter “Sagiator” 107Dudley, Shannon 224dudup 28, 72, 163dudups 83Duncan, Andy 35Duncan, Sel 163, 164Duncan, Vats 157Duval, Ken 39Dyer, Alison 79Dyer, David 191

EEagle Squadron 128East Side Kids 177East Side Symphony 30Ebonites 26, 30, 74, 75Edwards, Julia 215Edwards, Rudolph “Crabby” 45,

46, 115Eighth Army 177Eliot T.S 8Espinet, Charles 166Ewing, Jean 81Exodus 29, 31, 54, 122, 151Exodus Steel Orchestra 14

FFaini, Philip 92Farquhar, Max 165

Fascinators 19, 22, 56, 59, 72, 74, 111, 140, 209

Fereira, Ernest 139Ferreira, Ernest 39, 40, 41, 49Festival of Britain 21First all-female steelband 80first ever double second pan 170Fisheye 33Fitzgerald, Ella 7five-note kittle 163Five Graves to Cairo 185Flamingos 29Fonclaire 27, 106Fonrose 27Forde, Carlton 195, 211Forde, Carlton “Lord Humbugger”

20, 108, 118Forde, George 34Forde sisters 81Fourths and Fifths 65, 76, 88, 92Francis, Carlton “Mimp” 197Free French 24, 25, 26, 60, 99,

102, 105, 111, 129French, Ralph 155Frenchman’s Creek 29

GGarcia, Philip (Lord Executor) 39Gaston-Johnson, Edgar 62Gay Flamingoes 54Genie 29George, Aldwin “Beejay” 18, 59George, Kaethe 91Georges, Telford 97Geronimo 34Gervais, Alan 26, 31, 44, 64, 65,

87, 217Ghany, Sam 41Gilkes, Alfred 68Gill, Emory 47Gillis 173Girl Pat 49, 80, 81, 82, 97Gittens, Gerald 141Gittens, Theophilus “Man” 169Goddard, Cyril 29Goddard, George 19, 20, 96, 97,

208Goddard, Pelham 22, 122Gollop, James and Emelda 166Gollop, Sidney VIIGollop, Sydney 110, 165, 166,

217Gomes, Albert 39, 95, 110, 165Gomes, Rupert 64Gomes, Sa 39Gomes, Walter 104Gomez, Herman 141Gondoliers 26, 27, 55Gonzales, Victor 40Gonzales Rhythm Band 34Gonzales Rhythm Makers 192Goolcharan, Christina 118Gordon, Cecil “Jinx” 59Grand Stand 4Granger, Muriel “Little One” 37,

43Granger, Muriel “Little One” 206Greaves, Ernest 22

Greeks 4Greenidge, Carl 99Greenidge, Carl “Bumpy Nose”

46, 115Greenidge, Carl “Bumpy Nose”

198Greenidge, Norbert 206Greenidge, Robbie 47Greenidge, Sonny 106Green brothers 152Green Eyes 21, 37, 38, 133Griffith, Beverly 47, 48, 115, 198Griffith, Felix 162Griffith, Lt Nathaniel Joseph 111Griffith, Selwyn 48Griffiths, Lt. Joseph Nathaniel 21Griffiths, Lt Joseph 102Griffiths, Lt Joseph Nathaniel 215Griffiths, Lt Nathaniel 141Grimes, Carlton 138Grow More Food 117, 118Guinness Cavaliers 27Guy, “Snatcher” 28Guy, Cyril 172, 173Guy, Cyril “Snatcher” 85Guy, Cyril “Snatcher” 171, 179

HHadeed, Anthony “Haffers” 38Hagley, Stephen 64Hamel-Smith, Ray 97Hamil, Big Head 20, 52, 53Hamilton, Michael 56Harding, Jim 149Harewood, Claude 167Harlem Boys 84Harlem Nightingales 76, 125,

156, 163, 199, 208Harmonites 26, 31, 55, 65Harper, Roy 77, 125, 199, 200,

209Harriot, Wilhemina 190Harrison, Wilfred “Talkative” 196Harrison, Winston “Talkative”

