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photo: Carl Newallo |
“I made the steel band a real study. I
know the runs and the notes that mean something to the sound of the
band. I can hear the sound of the tenor pan.” (1)
It is to our eternal good fortune that there
developed very early a symbiotic relationship between Lord Kitchener
and the steel band milieu, and that despite spending a goodly
portion of his early career in England, that bond with the pan
culture only grew stronger after he relocated to Trinidad and steel
band haven.
In that opening quote from Kitch, from the
Pan magazine Fall 1987 issue, he is of course conveying a sense
of what gave him such facility in composing music for the steel
band. Many others would doubtless lay claim to similar familiarity
with the pan idiom. Whether this is in fact so is ultimately a moot
point. Suffice to say that the Kitchener connection to pan proved to
be literally in a class by itself, well beyond the contact point
attained by lesser mortals and considered by them to be special.
Pan magazine summed up in these words the serendipitous
circumstance of Kitch’s return to share space once again with those
whose lot it was to secure pan’s place as a spellbinding new
addition to musical culture: “For the steel bands, the ranks of the
music suppliers now included someone who had a real feel for what
embodied the quintessential panist’s turn-on.” (2)
It became quite obvious upon his return home
that he had pan music very much in his sights. He returned late in
1962, in time for the Carnival of ’63, and he began his impressive
run of road march mastery with The Road, followed in ’64 by
Mama Dis Is Mas and My Pussin in ’65. Evident in all
of them was Kitchener’s propensity for crafting melodic lines that
ideally suited the steelpan format, most significantly, the
dominance of staccato form as opposed to legato, in the notes that
found their way into his musical sketches. In that period, when
steel bands were the predominant road/party music for Carnival
revelry, Kitch was also well aware of the importance of
people-friendly chorus lines. So that whether in the Carnival-themed
The Road (“De road make to walk on Carnival day…”) and
Mama Dis Is Mas (“De band will be passin’ down Frederick
Street…”) or the slightly risqué My Pussin (“Is my pussin/My
pussin/My pussin…”) the audience sing-along requirement was handily
met.
By 1967, Kitch had ramped up the use of another
feature that would be a trademark of his compositional style, the
strategically placed rhythm pause for dramatic effect. Indeed 67,
his highlight selection for 1967, demonstrated the pause effect in
spectacular fashion, and introduced a new platform that, again,
would become synonymous with Kitchener’s exceptional tunesmith
abilities, the extended melodic line, here located within the verse. The then unusual device of a two-bridge verse,
making for a multi-part work, each section having its own distinctive character
and feel, made 67 not only the runaway 1967 road march but a
definite landmark in the galaxy of hit material that would be
amassed by Kitch. For pan’s orchestral voice, grounded in a rhythmic
assertiveness, 67 had a pulse to it that was akin to manna
from heaven. As we listen to an excerpt, the entire piece of course
evinces a celebratory atmosphere, but check how different are the
three musical moods defining the three elements that comprise the
verse – how different is:
Tina why you sleepin’
This is Jourvert morning
Tina why you sleepin’
This is Jourvert morning
From:
Gul ah really think you makin’ fun
Can’t you hear de band dem passing on
Everybody jumpin’ in de fete
And you fold up in yuh coverlet
And how different that mood is from:
If you want to lie down
And roll in yuh nightgown
Gul ah have no time wid you
When you miss me ah jumpin’ too
And again, the exchange between Kitchener and
this Tina judiciously spiked with those exciting rhythm stops in
advance of sections two and three.
’67 was a monster of a road march and a
Kitchener milestone, but shame on anyone who thought this
represented the limit of Kitchener’s creative genius, where steel
band-targeted material was concerned. In three years would come
Margie, which Kitchener later acknowledged as his first
important musical challenge to panists. Prof. Waldron’s serious
exploration of Margie as an inspired work on so many levels
addresses its musical complexity as well, much to our delight. From
the panists’ standpoint, here they were being served up chord
progressions that were a departure from standard road/party fare of
the day, and they obviously welcomed it, judging by Kitch’s copping
the road march title once more. But we need only reference Prof.
