Trinidad
& Tobago, W.I. - The city had been
sitting prettier than in recent years -
smoldering, really.
Another fine
Children’s Carnival; the grand Soca
Monarch finals; a strident tone
infiltrating through the half-opened car
window (“Who the hell is Machel Montano?
Girl, I was vex!); the young woman in
fishnet stockings and gym boots hanging
with friends Carnival Friday night on
Tragarete Road. A premonition from a
voice by over so: “Despers can’t cut
style.” Oh yes, and plenty of Pan on
Panorama Saturday.
It could have been Fight
Night the way blows landed and blood
flowed on the canvas, a place we all
fear.
In context, then,
Leon
“Smooth” Edwards, arranger for Trinidad
All Stars, just might be a prize fighter
the way he used the knockout to punch
the lights out of his adversaries at the
Queen’s Park Savannah.
Yet, it was
Len “Boogsie” Sharpe, Phase II Pan Groove’s
arranger, who provided the hand wrap a
boxer uses before the gloves are laced
up.
Earlier in the season,
Boogsie got Edwards’ ear when he
suggested that Trinidad All Stars choose
Edwin
Pouchet’s “It’s Show Time”
for Panorama 2011.
Boogsie had offered his
own song, “Do Something for Pan,”
when he heard Edwards hadn’t composed
any music for the festival.
“I told him it was too
controversial, the lyrics,” Edwards
said. “He told me, that is the only way
I could beat him.”
“Awright, awright,”
Edwards shot back. “I ain’t ‘fraid
that.”
Saturday night, Edwards
proved that he could tear out the guts
of a watch and make it whole again, but
in his own image. You could tell how, in
the panyard, he had sauntered into his
own head as composer and sprang back out
having remade the work more personal.
And that’s how Trinidad
All Stars won the Panorama.
“It’s show time and All
Stars is about show,” Edwards said.
Sparkles and fireworks
that underscored All Stars’ performance
might have been a little over the top,
though. No gimmickry was necessary.
Style and a little sass, that’s all.
“People are saying we
have the strongest frontline pans, but
we also have the strongest bass players.
It was a conversation in Pan. We brought
out the middles, too. Serious
conversation about ‘Show Time.’ It’s in
the same line as all the classics I’ve
done, including ‘Woman on the Bass,’
which still rules after 31 years.”
Edwards wasn’t just
mouthing off. His victory left Exodus,
Phase II Pan Groove and Silver Stars
watching from the canvas as every Duke
Street star pranced around in
celebration.
For its part in the
slugfest, Phase II didn’t dance across
the stage at all during its hot round.
Instead, Boogsie snapped off statement
after statement, sticking it to steel
band authorities. His plan was to score
and score some more. Not points, but
blows.
During one of his spare
but eloquent passages, the pans suddenly
had gone voicish, speaking Boogsie’s
truth about the state of affairs of pan
in the nation. Well, maybe a semitone
bark, alerting the culture that not only
has the Woodbrook wonder band been
talking the talk but also walking the
walk. See what we’re doing? What are
YOU doing? Such a challenge The Phase
had set for the evening! Addressing a
lack of moral and creative authority,
“Boogsie” kept pounding the pans as if to
say, “Dammit, you have a conscience,
stop wringing its neck!”
Another rhetoric he
phrased could have been, “Y’all in
another world. Why not do something for
pan right where it’s at in Trini Town?”
And so they fought, The
Phase, as if their lives (or bank
account) depended on it.
Sure, the echo whipped
up by the band rushed through the crowd
and rustled like cane fire. When the
smoke cleared, the panel of judges, it
seemed, couldn’t or didn’t bother to
translate the music. An illogical
judgement to some, logical to others,
they twinned the band with Invaders for
fourth place.
With Pouchet at home
resting after his discharge from the
hospital a few days before the big
fight, Silvers Stars, who ran third,
never winced. If All Stars is “show,” as
they themselves emphatically noted, then
Silver Stars has a fetish for lights,
bright ones, and its performance seemed
readymade for the brilliance overhanging
the Savannah night.
Alas, they must have
taken orders from their corner men, a
crew from the Ministry of
Self-Indulgence, and glittered off like
specks of gold down river. Swimming with
the fishes, they call it in Mob
territory.