45, 115Hart, Eddie 142Hart, Edmund 41Hart, Kelvin and Kenny 152Hart, Kenny 65Hart, Kenny and Kelvin 136Hatters 144, 173Hawkins, Coleman 12Haynes, “Patsy” 79, 111Haynes, Orman “Patsy” 111Haynes, Orman “Patsy” 169Haynes, Ormond “Patsy” 21, 26,

30, 35, 42, 43, 44Haynes, Orville “Patsy” 209Haynes, Patsy 77, 99, 135Headley brothers 30Heflin, Van 157Hell’s Kitchen 29, 155, 173Hellzapoppin 132, 133, 140, 141,

168, 169Hell Yard 20, 32, 33, 34, 36, 51,

52, 58, 107, 108, 128, 168, 177, 190, 193, 194, 195

242

Hell Yard bamboo band 32, 36Helzapoppin 41Henley, Hazel 80Henry, Ivan “Skull” 65, 84Hepburn, Nap 131Hercules, Hilda 162Hercules, Victor “Sufferer” 162Highlanders 19, 44, 49, 88, 109Hilanders 11Hillside 26Hilltop 26Hilltoppers 80Hill 60 22, 35, 46, 67, 79, 111,

140, 147, 166, 209, 213, 214, 215, 218

Hinds, George 184Hing 29Hinkson, Cecil “Dead” 177Hit Paraders 21, 22, 141, 142, 157Holder, Boscoe 112Holdip, Clyde 147Hollman, Ray 21, 22, 23, 38, 132Holman, Ray 142, 220Howard, James 212Humming Birds Pan Groove 56Hunte, “Scorpion” 25Hunte, Conrad “Cocoa” 36, 37Hunte, Roy “Scorpion” 164Hunte, Stanley “Ponehead” 37,

206

IIndian mas 147Invaders V, 2, 3, 5, 14, 18, 19,

21, 22, 26, 34, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 49, 53, 61, 62, 77, 81, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 111, 112, 115, 132, 133, 139, 141, 151, 152, 157, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 185, 192, 198, 200, 205, 206, 207, 209, 212, 214, 217, 218, 227, 234

In Focus 79, 80

J“Jim Bill” 151Jab Jab 74Jack, Herbert “Cobo Jack” 132Jackman, Cyril 163James, Albert “Philo” 22James, Alricia 134James, Ancil “Sonny” 79, 134James, Daisy 79, 80, 135James, Fitzroy “Gaga” 79, 134James, Knolly “Quasimodo” 83James, Leighton 72jamette 66Jap 157Japs’ Alley 180Jarvis, Hilton 99Jay Hawks 54Jean-in-town 67, 68, 69Jean and Dinah 70Johannesburg Fascinators 56John, “Shango” 28

John, Eva 172John, Reynold “Sing-co” 46, 48John, Reynold “Sing-co” 196John, Sonny “Shango Sonny” 172Johnson, Kenneth 176Johnson, Kim VIIJohnstone, Monica 99Jones, Conrad 147Jones, Kent 141, 169Jones, Sonny 52, 107, 193Jones, Valmond and Neil 131Jordan, “Madman” 29Jordan, Winston “Badman” 125Joseph, Arthur “Short Arthur” 156Joseph, Leonard “Slim” 205Joseph, Michael “Scobie” 154Joseph, Reginald “Piggy” 191Joseph, Ricardo “Breakadoor”

196Jules, Neville 24, 32, 53, 58, 62,

64, 87, 101, 102, 103, 120, 123, 125, 164, 171, 193

Ju Ju mas 63, 84Ju Ju Warriors 91Ju Ju warriors 37

KKade, Roger 88kalinda stick 34Katz, Prof 43Katzenjammers 41, 169, 170Kentuckians 99, 198Kerr, Carlyle 165kettle drums 83King, “Ginger” 64King, Winston “Wolf” 155Kinsale, Mack 60Kitchener 68, 69, 70, 112, 120kittle drum 28Kronman, Ulf 77, 86Kwong Sing, Peter 49

