Trial and Error
How do you get
to Carnegie Hall? Practice,
practice, practice, goes an old
joke.
That WITCO Desperadoes
almost didn’t make it to the august
concert hall on West 57th Street
wasn’t because of a sparse work
ethic.
Bravo!
It was not, as some erroneously
reported, that Desperadoes was
the first steel orchestra to
play Carnegie Hall. That
had been done before on several
occasions. No, what gave this
event its landmark status was
the kind of Carnegie
Hall audience that “Despers”
had enthralled. This was not
the sort of crowd that convened
at Carnegie, as they did in
the 60’s, for a Sparrow–headlined
calypso show, with a steel band
thrown in. Or even the folks
on hand for the Pan Am North
Stars Steel Orchestra/(pianist)
Winifred Atwell trail blazer
almost twenty years ago.
For Desperadoes in ‘87 it was
an audience, predominantly,
of New York chic.
Harry
Belafonte, pan stick and
all, celebrates with the
Despers rank and file after
their memorable Carnegie
Hall Performance. New
York Daily News VP
John Camp is next to Belafonte.
(Photo by M. Bambi)
They had come to Carnegie,
lured by the likes of Liza Minnelli,
Skitch Henderson’s New York
Pops Orchestra, musical star
Peter Allen and others.
And it was the improbable WITCO
Desperadoes of Trinidad who
blew them away, delivering the
kind of knockout punch that
this gussied-up Gotham crowd
would not soon forget.
When they spontaneously broke
out in rhythmic hand-clapping
accompaniment to the familiar
strains of the “Can Can” in
Offenbach’s Orpheus in the
Underworld, it was all
over but for the shouting.
Now it could be certified: add
to the list of captives of Despers’
magical execution the Carnegie
Hall gathering of May 27, 1987.
Manager Robert Greenidge
would say later that the significance
of upstaging Liza Minnelli and
company would probably be lost
on most of his 45-member aggregation.
“I’m sure many of them didn’t
know how big a star someone
like Liza Minnelli is,” he said.
But certainly getting a couple
of prolonged standing ovations
at Carnegie had to have some
impact, wouldn’t he think? And
Greenidge concurred. “Of course.
That was exciting for all of
us.”
Successful appearances followed
at the Apollo Theater and Brooklyn
Academy of Music. And Greenidge
would look back on it all and
declare that the week-long tour’s
biggest payoff was its being
“a tremendous showcase for the
band. It showed that the Despers
was back and peaking again.”
The peaking, if that is indeed
what it was, couldn’t be more
impeccably timed. A characteristically
sober judgment offered by Trinidad
& Tobago’s Consul General in
New York, Babooram Rambissoon,
perhaps best put things in context:
“Despers achieved more in one
night at Carnegie Hall than
we have been able to accomplish
in more than 20 years of diplomatic
effort.”
Bureaucracy,
the boon of civil authority, and
its sidekick “per diem expenses”
the bane of the touring steel hand,
conspired to put the trip into jeopardy
at the very beginning. Nice move,
it turned out. Nice move?
Because pan lords
have been suffering from a case
of “ringing ears” since the TASPO
tour of ’51, the resulting “moneyocracy”
of the Despers experience could
serve as education to steel bands
aspiring to international stardom.
Ask The Radoes about the first lesson
in pan entrepreneurship and the
counsel you get is that all deals
must be packaged abroad.
It was inadvertent,
but the Despers tour was a pilot
project on how to vend the culture
tastefully and successfully, albeit
painfully. In truth, the band may
have set new standards for the marketability
of pan, thanks to the government
at home and corporate sponsors in
the Big Apple.
Hail the new
era of corporate pan.
It all began
in storybook ambience on a summer
evening last year in a New York
restaurant. None of the principals
was Trinidadian. So far so
good. Conductor Skitch Henderson
of the New York Pops, John Campi,
vice president and director of promotions
and public relations of the
New York Daily News and Karl
Rodney, publisher of Carib News
of New York, were chatting over
dinner following a Pops performance
at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre when
the subject of pan was broached.
Henderson had
lucked into the art form some 15
years ago in Halifax, Canada, and
had written a concerto for pan and
symphony.
“It wasn’t practical
then to bring a big band from Trinidad,”
he recalled in a recent interview.
But Henderson’s
ship was about to come in.
“I told Skitch
that I’d just returned from Trinidad,”
said Rodney, “and Catelli All Stars
was playing excellent music. Then
I invited both men to Trinidad for
the steel band championships last
October.”