That left Exodus alone
on the stage with All Stars because
Invaders, Desperadoes and Fonclaire
couldn’t duke it out with the Hell Yard
crowd. Invaders had power for the first
time in years and years but lacked
sting. They don’t call it stinging power
for nothing. Clive Bradley had it. Jit
Samaroo, too.
Desperadoes, strong and
brave, but with a weak chin for a
national song that echoed “Hot Hot Hot,”
regained points lost in an earlier
scrap. Still, the scoresheet didn’t
reflect the band’s revamped attitude.
Should the triad of
Beverly Griffith,
Eddie Quarles and Andre Robley, the
Young Turk, a student at the University
of Trinidad and Tobago, whom Bradley had
taken under his wing, and leader Martin
“PC” Cain, have switched songs in
mid-season as Peter Minshall did in 1987
with “Santimanitay” and “Carnival is
Colour?” That move brought home a Band
of the Year title, remember? Naaah. It’d
be like walking back to the Mang, the
swampy area looking out to the Sea Lots
Channel in Southeast Port of Spain.
As for the San Fernando
band, Fonclaire time-travelled a ways to
1990, when “Pan by Storm” lost to
Renegades’ “Iron Man,”
Ken “Professor”
Philmore on TV telling the nation that
the contest had become an arrangerama.
That the future needed fixing. At the
time, he was way ahead of Boogsie, who
woofs louder today and carries a bolo
for lunch.
The future is now,
though, and vengeance stemming from a
half-point loss, one of the residuals of
Panorama, and packaged as “A Raging
Storm,” couldn’t catch up with the
rhythmic jam and jab Fonclaire had
banked on a decade ago for sustenance in
the League of Five.
A week ago, Town was
abuzz with talk about the pecking order
in the new normal Fab Five, and Exodus
was left untethered. Dem’s fighting
words in movie talk. The band from St.
Augustine looked spiffy in tunics as
clean and white as a pristine chord.
Sans canopies, Exodus had the carriage
of soldiers under drill. That’s how the
music behaved as well. The introduction
to Destra’s “Calling Meh” began with a
sample from Kes The Band’s “Wotless,” and took
you along in as solid a performance as
you’d get from this disciplined
orchestra most every time it performs.
Like a line in pianissimo that
highlighted the passage that preceded
the vaunted
Pelham Goddard climax,
which, of course, elicited sustained
applause.
Everyone in the house
now knew the threat Exodus posed.
In the light heavyweight
contest, Katzenjammers, a Tobago band
with panoramic plans, drew with Valley
Harps for the 2011 Championship belt.
Who’s to say they might have won
outright hadn’t arranger
Michelle
Huggins-Watts, adventured down a path
less trodden and changed time from 2/4
to 3/4 and back, here a calypso there a
waltz.
She wanted to win so badly,
pushing her luck was the trick.
It was a kind of
granular thinking against
traditionalism; perhaps taking a
paragraph from mental notes she kept as
a player in Phase II.
“I just dived in and
slowed down the tempo,” Huggins-Watts
said after her band played into the
crowd’s heart. “It was easier to get in
but more technical in a way, because we
had to get it right by doing pulsing
together over and over, and I told the
drummer to keep the time on the cymbal
so everybody can hear it and go with
him.
“I used a small phrase
to get out of it that was inventive. In
the preliminaries and semifinal, judges
noted that they could feel and hear the
begging to do something for pan. One of
them referred to it as a lamentation
about the condition of the art form.
“It was a 12-bar blues
progression - the device, which I
attribute to my knowledge of literature
as a teacher. I tend to do a lot of
interpretation with the music. That
dictated this bluesy line you heard.”
Now, in the aftermath,
the city’s sitting a little prettier
than in recent Panorama memory following
Huggins-Watts little waltz inside a
Panorama Calypso. And Katzenjammers’
promise to build a dynasty could turn
the 2012 festival into a battle royal.
Well, Do Something for
Pan. Bring the whole lot back. What a
musical evening! They had a fight and a
Panorama broke out.
Just plain lovely.
________________
Contact Dalton Narine -
narine67@bellsouth.net
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