LLadd 171Lalsingh, Angus 26Lalsingh, Kenrick 26Lalsingh, Steve 55Lalsingh. Steve 26Land of the Zulu 45Lasse, Vincent 64Laventille Boys 45Laventille Sound Specialists 56lavway 108lawa boys 117Lawrence brothers 214La Petite Musical 81Lee Heung, Steven 48Lee Hoy, Kenneth 49Lee Loy, Petal 48, 49Lee Loy, Valentino 49Lee Lum, Edwin 112Leningrad 30Leon, Everard 40Leung, Everard 40Lewis, Arthur 169Lewis, Harold “Fowl” 205, 207

Lil Drums 17Lincoln 15Little Carib Theatre 21, 37Livvy 52London Melodians 2Long Wai, Akam 49Lopez, Elton 30Lord Blakie 19, 70, 74Lord Caruso 74Lord Coffee 25Lord Executor 39Lord Hamburger 20Lord Humbugger 195, 211Lord Kitchener 18, 32, 68, 187,

221Lord Melody 26, 61, 70Loy Wong, Kim 11, 48, 49, 88,

177Lucas, Basil 138Lucky Jordan 61Lulie 52Lutchman, Billy 56Lutchman, Lawrence 54Lydian Singers 45Lynch, George “Whitey” 48Lyn Belle 172Lyons, Leonard “Sonny” 152Lyons, Milton 26Lyons, Milton “Squeezer” 152Lyons brothers 152

M“Marcus” 64“Mando” Wilson 168Macgrew, Chick 132MacLean, Archie 143Macwarren, Herman 177Madame Butterfly 25Madame Olinde 25Mafumbo calenda yard 52Maharaj, Sat 57Major Domo 157Malabar All Stars 173Malm, Krister 86Malone, “Screebo” 25Maloney, Russel “Screebo” 174Mannette, Ellie 64, 77, 81, 87,

111, 112, 125, 132, 133, 140, 141, 166, 169, 179, 200, 208, 209, 217, 218, 220

Mannette, Ellie and Birdie 198Mannette, Elliot 19, 21, 22, 26,

32, 36, 40, 48, 58, 62, 90, 115

Mannette, Elliott 5Mannette, Oswald 36Mannette, Vernon “Birdie” 21, 36,

37, 115, 141Mannette brothers 36, 37, 46, 90,

152, 206Mannette pans 38Marabuntas 115Maraj, Bhadase Sagan 29Mark, Augustus “One Man” 37,

42, 43, 44marking 87Marshall, Bertie 11, 19, 44, 48,

87, 93Martin, Nathaniel “Monster” 205,

207Mascall, Gary 157Mason, Frankie 169Mason, Kendolph “Cokey” 34,

42, 146Massy, Raymond 21Matthias, Lenny “Scaley” 107Maurice, Pat 80Maximin, Tambi 130Mayers, “Sack” 96, 102Mayers, Alfred “Sack” 39, 62,

102, 137Mayers, Clifford “Seabee” 138Mayers, Johnathan 125Mayfield 69May Johnstone, Helen 98McBurnie, Beryl 21, 37, 69, 80,

95, 166McGrew, Chick 140McLean, Charlie “Baker” 46McLeod, Neville “Bake Nose”

17, 202Meadow 24Melodians 2, 28, 65, 83, 84, 85Melody Makers 40, 49, 55Melody Masters 144Mendez, Alfred 39Merchant 89Merry Boys 34, 42Merry Makers 62, 69, 96, 102,

139Metronome 102, 129Midlanders Metronome 29Midland Syncopaters 29Midland Syncopators 96Midnight Robber 74Mighty Chalkdust 70Mighty Dougla 101Miller, Gerald “Fire Kong” 17Minshall, Peter 26, 49Missing Ball 52Miss Hetty 124Miss Myra 25Mitchell, Mortiner 166Modern Crossfire 164Mohammed, Amin 54Mohammed, Bobby 5Mohammed, Lennox “Bobby” 27,

