Panorama 2012 Notes - Ramajaying All Over Steel City
Trinidad & Tobago Panorama 2012

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• Anthony Williams revealed that he was tuning mystical secrets, “mainly the first pans,” for his second Panorama victory in a row (Mama Dis Is Mas). No wonder Desperadoes and Highlanders never had a chance with the same song. Pan Am North Stars claimed the first two Panoramas in 1963-64, yet Williams wasn’t thrilled because he thinks the arrangers were judged as amateurs. There’s more. “When Guinness Cavaliers won the 1965 competition with Melody Mas, Williams chalked it up to their high-decibel basses. “It created an impact,” he says. “When you lose a competition and analyze why, and if you don’t know, you drop out.”
  
  Panorama is a reptilian thing that roams the Savannah year after year, no matter how hard you try to break the word down. When I asked Keith Diaz, president of Pan Trinbago, if the beast is still in Pan, he didn’t flinch.
  
  “That’s the nature of Pan, the trials and tribulations of the pan man. That’s how I became a steel band man who knows the belly of the steel band movement. You need to be strong. Hardcore. Tough decisions. The demands placed on a steel band man...The steel band movement is not easy.
  
  “I knew George Goddard. I watched him walk up and down fighting for Panorama, and I said one day that I’d be in his shoes. I served under past presidents of Pan Trinbago, such as Arnim Smith, Owen Serrette, Patrick Arnold. You have to know the pan world. You have to know the belly of the steel band man. Rudolph Charles was a steel band man.” Well, all right, then! The beast still in this thing.
   

• Grandmothers always said to wake the mango tree before you try to pick its fruit. And that’s what Andre White, Desperadoes’ arranger, did with Prophet of Pan. Wait till next year when he has all the horses (sure, you can very well read between the lines) and the vibes between Robert Greenidge and him have ripened. Maybe the following year he will have owned the tree up on the hill. Not the one that some pan people think Judas hung himself from. White, Seion Gomez, Shenelle Abraham, Liam Teague and the rest of the 35 Panorama arrangers under 35 years old have the power to swing the music toward the youth movement, which includes 82 percent that play Pan.
   

• Pan’s spontaneous improvisations (as opposed to the controlled versions embedded in Panorama arrangements) is what an American music professor expects in future Panoramas, where they pull out all the stops, because he’s seen them do it in the pan yard. A few extemporizers come to mind:  Len “Boogsie” Sharpe, Ken “Professor” Philmore, Duvone Stewart and Ray Holman. A seismic shift? Naaah! A sea change, perhaps.
   

• Tuner Cliff Alexis at Northern Illinois University reminds that Panorama is a show and you can hardly make out the faces under the canopies. The finals happen at night, for Christ’s sake, when the tone “is different.” The pans ring a lot more. And it’s different from playing in the sun because the heat excites the partials.”
   

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• A Carnival moon rising in the east throws its incandescent light on the Silver Stars pan yard in the west as four panists rehearse a controlled improvisation passage in preparation for leader Edwin Pouchet’s call to order. Pouchet is being interviewed for a story about two brothers and a band when he brings up the topic of race in pan. “In 2008, we had the band’s 60th anniversary, and [elder brother] Junior gave a speech about his early involvement in Silver Stars. One part said it all. He used to play football and cricket; swim and hike all over the island, and when he led Silver Stars he became white. Everybody laugh. It’s the truth but nobody wants to talk about it. Looking back at pictures of the band in the 1960s, there were no white players, but some supporters were white. Whites might have followed us and Dixieland because we were not involved in the violence.”
   

  
  Pat Bishop

• Pat Bishop’s sister Gillian Bishop: “Gregory Ballantyne called about Pat’s life and works - a long session we had. Two days later he sang Archbishop of Pan on the telephone. I was very emotional. Boogsie requested the Lydian Singers, and I thought it was as backup singers but he said no, it’s a choral song. When I’m listening to the piece in the pan yard I don’t have time for emotion. Just the execution, the whole presentation breaking so much new ground. I come here literally every night to watch him work his magic. I have so much faith in him. His musicality. His judgement. Tremendous. He’s in a good place. He’s being fed by the music. They both had respect for each other, and now the whole thing is playing itself out in the music.”
   

• Phase II is the only band in the Panorama, a supporter in the yard said. “The heavens will open and angels and so on will come down and give him victory. But the Savannah people (judges) gonna give him second. Panorama is not an English-speaking competition. They’ll open the door and slam it in your face, not open it for you to pass.”
   

