Sheet Music
USA - Two Trees Music has just made available for purchase the sheet music for Gary Gibson’s "In the Shadows of the Forest," a nine-movement suite for steelband and choir based on the folklore of Trinidad.
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USA - Two Trees Music has just made available for purchase the sheet music for Gary Gibson’s "In the Shadows of the Forest," a nine-movement suite for steelband and choir based on the folklore of Trinidad.
→ more
International News
10/01/2008
'Hard Wuk': Exalting the Pan - Part 6
“Pan is opening up internationally and we can’t stop that, what we have to do is come up with new ideas to stay ahead.”
Dr. Jit Samaroo
Dr. Jit Samaroo
Category: International News Archive
“Steelbands need more respect on carnival day
Steelbands need more respect coming from the DJ.
You have your big box of twenty thousand watts of power
When the steelband pass we cyar hear the bass nor tenor…
So for this festival hear what I want you to do
Turn down your box, look the steelband coming…
We want to hear what the steelband playing.”
Black Stalin, “More Respect,” 2009
Stalin is always ready to celebrate the “hard wuk” that spawns achievements as he did with “Dr. Jit” in which he sang:
“It was a long hard fight for the panman…
So when word came out that day from UWI
Jit Samaroo would receive a degree
It brought great joy to pan people everywhere.”
Here, The Black Man celebrates the famed pan arranger/composer—and nine time panorama winner with Renegades!--on the receipt of an honorary degree from UWI in 2003. This aspect of his work and appeal is not lost on the legion of fans, who respect The Black Man, not just for his music but, for his enhanced humanity and humility. A disposition that’s fused with an urgency to use the vehicle of the calypso to elevate the status of many of our unsung heroes and other voices form the margins even as he excavates and memorializes pan’s journey, “From playing a pan in Miarma Club to a degree.”
Stalin’s haunting lyrics tugs at, and serves as our collective conscience and is recognized and appreciated throughout the Caribbean and beyond. It’s interesting to note how many fans and critics alike instantly retrieve a particular song or catch phrase when looking at Stalin’s transcendental outpouring. St. Lucian Hoagy Stevens reflects: “Even in ‘Hey, Hey, Mr. Panmaker’ we have seen Stalin warning governments to safeguard we art-form.” To be sure, Stalin is very conscious of his mission of celebrating and protecting the interests of both the instrument and player. He explains, “I try to deal with the pan and the man. Like in ‘Mr. Pan Maker’ where we dealing more with the pan: its development and the need to nurture, safeguard, and refine it; and a song like ‘Pan Gone’ where I more deal with the man.” And he interjects a stanza, “Steelband now in society/But when they say society/Brother try and understand/That really goes for the pan/They don’t mean the man.”
Apart from Kitchener, the Grand Master, few calypsonians have celebrated and defended the pan--our patrimony--as tirelessly as Stalin. This inextricable link between artist and pan prompted Les Slater to observe: “Stalin is always exalting the pan; never seeing it in a light manner. The fact that Stalin could ask in ‘Mr. Panmaker’ how many grams of steel to make a pan lets you see the seriousness that he attaches to the pan.”
Indeed, throughout Stalin’s illustrious career, which may well have started in the pan yard, the pan has always been dear to him for as he says, “from small there was always a tenor pan in the house.” Featuring his early connection to the pan, Regis, in his definitive biography on Stalin, notes that Dennis, Stalin’s older brother, of the southern based Free French Steelband, and in whose care the young Leroy was entrusted, carried him to the pan yard from early prompting the mature Black Stalin to reflect, poignantly, that “his first crib was a tenor pan”! And it is this deep affinity with the pan flowing with his social concern which is at the heart of The Black Man’s life work and art.
Dawad Phillip, poet/journalist and founder of the San Fernando Jazz Festival, recalls, “Of course, Stalin’s first success in terms of music for pan was, as early as 1967, with ‘Beat My Tune’,” with which according to Stalin, he “went to the Calypso finals.”
Referring to that time when Sparrow and Kitchener ruled the road, Stalin adds, “I got beautiful feedback on ‘Beat My Tune’ as a couple of steelbands played it on the road carnival day… I remember Solo Harmonites doing it and it was on a recording with a steelband coming out of Telco Recording.” His appeal to the pan is taking off. Stalin reports that, “Today Jah Roots a steelband out of Point Fortin seem to take to Black Stalin’s music…. This year they played ‘We Can Make it if We Try’, ‘Black Man Feel to Party’, ‘Come With It’…. Roots play a lot of Black Stalin music and I sang with so many steelbands accompanying me, Skiffle Bunch, Despers, Silver Stars, and Exodus.”