54, 55Mohammed, Zaid “Toscanini” 55Mollineaux, Carl “Assing” 63Mollineux, Othello 1, 21, 38,

118, 201Montalban, Ricardo 177Moore, Kirton “Eddy Boom” 174Morning Stars 63, 64Morocco 45Morris, Leonard 129, 139Moscow 84Mose, George 165Mother Gerald 28Mottley, Alan 59Moyou, Evelyn 97Moyou, Rolf 41, 49, 50, 96, 97Mud Mouth 18Municipal Orchestra (Martinique

111

243

Munro, Robert 121Murray, Joe 29Mus Mus 37

NNarrell, Andy 21Nathaniel, Rupert “Shadow” 164Nelson, Oliver 219Neverson, James “Bumpy” 63New York branches 2Ng Wai, George 50Nicholson, Horace “Nickerdee”

104Nicholson, Stephen “Goldteeth”

68, 133Nicholson, Stephen “Goldteeth”

178, 205, 206Nicholson, Steven “Gold Teeth”

35, 37, 43Nightingales 21, 22, 30Night Invaders 21, 36Noah’s Ark 45Nob Hill 29, 125, 155Noel, Lincoln 11, 65, 87, 88, 217,

219Northcote, Dr Sydney 99, 101Northern Stars 155North Stand 4North Star 30, 182, 183, 200, 201North Stars 3, 22, 44, 76, 77, 78,

87, 99, 111, 199, 201, 209, 218

North Stars, 157Notting Hill Carnival 6Novotney, Eugene 8, 220, 225

OOhio 176, 177, 178Ohio Cassanovas 35Olga 128Olliverre, “Fisheye” 128Olliverre, Rudolf “Fisheye” 33,

52Olliverre, Rudolph “Fisheye” 180Olliverre Band 33Orisha 190Osbourne, Cecil 42Ossie 37Ottley, Carlton 165Oval Boys 21, 36, 91, 212Owen, Wilson 31, 40, 49

PPacheco, Francis 114Pacheco, Wilbert “Be-eh” 45Pacheco, Wilbert “Be-eh” 196Pacho’t, Henry “Patcheye” 213Pachot, Henry “Patcheye” 35Palladium 30Panazz 121, 122Panorama 2, 3, 4, 6, 13, 14, 23,

26, 27, 31, 34, 36, 42, 47, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 65, 78, 189, 224

Panther 24Pan Ramajay 79

Pan Trinbago VII, 165Pan Vibes 199, 201Papite 83, 84Pardo, Frank 41Paria Publishing VIIParks, Larry 177Park Street 18Pasea East Indian Steel Orches-

tra 56Patcheye Pacho’t 166Patsy 21, 26Paul, Wallace “Ako” 176Payne, Edwin 144Pearl Harbour 24, 25, 127, 128,

143, 173Pelletier, Roland 169Peschier, Hugh “Sage” 33Peschier, Hugo “Big Jeff” 53Peterkin, Rudolph 169Phase II 22, 54, 142Phase II Pan Groove 2, 6, 14Phillip, Ancil 179Phillip, Ranny 138Philo 22Picton Street 21Pierre, Curtis 40, 139, 201Pierre, Lennox 21, 37, 60, 81, 97,

110, 165, 200Pierre, Leo 17Pierre, Leo “Lil Drums” 17Pierre, Leo “Lil Drums” 17Pierre, Raymond ‘Brokofoot’ 177Pile, Oscar VII, 34, 36, 41, 42,

135, 136, 166Pile, Oscar “Bogart” 34ping pong 29, 63, 76, 77, 79, 80,

84, 91, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 109, 118, 125, 128, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141, 154, 206