• Leon “Smooth” Edwards, arranger of champion band Trinidad All Stars, recalled that when he tried late in 2011 to reach Clive Telemaque, one of the band’s crack-shot players, here’s what filtered through the ear piece: “I in the studio and Pelham [Goddard] arranging my song.”
  
  “Well, he brought Play Yourself after the recording,” Smooth said, “and that song was making more sense to us than any other. It was in the mood of what we kinda wanted to do.”
  
  Trinidad All Stars is a musically promiscuous big band. Bet on it.
   

  
  Katzenjammers Steel Orchestra

• Maxon Ramsey, Katzenjammers’ driller, has unusual conductor skills. But one needs to relax and hear the band, not watch Ramsey throw waist. You always knew when a passage was about to turn the corner because he telegraphed the move like a traffic cop. From the get-go you realized that the Tobago band had the Medium Band championship in hand. Everything else was gravy. Like the fast bowler’s pace of the music. Like when Ramsey takes a lil wine on the flag girl or loses his cap as he crabs across the face of the frontline pans the way a fancy sailor with a nip in hand thinks he owns Park Street.
   

  
  Siparia Deltones Steel Orchestra

• Siparia Deltones should be thankful that arranger Carlton “Zanda” Alexander a) hails from a musical family, his father’s shoemaker shop in Siparia over the years having become a repository for creativity, and b) Zanda and his brother Clive Zanda had been collaborators at the late Schofield Pilgrim’s informal school of Pan jazz and jazzalypso that included Boogsie Sharpe and Barry Howard and Raf Robertson, among a host of elite pioneers a few decades ago.
   

  
  Redemption Sound Setters

• Only 12.55 a.m., and arranger Winston Gordon still hasn’t got over the 2.30 a.m. blues he’d been harboring all week since the semifinal when his complaint that his Tobago orchestra, Redemption Sound Setters, carried children, including a 10-year-old, during the 49-band marathon that took about 17 hours to complete the course. Take note, Diaz.
   

  
  Phase II Pan Groove

• Boogsie Sharpe, who composed more than 35 Panorama pieces, took Bishop of Pan to Peter Minshall for his blessing, the mas man having been a dear friend of Pat Bishop’s. Come to find out that Minsh, who waved a huge silver flag during the band’s performance, suggested Archbishop, according to the Phase II bad boy, because she was more an archbishop than a bishop. Point well taken. Hear Boogsie: “The song will live on, maybe 20 years or more.” Meanwhile, the band sported its best-tuned pans, perhaps ever, what with Bertrand Kelman’s magic with the hammer. And bassist Korey Vincent on the G-Pan Six letting on that he revels in the sound. “Louder than an ordinary six.”
   

  
  Fonclaire Steel Orchestra

• Ken “Professor” Philmore speaking at 3 a.m. when the Grand Stand was thinning out, said just before he dropped Vibes that his presentation should remind of funk. “Old school, that’s what it is.” Hey, hey, hey! Stop that! Storm was 22 years ago. No need to revisit. Everybody knows the lowdown, though the ‘Gades would never acknowledge what went down that classic night. Memory doesn’t serve them right, you see. Or, maybe the rest of us imbibe in a parallel universe. I have the gospel truth, you have yours, and, hell, never the twain shall meet. Not on this score.
   

• Back to the Phase. Archbishop vamped chords that would have made a harp wimp, the easterly wind strumming them across the Savannah like UMOs, pulsing the music to breathe - like the sound of a slow jam.
   

  
  Trinidad All Stars Steel Orchestra

• Once the lights are switched back on the stage and the metronome of the pan stick slapping the side of a double second drives the Trinidad All Stars frontline, four deep, and catapulting the motor off the cliff while taking thousands in the audience on a wild ride, “Smooth” might have referred to the experience as a conversation among the drums, though it turns out to be a rollicking roller-coaster adventure...players bobbing and weaving through the welter of notes during the free-fall into the dry river, which hurries passages out to sea, to the deep, from whence the music came.  “Smooth” just giving back, that’s all.
   

• The broken dream of the short sailor suit nobody picked up, as my friend, poet Mervyn Taylor, a true-true mas man would stutter step in conversation; the half-past Carnival Sunday doze of a mas maker slumped over his sewing machine; the gutting of the flesh in the Carnival - all of that to follow Dimanche Gras and J’Ouvert. For now, though, the pan making a face in chrome. For real, Bro.

So it hang, so it fall, bloggers.

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