Waldron’s examination where amply detailed are the properties that
made Margie an outstanding composition. As an aside, in a nod
to current happenings, perhaps it bears noting that Kitch’s Margie,
who we have reason to believe was not a local, may have had a
somewhat tepid response to his entreaty to “lime” on Carnival day.
But what a difference 38 years makes, with an indoctrination to the
art of liming being recently offered on national TV in America by
another non-T & T local, Queen Latifah.
Kitchener would say of his taking the panists
for a run with Margie, that he “just kept on challenging them
after that.” (3) As the 70s progressed, there was another stage
demanding his focus, alongside Carnival street parading and its
demand for the music of revelry. Panorama, which had begun the same
year Kitch had reconnected to Carnival (1963), was fast becoming the major Carnival
forum for steel bands. With high-tech enhancements powering up the capacity of brass
bands and, increasingly, deejays for road and party music, the steel bands’ prominence on
the Carnival music scene correspondingly faded. But before that
major shift had become a fait accompli, Kitchener’s status as
supreme crafter of music for the road had been indisputably
established. In fourteen Carnival celebrations between 1963 and
1976, Kitch won the road march title no fewer than 10 times. (4)
The Panorama would allow Kitchener to reach
deep into his reservoir of musical skills to come up with some of
the most stunning works ever written for pan and erase any doubt as
to his nonpareil ranking as a composer for this medium. From the
mid-70s there would be such niceties as Pan in Harmony and
Pan in the 21st Century. In both pieces, apart from
his musical acumen, he continued to demonstrate a familiarity with
and fondness for the constituent units of the pan orchestra,
something he tended to do throughout the years of his writing on pan
themes as, for example, in Steelband Music in the 1960s. In
Pan in Harmony, he was again singing the praises of
individual pan instruments and the fantastic music they make
together:
You can hear bass and the guitar in the
background
While the cello and the tenor with the
big sound
And they all join together
With the rhythm of the drummer
Pappy-O / Harmony fo’ so. (5)
Over his career, he would create individual
odes to the guitar pan, the iron man, the flag woman – not to
mention the countless shoutouts in his pan-themed compositions to
major modern-day figures, the likes of Clive Bradley, Ray Holman,
Boogsie Sharpe, Jit Samaroo et al. No aspect of what made steel band
music happen escaped Kitchener’s purview. Indeed one particular
gesture of salutation resulted in Kitch running afoul of many
historians and would-be historians of the pan phenomenon, when he
referred to pioneer Winston “Spree” Simon as the “inventor” of pan
in the 1975 road march, Tribute to Spree. (In truth, Kitch
should have known that claims about who did what, particularly in
the pan culture’s infancy, are a toxic area that should best be
studiously avoided.)
Beginning when he wound up living in LaCourt
Harpe in Port of Spain, after coming to town from Arima, and found
himself cheek-by-jowl with the Bar 20 steel band’s practice yard,
Kitch obviously considered himself intensely partial to pan music.
The decades-long avid interest would perhaps suggest a desire, along
the way, for hands-on involvement on his part, but he was quick to
set the record straight: “I don’t know anything about pan; I can’t
play it at all.”(6) Inspired by Bar 20, his Beat of a Steel Band
in 1944 set the stage for his unbroken identification with the world
of pan, represented in a manner that best did it for him, namely,
compositions that spoke to or were designed for this evolving new
musical experience that was so sweetly compatible with the calypso
tradition in which he was immersed.
1979 would come to assume special significance
in the odyssey, for this was the year of Symphony in G. The
piece is considered by many to be the first of Kitchener’s “major
reach” efforts. Structured with a minor-key
verse, this works to perfection as the attention-grabber, suggesting
something grand to follow. Those expectations are stylishly
fulfilled as the composition unfolds, all the way through
Kitchener’s use of patently classical lines that conclude the
chorus. Symphonic indeed! But 1979 happened, coincidentally, to be
the year of a steel band boycott of Panorama, thereby denying audiences what would surely have been a number
of bands trying to take the measure of Symphony in G. Going
against the grain, Desperadoes treated a grateful Carnival Tuesday
audience in the Grand Stand at Queen’s Park Savannah to Clive
Bradley’s brilliant arrangement. A sampling seems appropriate.