PNM 18Point Cumana 22Police Band 95, 111Poon, John 61Popo 108Pops 34, 42Port of Spain 19, 20, 21, 24Potential 30Power Stars 22Preddie 24Primitive Man 45Prince Batson 20Procope, Bruce 37, 95, 97Public Transport Service Corpora-

tion Steel Orchestra 154Puckerin, Herschel 22Purple Hearts 206

QQuaduet 90Quamina, Errol 169Quarless, Eddy 122Questel, Carlton 59Quevedo, Raymond (Atilla the

Hun) 39

R

Rab, Hamil and Eddy 52Rambaran, Lalsingh 56Rampersad, George 56Ramsumair, Buddy 54Ramsumair, Charlie 54Rance, Sir Hubert 112Ranjitsingh, Sam 56Raymond, Edmund “Waj” 194Raymond, Edward “Waj” 52Ray “Bucket” 168Realm of Incas 45Red Army 29, 30, 37, 39, 49, 60,

61, 62, 68, 69, 99, 115, 129, 131, 137, 138, 139, 140, 147, 173, 177, 197, 206, 212

Red Glory 183Red River 30Red Vernon 173Reece, Jojo 31renada Harmony Kings 111Renegades 2, 3, 6, 14, 15, 18, 31,

34, 35, 37, 40, 46, 54, 55, 68, 69, 109, 120, 122, 133, 135, 142, 146, 157, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 205, 206, 207, 219, 227

Rhapsody 65, 74, 75Rhythm Stars 55Richards, Albert 61Riley, Emmanuel 132Riley, Emmanuel “Cobo Jack” 21,

37, 38, 46, 47, 115Riley, Emmanuel “Cobo Jack”

169, 198Rising Sun 18, 22, 34, 80, 99,

103, 111, 115, 130, 131, 136, 147, 149, 151, 153, 180, 197, 209

River Lady 59Roach, “Musso Rat” 34Roach, Carlton “Sonny” 111Roach, Carlton “Sonny” 208Roach, Conrad “Musso Rat” 191Roach, Sonny 22, 34, 76, 77, 112,

119, 123, 124, 125, 156, 169, 183, 199, 200, 208, 209, 210, 218

Roach, Sonny “Sire” 156Roaring Lion 70Roberts, Aldwyn 68Roberts, Franklyn 63, 65Roberts, Stephen 187Robertson, Elie 81Robeson, Paul 121Rodney, Earl 64, 65, 217Rogues Regiment 26Rojas, John 97Rollie, ‘Cody’ and ‘Slick^ 163Rollie, ‘Cody’ and ‘Slick’ 163Rolston, Joan 81Roodal, Timothy 25Rose, Carlos 29Rose Hill 190, 191Rose Hill tamboo bamboo band

35Rouff, Dudley 203Royal Air Force 24, 105, 143Ruby Rab 69

Rudder, “Vats” 53Rudder, David 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, 30,

38, 140, 142Rudder, Victor “Chungi” 30Rugged Tommy 83Russell, Lenny “Bad Good” 37,

61Russian Symphony 29

SSagga Boy 109Sagiator 33, 52, 53Saigon 21, 22, 142sailor mas 45Salome 206Samaroo, Jit 14, 29, 54, 55, 121,

122Samaroo Jets 55Samba Boys 109Sammy, Ramdass 56Sampson, Addawell 125, 209Sampson, Addawell and Nooksin

119, 123Sampson, Franklyn “Addawell”

123Sampson, Herbert 119Sampson, Noel “Nooksin” 123Sampson, Noel “Nooksin” 208Samson, Gerald 19, 37Samuel, Charles 125Sands of Iwojima 45San Juan All Stars 18, 19, 30, 45,

74, 75, 115, 157, 219Saraswatie Steel Orchestra 56Savoys 18, 79, 84Scaramouche 157Scherzando 56Scott, Winfield 112Screebo 25Scrunter 80Seabees 26, 27, 55Sealey 22Sealey, Granville 22, 111, 117,