Henderson was
unable to attend but Campi, a former
drummer, and the Jamaican-born Rodney
took in the world’s most prestigious
percussion festival with the excitement
of young boys on Christmas morning.
The magic of
Desperadoes—after all, they’d beaten
the champion All Stars, coming off
19 years of self-imposed exile—
begged to be showcased, and messrs
Campi, Rodney and Henderson found
good reason to oblige. (Trinidadian
Carlisle Hall, a New York travel
agency operator, was “very helpful”
in establishing contacts, Rodney
said.)
Notwithstanding
London’s Royal Albert Hall, in terms
of eminence Carnegie Hall is Mecca,
and Despers figured on earning kudos
and standing ovations from an eclectic
audience accustomed to virtuoso
performances. One small step
for Pan, one giant step for Trinidad
and Tobago. Well... maybe.
Eight months
lay between the contest and the
ultimate prize. Plenty of
time to deliver, right? But we’re
talking Trinidad time, of course.
To compound events, there was this
little matter of the government
changing hands in December.
In addition, the legacy of a Mother
Hubbard treasury that was left to
the new administration certainly
couldn’t help the cause. Moreover,
negotiations among the Ministry
of Culture, the Tourist Board and
the New York impresarios had bogged
down on a bureaucratic treadmill.
You got the feeling things were
moving but that wasn’t the case
at all, is how some parties close
to the action saw it.
Meanwhile, Pat
Bishop, Despers’ conductor, was
taking the band on long musical
trips well into the night.
So you want to get to Carnegie Hall?
How was she able
to whip the players into shape without
a baton?
“The way I conduct,”
she would say, “is to, for instance,
give a fella a bad eye. Facial
expressions are what do it for me.
I could never conduct with a naked
face.”
For their part,
Campi and company didn’t get the
big stare from the powers- that-be,
but obviously they felt a big chill
when promises went awry. At
one point word was given (and taken)
for the band’s expenses in New York:
ground transportation, etc., to
be paid by the Tourist Board.
Later, there would be no money in
the till. Now you see it,
now you don’t, for there was “nothing
in writing.”
The tour was
unraveling even before it got underway.
Enter the Ministry’s Joan Massiah.
“She acted as
liaison at a crucial time, and we
appreciated her efforts,” Campi
said.
Still, the band
wasn’t sure about the trip as late
as three weeks before actual departure.
Finally, courtesy the affable BWIA,
Desperadoes arrived in this city
of eight million big dreams on a
literal wing and a prayer.
“If we had the
time we could have booked the band
on the popular Today show, as well
as a host of other TV shows,” Campi
said. “Great talent was held
back. Why must this music
be kept a secret?”
Big Apple Serenade: A
Despers salute to New York City
rings out from the City Hall.
Then there was
the unresolved question of hotel
expenses, etc. Coca-Cola and AT&T
provided answers not at all too
soon. As major sponsor, the
Daily News contributed massively,
including the running of 10 full-page
ads over a span of two weeks.
The paper also printed a special
front page feature highlighting
the band’s New York achievements.
Each concert goer at the four sold-out
shows received an issue as a memento.
The accolades
poured in like humanity would at
a Prince/Michael Jackson one–nighter.
Harry Belafonte told the band after
it received two standing O’s at
the Carnegie benefit: “It
took me 40 years to play Carnegie.
You guys made it and were super.”
“I have a tough
orchestra,” Henderson said, “but
my guys dropped their jaws and never
closed them until Despers finished
playing. I used to think the
instrument was limited, but not
anymore.
New York
Pops music director Skitch Henderson
joins Desperadoes manager Robert
Greenidge and conductor Pat
Bishop
“Despers is the
Rolls Royce of this representation
of classical music. I love Pat Bishop.”
“This trip,” Bishop said, “has confirmed
to me that the instrument is quite
remarkable and utterly legitimate
and I don’t think we deserve it,
because we have no use for it.
We don’t know what to do with it.”
That’s the way she
speaks.
Outrageously sincere.
Bishop was waiting
for a bus outside her Manhattan
hotel when a black woman approached
her. “Sister,” the stranger said,
“you don’t know what you’ve done
for black people.”
Said David Rudder,
who performed with opening act Pelham
Goddard and Charlie’s Roots at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music three
days after the Carnegie concert:
“The performance of Desperadoes
brings more and more people into
our world, because we’ve been living
in their world for so long.”
Goddard himself
allowed as how the culture was exposed
to a “different type of audience
this time.” Pan has been to New
York before, of course, but not
the way Despers has brought it here.”
The Flip Side...
