An Embarrassment of Riches

Global - A hot early-summer night in Florida and the AC’s cranked up but I’ve disabled the alarm because I’m gonna amp the juice box to the sky as if Jouvert’s here and those suckers with the big-bang special effects strapped to their trucks are hearing pan and anxious to drown out the bad ol’ steel, rubbing it in by wiping their mouths with that crunky Appalachian laugh of theirs, like you know what I mean?

Yeah, you do. So I’m gonna play this bad boy that fellow TTT announcer Alvin Daniell slipped me in 2003 because I had a vaps about the Rama and thought Boogise Sharpe and his yardies, the only band I’d heard (after stopping in a drive-by around the Savannah on my way from the airport to my pad on semifinal Sunday) in the Julie season of Pan, a Bertie Marshall film playing on my mind all these years and time rushing up to me to roll it. So, no – no Rama for me in 2003, because I’d heard the best already, best ever and you can pong me all you want.

Ay man, what’s the new buzzword they use on TV these days? Ah, “nuance.” That’s it! Yuh hadda be dere to pik up de NUANCE. Ting doh come vi-ke-vi so (OK, vaille que vaille). I caught the nuance of Phase II’s song, Music in we Blood, locked it een and I gone – no marathon interview session on the stage for me that year – Lord Bertie’s on hold.

Well, my dear soldiers and sistas, I even wrote a piece for The Express and I’m still guilt-ridden over how many Panoramaphiles may have lost their shirts because of my “lock” pick. Yes, you guessed right, the results. Ha, Lord, that’s why Daniell handed me the double CD so I could stanch the embarrassment and pay penance by unloading Desperadoes. Here’s what he said. “When you get the chance listen to Despers on this CD.” All manner of “things” intervened before I got the chance, soldiers and sistas. First, the prologue. You tink it sorf. Read on. The Express, please.
 

Phase II bass player in panorama heaven on stage performing "Music in We Blood"

- photo by C. Phillips

It was absolutely the best Panorama performance I’ve ever heard. It was music in B sharpe. Last Sunday, I found that new note just inside Pan Trinbago’s “village,” the organisation’s brand old drag, the one that was introduced to us at the western front of the Savannah Party in a getting-to-know-you moment. Here, under metal-gray skies, in the vicinity of 2.30 p.m., Boogsie Sharpe and his Phase II Pan Groovers cut loose a symphonic arrangement of Music in we Blood for a grap of villagers that circled the band’s cosquelle drums like a halo. So, it was divine, then? Hello? Let me explatiate.

First of all, TV host Allyson Hennessy later told me about a similar experience, when an American musicologist left the Savannah (as I had following the Phase II workout Sunday), after Desperadoes had bowled over the crowd with Robert Greenidge’s Musical Volcano. “I tried to tell her that was the first band, and there were 11 more to come,’’ Hennessy recalled. “But she said, ‘I don’t want anything to spoil the memory of what I’ve just heard.’ ” So Despers won, for real.
 

Peter Minshall’s dance crew performs with Phase II

- photo by C. Phillips

Secondly, you could use all the musical terms in serious music, like arpeggios and dissonant chords; or in jazz lingo, like riffs; or in hip-hop slang, like slammin’, know what I’m saying? But, simply put, Boogsie’s music, at THAT venue, at THAT time, under THAT sizzlin’ drizzle, was laid down like a classic work. Like music from the masters. The arranger had taken a Panorama piece, and as Peter Minshall had done with Tapestry, distilled all of his experiences in the art and wrapped them in a rainbow, colors that Boogsie used on tenor basses and quads to fatten the melody in presenting his sweetie of a treat. I was enamored of those tenor basses and front line pans how they danced in lockstep as their conversation, no-no-no, ole talk, tic-tac-toed off the puddles, which got fuller with the intermittent rain.

One time, the tenors and their counterpart double tenors carried you up a chromatic scale, higher and higher in gigantic steps, way past pregnant clouds, up yonder near the ozone layer—OK, so they waxed heavenly—and then Boogsie walked you back to earth, back to the bloodstream, so that you could rediscover his music. It was like being outside (foreign) and then coming home to rediscover your identity: Trini in de blood. Yeah, in the very marrow of the bone, even. That was where Sharpe left you; flat-out exhausted for the thrill of the experience. Another time, he stopped the music cold with his makeshift wand, as if to say, let dat sink een, leh it consomme for a few beats, before he carried on with his mad lark of a Panorama tune that was so confectionary, it bordered on your calling the doc for a shot of insulin.
 