118, 125Second Eleven 34Second Fiddle 52Second Imij 50Seon, Donald 24, 25Sergeant Caesar 191Serrant, Jerry 193Serrant, Macdonald “Jerry” 51Serrette, Ethelbert 176Serrette, Owen 31Shadow 21Shango 172, 208Sharpe, Boogsie 14, 22Sharpe, Len “Boogsie” 22, 54,

164Shaw, Raymond “Artie” 47, 115Shaw, Raymond “Artie” 198Shearwood 25Shearwood, “Coolie” 25Silver Stars 21, 49, 50, 142Simmonds, Randolph “Croppy”

43Simmonds (pianist) 43Simon, Spree 77Simon, Wilfred 17

244

Simon, Winston “Spree” 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 35, 36, 46, 58, 59, 107, 111, 189, 202

Simon, Winston “Spree” 202, 209, 214, 218

Simpson, Keith 78Sing-co 46, 48Singh, Boysie 17Sinking 87Skeete, “Snooze” 28Skeete, Harvey “Snooze” 172Skeete, Rosina “Mother Gerald”

172Skull 65, 84, 85Sky Chief 201Slap Bass 20Slater, John 139, 166Smacky 157Smith, “Pinhead” 66Smith, Dudley 22, 77, 99, 103,

111, 131, 170, 209Smith, Rudi 1Smith, Rudy “Two Lef” 62, 89Smith, Trevor 40Smith, Yvonne “Bubulups” 33,

66, 151Smith, Yvonne “Bubulups” 174Snowden 45Solo Harmonites 31Sombreros 133Southern All Stars 22, 26, 102,

103, 105, 106, 209, 218Southern Marines 26, 152, 153,

154Southern Symphony 22, 26, 31,

44, 64, 65, 84, 85, 99, 111, 133, 209, 217, 218, 219

Sparrow 119, 191, 219Speaker 45, 46, 47Spider Web pan 88Spike Jones 46, 116Spoiler 67, 69Springer, Ulric 132, 140Springer, Ulric “Chick McGrew”

168Sputnik 109Stalingrad 29Stargazers 157Starland 48, 49, 56, 198Starlift 11, 19, 22, 23, 54, 72, 74,

88, 128, 140, 141, 142, 157

Starlight 63, 64, 65, 144Starlighters 80Starlight Syncopators 30Starniks 201Steadman, Donald “Jit” 45, 115Steadman, Donald “Jit” 196, 198,

203Stephens, Theo 22, 77, 102, 105,

129, 153, 209, 218Stephens, Theodore “Black James”

26, 33Stephens, Theo “Black James”

111Ste Madeleine Steel Orchestra 26Stocking Dinah 128Stoute, Cyril 55

Stowe, Eric 52, 108Stowe brothers 52Stromboli 131Stuempfle, Stephen 193Stuempfle, Steven 20, 60St Louis, George 63St Lucia Police Band 111St Vincent Government Band 111St Vincent Philharmonic Orchestra

111Sufferers 34Sullivan 29Sunland 29, 131Sun Valley VI, 3, 22, 61, 62, 76,

77, 109, 111, 119, 123, 125, 126, 133, 138, 147, 155, 156, 169, 179, 183, 199, 200, 208, 209, 218

Swanee River 173Symphonettes 164Symphony Stars 29Syncopaters 22

TTaitt, Nerlin 26, 55Tall Boy 24Tang, Norman 37Tantie Baby 176Tantie Willie 191Tanti Willie 34Tarzan 127TASPO 21, 26, 35, 37, 41, 43,

46, 53, 58, 77, 78, 84, 86, 92, 98, 99, 102, 110, 111, 112, 119, 121, 125, 141, 156, 163, 167, 200, 201, 209, 214, 218

Taylor, Irvine 36Taylor, Robert 25tempering 86, 87, 92Theodore brothers 163The Snow 24, 105Third World 22, 54Thomas, Hamilton 52Thomas, Hamilton “Big Head”

