Pan Buzz

I am back hav­ing spent some months in the USA with fam­i­ly. You know that Car­ni­val is not far off once the ru­mour mill be­gins churn­ing about pan and ca­lyp­so, and mas of course. Just a lil teas­er for Panora­ma 2012. A birdie whis­pered to me this week that Ex­o­dus, the most suc­cess­ful steel or­ches­tra in East Trinidad, will ap­pear in next year's com­pe­ti­tion as Re­pub­lic Bank Ex­o­dus. Ex­o­dus was pre­vi­ous­ly spon­sored by Sagi­cor. Songs for Panora­ma 2012 are fly­ing like bul­lets from a ban­dit's ma­chine gun.

Ear­ly out of the blocks are Car­wash (Dun­stan Lawrence), Ja­son Isaac's (Peanuts) Pan Tur­bu­lence, and, De Fos­to's An in­ter­ven­tion of Hope.

Al­ston Jack is in the fray as well with Voodoo Woman. This year, he paid trib­ute to the Bam­boo Man and, in 2009, thrilled us with Time. Lon­don-based bass woman De­bra Ro­main (Pan Di­va) de­buts with Tri­als of a Pan Woman. Crazy, the Love­able Lu­natic, has Kam­la the Great­est and al­ready steel­bands are look­ing at this one. Du­vonne Stew­art, who cam­paigned suc­cess­ful­ly with sin­gle pan band La Hor­quet­ta Pan Groove, has re­port­ed­ly been giv­en the ba­ton at bpTT Rene­gades. He steps up in­to the big league af­ter parad­ing in the mi­nor con­fer­ence of pan in which he led Pan Groove to five suc­ces­sive wins in the sin­gle pan com­pe­ti­tion.

Mean­while a Brook­lyn-based arranger/com­pos­er/pan­nist is await­ing word from a heavy roller south band to arrange for them. And, the buzz is that a big To­ba­go steel­band is in­ter­est­ed in his ser­vices to main­tain their win­ning edge as well.