Driven by the need he recognized to supply
Panorama’s fiercely competitive participants with imaginative
material, Kitch would spare no effort through the 80s and 90s to do
so. Pan magazine referred to his reveling in a “Kitch vs
Kitch game of ‘Can You Top This?’” (7) Symphony in G, it
turned out, was merely setting us up for the tremendous flow of
compositional wizardry that would follow. Such works as No Pan,
Sweet Pan, Heat, Pan Night and Day, Pan In A Minor…lured us into
thinking there was nothing left in the tank. Guess again. We would
continue to be surprised by how awesome were Kitchener’s abilities
on the musical front. Always, after his last super offering, was the
chance that lurking around the corner was another Iron Man, Bees’
Melody, Earthquake, Guitar Pan…
Kitch let on that music was first in the
process of designing these pan-themed masterpieces. “Music is what
I’m looking for,” he said. “Once I get the music – those chords and
that melody – then finding a theme is easy.” (8) But, remarkably,
those were not “afterthought” lyrics that accompanied the music. His
lyrics had him assuming any number of roles. He was advocate, as in
his lamenting the steel bands’ reduced presence in Carnival in
1985’s Pan Night and Day. (“Every night, every day/People
want to hear the steel band play…We want you for all the time/Not
just for Jourvert”) He was, as always, the compelling storyteller,
as in his experience with the musical bees of Bees Melody
(1992), or the folks in Earthquake (1994) mistaking the
rumble of pans in the Panorama for genuine earth tremors. And he
seemed to particularly relish the role of teacher, shown off to
advantage in the 1987 blockbuster, Pan In A Minor, where pan
arrangers and players were his total focus:
Ah walk around the room and ah started to
create
Ah know ah have to prove to them
Ah have the ability
Ah there and then decide the minor should
dominate
If not entirely
For most of the melody
You notice the chorus carries a simple
hook
From the seventh to A minor…(9)
Lyrics that reflect a desire to share such
musical intelligence with panists are quite rare. But, aside from
getting into such technicalities vis a vis musical content, Kitch
oftentimes assigned himself the responsibility to be instructional
in the manner of his phrasing, again, clearly intended for the pan
player’s benefit. The verses of Pan in Harmony are
illustrative of this, as in: “If you pass by Salvatori Jourvert
mornin’/Yuh go hear pan till yuh giddy they ent jokin’” (10)
This in my view underscores the depth and
genuineness of the commitment that Kitchener maintained to the world
of pan. It must be said that the pan community in large measure
recognized his genius. In the era of a preponderance of steel band
music on the road, Kitchener came to be dubbed rather early the
“Road March King.” Later, when forces combined to shift the steel
bands’ gaze almost totally to Panorama, he was again front and
center. There were 36 Panorama contests between 1963 and 1999, the
year before Kitchener left us. The record compellingly makes the
case: bands performing Kitchener’s music were in the top three in 29
contests, winning on 18 occasions. (11) Here are excerpts from two
of his Panorama winners, Pan Night and Day (1985) and Iron
Man (1990).
The love affair between Kitchener and the pan
medium was no fly-by-night affair. For most of his long tenure as a
troubadour in calypso, where pan was concerned there was passion,
there was dedication. And his profound understanding of what best
constituted the music of the realm, remained in place to the very
end. Along came Toco Band in 1999, as he got ready to bow
out, as proof of that. One is constrained to say it will be many,
many moons, if ever, before we see his equal.
#####
(1)
Les Slater, “Lord Kitchener and Pan Music Have a Thing Going” Pan,
Fall 1987
(2)
Ibid
(3)
Ibid
(4)
National Carnival Bands Assoc., Trinidad & Tobago Complete
Carnival (2006)
(5)
Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), “Pan in Harmony” from album Home
For Carnival, KH Records (1976)
(6)
Les Slater, “Lord Kitchener and Pan Music Have a Thing Going” Pan,
Fall 1987
(7)
Ibid
(8)
Ibid
(9)
Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), “Pan in A Minor” from album
Kitchener the Grand Master, B’s Records (1987)
(10) Lord Kitchener
(Aldwyn Roberts), “Pan in Harmony” from album Home For Carnival,
KH Records (1976)
(11) National
Carnival Bands Assoc., Trinidad & Tobago Complete Carnival
(2006)
Contact the author at
-
slatertalentmart@yahoo.com
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