Trinidad and Tobago

“The steel drum or steelpan is the only acoustic musical instrument invented this century. (19th Century) The steel orchestra is composed of instruments covering the full range of the conventional orchestra. Six categories of drums make up the orchestra: the tenors, the double second, the guitars, the cellos, the quadro and six pan, the bass, plus the rhythm section. These instruments are made from used oil drums and are extremely versatile. Steelpan music includes not only Afro-Caribbean music but extends to jazz, pop and classical with all distinctive rhythms and tonality of the steelpan instrument.”

(from History of the Steelpan)

Homage to the Steel Bands

My first encounter with the steel bands, the Desperadoes Steel Band on Laventille Hill in Port of Spain will probably remain the single most indelible impression of my two weeks of wide-eyed pleasure in Trinidad and Tobago for Carnival in February 2004. A diamond, it is said is simply a lump of coal which did very well under pressure. That process, the miraculous transformation from a crude substance to its unrecognizable refined end product seems to be an apt metaphor for my introduction to Carnival. That the Desperadoes Steel Band Orchestra had flourished in an economically depressed area presented a surprisingly appropriate context to the beauty and power of the Steel Band. There was an undercurrent of violence in that area of Port of Spain at that time and we passed a roadblock composed of Police and Military forces to get to the top of Laventillle Hill where the Desperadoes had their pan yard (club). This evidence of potential violence pales in contrast to the violence in the environments of slavery from which the Steel Pan tradition emerges. Despite the oppression and brutality of slavery, despite the attempts to suppress and eradicate the creative spirit, in the music of the Steel Bands, the Underdogs have emerged victorious. By a miraculous transformation, industrial detritus, discarded containers for petroleum have been fashioned into instruments that rival the celestial sounds of the harp. A sonorous alchemy has produced a transformation from enslavement to spiritual freedom through creativity, from industrial waste to a symphony. The irritation of a grain of sand causes the oyster to produce a pearl, pressures over time produce a jewel from a lump of coal and oppression, suppression, repression, were the pressures prerequisite to the creation of the hauntingly beautiful, adamantine, lapidary polished, soft, sweet, metallic hardness of the steel band sounds in the concrete canyons between the rundown buildings of the inner city neighbourhoods of Port of Spain.

Two echoes still reverberate from my encounter with Carnival in Port of Spain:

1. I was content that, now an old man, I have left behind the imperious dictates of libido and the tyranny of the hormones that feed it. I was able to appreciate with a certain dispassion the beauty of the spectacle, especially the part played by the female participants in a truly humanistic way without the scheming of the male ego
2. I was grateful that I was able to find new, non-judgmental eyes to view this enchanting display of a people’s history and to witness through the many activities of Carnival, humanity’s revenge against oppression, not through war but by the triumph of the irrepressible human spirit. Old ways of thinking, eyes blinded by preconceived judgments and received ideas of propriety just would not do since a closed mind gathers no insight. “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.” (Dr. Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention)

On my second trip to Carnival in 2009 I composed two verses to celebrate the glimpses I had of the ineffable, glimpses of a distant view beyond the obvious.

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