Phase II dedicated their 2003 finals performance to the mother of Len “Boogsie” Sharpe

- photo by C. Phillips

It was sicker than how arranger Leon Smooth Edwards of Trinidad All Stars described his atonal chords in a Panorama piece eons ago. “That was sick,’’ he said in the aftersweat of his victory. For his part, Boogsie said he was dedicating this year’s performance to his mother, who passed away December 18.
 

“That’s why I used a different approach,’’ he said afterward. “A week before she died, she was suffering from a stroke on her left side. I always run my song by her first, before anybody else, and when I played it, her head nodded to the music, her big toe kept time and she squeezed my hand about 10 times. I knew it was my best melody ever. She knew it too. So the approach was classical. “It’s good music,’’ he said. “It HAS to be a classic. So the tenor basses vibrated. And the song ended with a rhythmic bass, not the usual Panorama ending.’’

Does he fear Clive Bradley and Desperadoes? Smooth and All Stars? The rest of the Dirty Dozen? “There’s a lot of pressure on me because Bradley wants to beat me with my own music,’’ he said. “But I respect All Stars the most. They are the champions. They just don’t take things lightly, like final night.’’

I remember visiting a pan judge at her home in Sando many years ago. She recalled why she admonished her peers when Boogsie had dropped da bomb, I Music, on the world.

“One of these days,’’ she had told them, “we’ll have to deal with this man.’’

So said, so done.

Subsequently, The Phase won two titles. But, since ‘88 this man can’t catch a break. Maybe because Despers, All Stars, Exodus, Nutones and Renegades, and, oh yes, in a few cases the judges themselves, as supporters are wont to believe, all have conspired to keep him on a leash.

Well, the dog is out, and has taken a fork in the road. So, could the new mantra from the judges’ box be, “One of these days, we’re going to have to deal with this man, anew’’? Hey, if music in dey blood, maybe they have to start dealing, like NOW. B sharpe’s not an easy note to hold for long. It can get cloying, like toffee. You just can’t get the taste out of your mouth, er, blood. Ask the villagers.

End of story? Nah, not quite.

Let’s climb back into the crib, lay back, cock yuh foot and give the late Clive Bradley’s piece a chance.
 

Desperadoes Crew at 2003 finals

- photo by C. Phillips

Oy, right off the back foot pops a commencement ceremony for our talents as a people; and he doesn’t leave it there but takes us back to the panyard where the hills are alive with the sound of music. And, true as the sampling from the musical, the band takes flight with clever orchestration, one of the keys to Bradley’s genius, the instruments blending like orange peel tea and brown sugar. Good for the blood as your grandmother would say. Lots of iron, too, which you get in rich, clear doses from the foundry. The whole thing sparkles. He’s riding on the red road now, taking you along this way and that. Mathematics and music. He’s got the connection and it’s playing to the crowd. Hear them? Numbers and scales. It’s his theory of how to market a competitor’s handiwork. Like the background pans, how they come to the fore by polishing the score. Toward the middle, the enforcer inserts a passage that reads like a composition inside a novel, then thrusts a leggo upon the crowd, old wine in new music, the tenors customizing the rhythm by syncopation. A pinch of dissonance here, a snappy stop there in a salute to Sharpe and chromatic chords counterpointing the subdued mood of a minor key. All of this is happening as mostly Laventillians, I gather from years working Panorama at the Savannah, sway at the front and back of the stage. You heard it in your bones as they rattled along to Bradley’s conversation – which very well could have been about a bullfighter’s flashy suit, but really turned on Boogsie Sharpe’s subject about the multicultural music coursing our veins. In the end, Bradley reminded one and all that it was the hills that were alive with the sound of Boogie’s music. And the recording was Panorama Semifinals, mind you, just an hour after I’d left the cosquelle band. Final night was something else, though. Ask the villagers.

Results from 2003
Exclusive Interviews with the arrangers of TnT 2003 Panorama

The author Dalton Narine grew up in Belmont, East Dry River and Success Village, Laventille.  He played pan for Trinidad All Stars for 20 years and Highlanders for a Carnival season.

Contact Dalton Narine:  narine67@bellsouth.net

Published with the express permission of the author, Dalton Narine

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