Cherisse Moe

Mu­sic pe­ri­od at Preysal Sec­ondary School is nev­er just an or­di­nary class. An­dre Fred­er­ick, who teach­es steel­pan to Forms One to Five, en­sures it is an en­joy­able ex­pe­ri­ence filled with prac­ti­cal life lessons.

He knows the pow­er of the in­stru­ment all too well. Grow­ing up in Mor­vant, the South East Port-of-Spain Sec­ondary alum­nus re­mem­bers pass­ing boys around his age lim­ing on the block on his way to school and then see­ing them in the ex­act spot, still in the same clothes, on his way back home in the evenings af­ter ex­tra pan lessons. It was an al­most dai­ly oc­cur­rence, a lifestyle he nev­er had the time for, even if he want­ed it.

“Mu­sic was my es­cape from a lot of per­son­al is­sues in child­hood,” he tells Guardian Me­dia. “It gave me some­thing to look for­ward to and kept me busy. It has giv­en me dis­ci­pline and self-con­fi­dence. I was very shy but once I reached sec­ondary school, stu­dents would come up to me and ask ‘You is the boy who does play pan ent?’ It start­ed the con­ver­sa­tion for me.”

Pan first piqued his in­ter­est when he was around sev­en, watch­ing his cousins Mar­lon Ben­tham play for Trinidad All Stars and Richard Ben­tham for In­vaders Steel Or­ches­tra on tele­vi­sion dur­ing Panora­ma.

“It just looked like some­thing fun to be a part of.”

Then, in Stan­dard Four at Chi­napoo Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry, it was an­nounced dur­ing the morn­ing as­sem­bly that the school’s band had won a com­pe­ti­tion and the play­ers were pre­sent­ed with tro­phies. But most of them were due to grad­u­ate and teach­ers need­ed to re­cruit new mem­bers. An­dre signed up im­me­di­ate­ly.

“My moth­er gave me the go-ahead be­cause she knew I al­ways want­ed to play. I must take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to shout out my first pan teacher Mr Dale Mc­Don­ald, he passed away in 2021. Our ini­tial lessons were close to Christ­mas, so he taught so­ca parang and we per­formed in the school con­cert that year,” he re­calls.

“As a teacher now, I can say that is the best way to learn an in­stru­ment...learn easy, pop­u­lar mu­sic. That feel­ing of hear­ing a song on the ra­dio and be­ing able to play it is in­de­scrib­able! It felt like I had a su­per­pow­er. I still feel like that to­day.”

Lessons be­yond the pan

In his own class­room, his lessons are 80 per cent plan­ning, ten per cent teach­ing and ten per cent as­sess­ment. In­ter­ac­tive as­sign­ments re­quire stu­dents to find notes in­de­pen­dent­ly and work to­wards a goal.

He al­so takes on the task of help­ing to or­gan­ise the school’s Christ­mas con­cert and its Car­ni­val show­case, the lat­ter dou­bling as course­work, with pupils re­search­ing and per­form­ing tra­di­tion­al ca­lyp­sos.

“I tell them be­ing on a stage is not just ‘do­ing a thing,’” he says, adding,

“It goes much deep­er. It needs to be in­formed, thought out and the cor­rect tech­niques. It helps to show them how they should present them­selves in their every­day lives.”

His sat­is­fac­tion comes from watch­ing stu­dents come alive dur­ing a ses­sion.

“For ex­am­ple, if I say ‘to­day we are go­ing to learn Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb’, I have just giv­en them the ob­jec­tive and they know what they have to work on. In the end, when they all play it to­geth­er, you see the smiles and laugh­ter and the ‘I get it be­fore you!’ What they just learnt is that to reach a goal takes prac­tice, and al­so some in­di­vid­ual work. It’s the joy of re­al­is­ing you just un­locked a new skill.”

One stand­out suc­cess came from Form Four stu­dent Ali­cia An­toine, whose as­sign­ment-turned-com­po­si­tion, ‘I Come Out To Par­ty,’ won the best orig­i­nal so­ca tune in the 2023 San­Fest Com­pe­ti­tion and a spot at the Na­tion­al Ju­nior So­ca Monarch the fol­low­ing year.

From pan play­er to mu­sic teacher

Be­lieve it or not, ini­tial­ly An­dre was re­luc­tant to study mu­sic, de­spite be­ing cap­ti­vat­ed by the pan. It was his Form Two teacher, Miss Brown, who, recog­nis­ing his tal­ent for learn­ing and mem­o­ris­ing notes quick­ly, urged him to be­come “an ed­u­cat­ed pan man” by pur­su­ing Mu­sic The­o­ry.

“You can’t just play pan alone,” she told him.

An­dre lis­tened. He chose mu­sic for CSEC while tak­ing on ex­tra lessons and fell in love with it. A Bach­e­lor’s de­gree in Mu­si­cal Arts from The UWI came next. Hon­ing his craft by teach­ing in pri­vate schools and va­ca­tion camps, he of­fi­cial­ly be­came a mu­sic teacher with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion in 2014, and lat­er served as Pres­i­dent of the uni­ver­si­ty’s Arts Chorale from 2015–2017.

Three years lat­er, he earned a Ful­bright schol­ar­ship to pur­sue a Mas­ter of Mu­sic in Choral Con­duct­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas in the Unit­ed States.

“I thank Miss Brown for nev­er giv­ing up on me. I guess she saw some­thing in me I didn’t see in my­self,” says An­dre, now 36.

Tak­ing the steel­pan be­yond Trinidad and To­ba­go

The steel­pan has tak­en him to coun­tries like Be­lize, Mex­i­co and Pana­ma on glob­al per­for­mance tours. To­day, he’s a strong ad­vo­cate of in­cor­po­rat­ing the na­tion­al in­stru­ment in­to the cur­ricu­lum of all schools, be­liev­ing it is vi­tal for preser­va­tion and an ex­pres­sion of lo­cal iden­ti­ty “much like mak­ing pelau, roti, or dou­bles.”

How­ev­er, he ad­mits, “to be fair,” that mu­sic it­self is an ex­pen­sive art. Though his class­room has a 20-piece steel or­ches­tra, with up to 31 stu­dents at any one time, they of­ten have to share.

“It would be so much bet­ter if we had re­serve in­stru­ments. But even main­tain­ing them, in terms of tun­ing, costs mon­ey. The school pays for that… but that’s not al­ways a guar­an­tee when we re­quest it.”

Keep­ing the next gen­er­a­tion in the rhythm

Still, he is hap­py that youth in­ter­est re­mains strong. Pro­grammes led by the Mul­ti­cul­tur­al Mu­sic Pro­gram Unit, to­geth­er with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of ju­nior bands by ma­jor groups like Cou­va Joy­lan­ders and Trop­i­cal An­gel Harps, are mak­ing a dif­fer­ence.

“I have taught a few stu­dents in those bands,” he re­veals, “there have been a lot of pan events through­out the year too, more so than when I was a teenag­er.”

So­cial me­dia has al­so fu­elled the push.

“Stu­dents have come to the mu­sic room say­ing they want to play like Joshua Re­grel­lo.”

As Trinidad and To­ba­go wraps up Na­tion­al Steel­pan Month, ho­n­our­ing the on­ly acoustic in­stru­ment in­vent­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry, An­dre rec­om­mends that all par­ents get their child in­volved in the arts—not nec­es­sar­i­ly to turn them in­to a pro­fes­sion­al but to help them gain fo­cus and a healthy out­let for their en­er­gy.

“I have al­ways said I didn’t choose mu­sic, mu­sic chose me... and I am glad it did,” he con­cludes.