It is perhaps inevitable,
given the oftentimes rocky and
unrewarded course Trinidad &
Tobago’s steel band music has
run, that an event like the
Desperadoes visit to New York
would take form in a manner
that has a bristling effect
in some quarters. During and
immediately following the week
of performances, there was no
shortage of detractive comment.
Probably so on account the band’s
enjoying unprecedented publicity—thanks,
primarily—to the involvement
of the mass-circulation
New York Daily News—and
therefore being much more of
a conversation piece than would
normally have been the case.
Carlisle Hall—whose past
is not without substantive acknowledgement
of pan’s compelling presence—considers
himself no mere bystander in
the Despers-in-New-York scenario.
A central player when the undertaking
was little more than a drawing
board item, Hall wound up (of
his own volition, he insists)
on the periphery as the exercise
snaked and bumped its way toward
fulfillment. His
main contention has been (i)
that the Trinidad & Tobago government
chose not to make capital of
the exceptional promotional
opportunity the Despers tour
afforded, and (ii) that some
folk seemed more intent on personal
high-profiling than in seeing
the band through a flawless
schedule of commitments.
“By declining to pick
up the band’s per diem and other
incidental expenses,” Hall said,
“the Trinidad government in
effect rejected the idea that
we should be in solid control
of the promotional flow deriving
from this event. It was a signal
that we were willing to go along
with whatever others contrived.
Here we had a rare opportunity
to come up with a really first-rate
effort to enhance the Trinidad
& Tobago image and it was not
seized. As a Trinidad
& Tobago national, I was embarrassed
by such a stance.”
“As far as the several instances
of bandwagon-hopping, that’s
to be expected I guess. I just
didn’t think that some people
would be so gross about it-that
they would display such a lack
of integrity and ethics.”
Desperadoes manager
and professional solo artist Robert
Greenidge, who had given Brooklyn
patrons a heavenly helping of ”Stardust”
as a bonus, recounted the experience:
“We hope these engagements would
break the ice on the world who still
think of the steel drum in terms
of ‘Yellow Bird.’ We’re in
the league of big-time music.
Those responsible for the Carnegie
event are the kind of people who
will continue breaking the ice.
Already, we’re receiving overtures
from corporations about future trips.”
But it was Tourist
Board Director Winston Borrell who
had the last important word.
“In the present
environment,” Borrell explained,
“financial resources are limited.
And as they become scarce we expect
promoters from the private sector
at home and abroad to help out.”
“Other entities
enjoy the financial benefits of
the band’s performances,” he said.
“Nothing’s wrong with that. But
if revenue is generated why can’t
sponsors abroad provide per diem
expenses?”
“As for the negotiations,
decisions were made late in the
game because of financial considerations.
In the future, the requesting agents
should define how they can meet
all costs of the touring group before
seeking our help. We feel such sponsors
should be prepared to stand more
and more of the expenditure.”
According to
Rodney, the Despers concerts benefited
New York’s Associated Black Charities
and the Caribbean Education and
Cultural Institute.
There may be
reason to brush aside the issue
under the circumstances but has
anybody ever thought of Laventille
as a charity case? Why, Pat
Bishop never earned a penny for
her stint on the podium. Never.
Sure, the tour
put Desperadoes and Trinidad and
Tobago in the international spotlight,
but consider all those nights on
the hill those 47 panists shared
with the dew.
Classic story
of pan music gone, panman stay.
Maybe, just maybe, corporate sponsorship
is the window of opportunity for
the steel band movement.
EPILOGUE
Naysayers notwithstanding,
the visit of WITCO Desperadoes to
New York cannot, in the final analysis,
be viewed negatively. Even if there
were those whose motives were not
as wholesome as they postured publicly,
even if Trinidad & Tobago’s interests
were not astutely served, even if
the conductor of this champion orchestra
was moved to wonder whether the
said Trinidad & Tobago “deserves”
custodial rights to so marvelous
an art form, the Despers tour should
be seen as nothing but one giant
plus.
The observation
that the Carnegie stint far outstripped
Trinidad & Tobago’s cumulative diplomatic
outreach since statehood in 1962,
is dead-on. Despers at Carnegie
Hall, the highlight of the week,
was major–league stuff. More
of the same is obviously needed.
There is no reason to believe more
of the same can’t be accomplished.
There are lessons to be learnt,
of course, and some odd-ball precepts
that ought summarily be dumped.
But “accentuate the positive” should
be the biggest lesson of all. There
was enough about Despers in New
York in ’87 from which solid building
blocks could be fashioned.
And, for an event that almost never
was, that’s a respectable enough
helping of “positive” to accentuate.