In discussing the appeal of Stalin’s music to the pan, Phillip adds, “It happens sometimes that because of an artist’s lyrical strength people always listened to Stalin as opposed to cultivating an appreciation for his melodic contribution and its receptivity by pan…. But now, more and more, the pan community is listening to Stalin’s melody and finding a lot of great tunes to explore on the pan.” Embracing and extending Slater’s notion, Phillip adds, “Stalin both exalts the pan and provides beautiful music for the pan to play… but in the past people focused more on the message in the music, as opposed to the music in the message.”
Although “Beat My Tune,” like Shadow’s “The Threat” [1971]—early threats indeed to the then two-man domination of Pan’s Panorama Repertoire--can be viewed as an appeal to the pan, Stalin argues: “I never went the way of writing a particular song for the pan to play or as some people say a pan song. I don’t see that in the music. I don’t think there is anything that one can call a pan song… I view the pan as any other instrument in that it can play any music that you give it to play so I never really… concentrate on doing music especially to attract steelband arrangers.” The discography of pan bears out Stalin’s point, for from European classic and Samba to Jazz and Reggae pan has made its mark. Stalin breaks out singing his 1994 Classic, “Me ain’t no one tune pan man/ any tune I could play beat me brudder, bring on you music sheet/ Whether it’s jazz or classic, name the music I could play it/ I could ramajay, any music I could play…. it’s time you start seeing me as a musician” and he rests his case.
Further buttressing the Black Man’s point Phillip adds, “Sometimes those who make the choices for the steel bands kinda deal with a narrow pallet. They look to the usual people. If you look back at the melodies of Stalin’s music, it has all the possibilities for pan... it’s just that somehow he hasn’t been a consistent choice and it’s not Stalin’s fault…. Steelband arrangers hear what they want to hear…. You can’t tell me that if I’m coming down the road with my band playing ‘Black Man Feeling to Party’ I cyant mash up de place!” Underscoring this view Phillip notes, “At this year’s Laventille Steelband Festival, the band that stole the show was Renegades… Everybody was playing Kitchener and all kinds of popular and tested songs but Renegades came through playing Nelson’s ‘All Ah We Is One Family’ and they mash up the place. What they did was energize a song that arrangers rarely looked at before. And it’s the same thing that’s happening with Stalin’s music…arrangers discovering tunes that they never looked at before.”
Flowing from the increasing pan activities throughout the year there has been a broadening of the repertoire of the steelband, especially since many of these events stipulate the genre of music to be played. Phillip reports that at a September 2008 Marabaella Pan Festival part of the arrangement required steelbands to play chutney, and a parang. Indeed, these stipulations allow for a broader range of choice thus allowing bands and arrangers to explore previously unexplored music.
It now appears as if society is finally catching up with Stalin in that more and more, we are moving beyond our self-imposed limitations as “part time lovers” of “we culture.” Speaking to this repositioning of the culture of pan in the national psyche Philip concludes, “Of all the songs Phase Two decided to play at this years Laventille Festival was a 1957 Melody tune, ‘Jonah and the Bake’, which is an impossible piece of music to play for a band on the move… and you have to imagine how they have to stop and play ‘Jonah… Yes pah. You take a bake here? No pah. One gone, one gone.’ However, in spite of the challenge, it was a real intricate and beautiful performance,” that dramatizes anew that no tune is beyond the range or scope of the creativity that fires the inspiration for each performance. Indeed, Denzyl Botus, the renowned arranger of Despers USA argues that “We always like to take a challenge, a song like Rudder’s ‘Monsterrat’ that everybody figures is hard, and make music out of it” (Everybody’s Nov/Dec 2001).
Just as Stalin is committed to exalting the pan he is equally committed to bearing the burden of documenting pan’s journey thereby serving as our collective memory. Challenging the pan fraternity to tell more of their stories Stalin implores, “Robbie Greenidge, Rudy ‘Two Left” Smith, Othello Molineaux and other panists to relate their stories in any form; lectures or write about it and let the children read about it” For as he asserts, “Young musicians need to understand that journey… to help them appreciate how panists were able to take their pans from the hills in Laventille or from St. James and reach on a stage with Jimmy Buffet and Liberace… Ah mean that’s a long trip. If we panmen playing with these musical legends, then they are not just panmen but renowned musicians!”
Fortunately, Stalin’s call for serious documentation of the road traveled by the pan fraternity is being realized. There is now developing a treasure throve of publications to introduce, engage and stimulate young musicians around and behind the many bridges of suffering from which the pan rose. Or, as David Rudder puts it so aptly, “Out of a muddy pond ten thousand flowers bloom.” Both Kim Johnson’s “If Yuh Iron Good You Is King: Pan Pioneers of Trinidad and Tobago” and Myrna Nurse’s “Unheard Voices: The Rise of Steelband and Calypso in the Caribbean and North America” serve as the window through which youthful panists can be introduced to pan’s glorious and multifaceted history and in the words of those who, according to Stalin, made “the long journey.”
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