193Thomas, Hamilton “Big Head

Hamil” 107Thomas, Kenrick 28, 96Thomas, Kenrick “Daba” 171Thomas, Mark “Zorro” 28Thomas, Nernard “Zorro” 172Thomas, Percival 41Thomas, Percy “Lizard” 169, 170Thomas, Ruffina 172Thompson, Albert 131Thompson, Bertie 166Thompson, Carlton “Copperhead”

45Thorpe, Eamon 118, 164Thorpe, Emmanuel “Eamon” 22three-bass 85Times Square 29Timothy, Al 144Tinpanny Five 144Tokyo 17, 18, 19, 20, 59, 66, 71,

74, 75, 90, 91, 97, 115, 131, 140, 147, 151, 157,

166, 180, 197, 198, 203, 206, 214, 218

Tokyo Steel Orchestra 58Tombstone 28Toto 18To Hell and Back 45Trendsetters 79Trim, Earl 219Trinidad All Stars 32, 43, 51, 53,

69, 77, 84, 99, 101, 102, 103, 108, 120, 121, 151, 163, 168, 180, 193, 195, 209

Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra 153

Trinidad All Steel Percussion Or-chestra (Taspo) 21, 26

Trinidad Maestros 55Tripoli VI, 3, 22, 37, 111, 117,

118, 119, 123, 125, 147, 163, 192, 201

Tropical Harmony 59, 64, 65Tunapuna All Stars 56Tutee 108

UUSA Invaders 133USS Bad Behaviour sailor band

51USS Virginia 52

VValley Harps 78Velasquez, Lewisito “Cito” 72Vernon, “Black” (Papite) 83Vernon, “Red” 83Vernon, Reds 83Vernon “Red” 28Vibrations 79Vida 24Vigilantes 28, 84, 173Vincent, Kenneth 144Vintaitt and the Comics 26

WWaithe, “Giant” 28Waithe, Desmond 22Waithe, Percy “Giant” 172Wake Island 29, 172, 182, 183Waldron, Irma 81Walke, Olive 81Ward,Cecil “Bajan Cecil” 125Ward, Cecil 208Warner, Leo 211war mas 45, 115Waterloo 109Watson, Boysie 28, 83Wayne, John 3West Side 22White, Cecil 175White, Landig 56White, Muriel 174, 175White, Phyllis 174Wickham, Francis 141Wickham, Francis “Peacock” 36,

37, 38, 91

Wickham, Francis “Peacock” 206Wight, Sir Gerald 112Williams, Anthony 8, 22, 76, 92,

93, 99, 102, 112, 200, 209, 220

Williams, Anthony “Muffman” 111

Williams, Dr. Eric 18, 41, 49, 50, 80, 95, 96, 97, 116

Williams, Emile “Zola” 24, 105Williams, Eric 203Williams, John “Buddy” 21Williams, Meadow 127Williams, Tony 11, 22, 64, 65, 87,

88, 111, 112, 119, 121, 125, 141, 155, 170, 198, 201, 208, 209, 217, 218, 223, 224, 228

Williams, Tony “Muffman” 76Williams, Tony “Muffman” 179Williams, Zola 102Wilson, Frederick “Mando” 211Wilson, Victor “Totee” 118Wilson, Victor “Tutie” 20, 36Wilson, Victor “Tutie” 211Wiltshire, “Ladd” 29Wiltshire, Randolph “Phil” 171Wiseman, Dr Herbert 103, 163Wonder Harps 118Wong, Kim Loy 11Wong, Lennox 50Wong Sang, Joyce 48Woo, Malcolm 49Wooding, HOB 95Worrell, Gemma 79Wrapping sticks with rubber 85Wrapping strips of rubber 91

XXavier, Rudolf 105Xavier, Rudolph 158

YYankee Boy 41Yearwood, “Killey” 34Yearwood, Wellington “Killey”

190Yeates, George 46, 96, 97, 115,

198Young Destroyers 45

ZZainool 27Zigilee 67, 68, 189, 206Zigilee brothers 29Zone 20 30Zone Stars 48, 49

if yuh iron good you is king

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