So now that the boutique steel bands have closed shop till Saturday, let us take in a stylishly different experience. Shopping for the best delivery of sounds in the designer district of Panorama. We're here this semifinal Sunday evening at the pretentious moorings of the Queen's Park Savannah, Port-of-Spain, distinguished for its choice in introductions, modulations and codas. In short, imbuing a melody with diversity. Flashy or voguish. Hip or swanky. Whatever. This is a setting that caters to audiophiles and plain folks alike, trying out a means of judging the commodity in their un-Trini loyalty to excellence. It's a splintered platform for anything your heart desires. Whether wine or jam tickles the palate, Panorama is the taste of Trinidad and Tobago for sure. Like red wine in a fancy sauce. Tasting Music. Blood. But not victory. Not yet. Save that drama for next week. For now, the bands are either hemmed at the east enclosure of the Savannah or hanging back at nearby Memorial Park, waiting turns to transmit their labour of love-depending on the steelband perspective because panyard sessions in the Panorama season could appear to be voluntary, what with strikingly little material reward or compensation. That is, considering extensive man-hours, in the dew, no less, required to complete the work.
Anyway, for what it's worth, Panorama Sunday remains a hot ticket. Yet one can still cash in on the street or on the Drag, the paved roadway that ushers bands onto the stage. Here's Exodus, wedged into an empty lot opposite the Grand Stand and arranger Pelham Goddard making the best of his good fortune with his composition Aunty Pat to spillover jammers. "She ended concerts with Hallelujah Chorus and tassa drums, so we are using a sample in one of three change keys. Among other devices, we have a minor for a classical progression because she was a classicist."
Up the street, with the National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA) as backdrop, Silver Stars can't afford to wait to get to the Drag, so they drop their song right there in the middle of a people jam that catches you searching out a visitor chatting on a cell as he shrugs his shoulders through the mass, a woman being pushed along in a wheelchair, a mother seeking right of way for her baby in a navy blue pram, and an Indian man hawking burgers. So thick are the crowds in this panoramic compass, Trinidad All Stars is nowhere as far as the neck can crane. So you chat on the fly with Donell "Bravo" Thomas, Silver Stars' driller extraordinaire, who's rushing you off because he's gotta get back to bandleader Edwin Pouchet's Gie Dem Tempo.
"Tempo is rhythm and timing," Bravo says. "We're attacking the tune so it could take tempo. It's complicated, but everything is clear and players enjoy the music. 2011 was a hard year for Edwin because he was ill. Now, we're back with a bang and we'll make him happy again." Up ahead, on the Drag, Gerrain Newton of Diego Martin doesn't need the dark glasses he's wearing to be hip. He makes the double seconds shiver on their racks while literally working on his dance routine for the stage. Being among the pans is like galaxying through the beyond. You find a verse transitioning to a change key improvisation that features double tenors, double seconds, quads and four pans, all of which moves Stewart to remark that it's the players that make the magic happen. Vibes creates an ambience of happiness, he says, and every line, phrase and section in the song is a reflection of a tightly disciplined group.
"They need the freedom to be themselves." Stewart, a band member for 11 years, says he was charged with playing a piece emphasising much love so players could look forward to practice sessions slackened with happy music.
Desperadoes is banging hard at Jerningham Avenue corner, tons of people swaying to its snazzy Prophet of Pan but it's like being trapped in a minefield. It'd take forever to get there. Good thing Invaders' composer-arranger Arddin Herbert has the modern version of the old Harps of Woodbrook champing at the bit to be the first of the large bands to perform on stage. He's tightening the screws now. They fit in well on the Drag as panaraders double file one way and the next on both sides of the orchestra, which is rooted in place yet pushing people to jock dey waist coming in or going out the Savannah. And so a conga line washes you out back into the street, and is dem to ketch. Not you bothering with all the din and dissonance. So you badge your way into the Grand Stand, just in time to catch Invaders banner shifting to and fro at the foot of the stage, which, now that you think of it, lacks excitement. She was so much sexier a year ago. It's like she has aged and doesn't know or care what to do with herself. Both the Grand Stand and North Stand receive from Invaders a piece, so wickedly beautiful at the centre of the compass, as a muddy sound, the basses seeming to be rumbling down a roller coaster or steel drums bouncing off a truck. The band should make an inquiry. The reception leaves Peter Aleong, public relations officer for Siparia Deltones, to wonder about the judges dilemma, whether to judge the actual sound that is compromised or that of the speakers packaged in racks that climb the scaffolding to the rafters. As Bertie Marshall once said, there's a lot of noise in the Rama. But he didn't mean it this way.
Renegades leaves Aleong restless with advice for the authorities. "Anytime a country is under strain this national instrument is so spiritual that it shows the government the direction it should go in." He ticks off pan factory, pan classes in every school, and so on. Deltones brings five drummers from Cuba, to augment African and Tassa drummers for the band's presentation of Shadow's Naked Riddum. Carlton "Zanda" Alexander spins the work as a jazzalypso, invoking American jazzists Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and even Shadow, Aleong says, because of the rhythm and the song's story that music gives you the breath of life. Zanda hands us a performance to cherish and cuddle. Right now, Zanda is the Panorama. Not for long, though. Because when you hear Pouchet say Gie Dem Tempo features the rhythm section without making it obvious, you know he's not letting it all hang out. Come to find out it's gonna be Bravo's show. They call him Bravo because every time he performs he gets a hand from the audience. Bravo is earning his nickname tonight. He's pointing to tenors, then calling on the basses to respond. The music is in his baton We could do without the band, but then we'd be missing a treat reminiscent of Guiness Cavaliers performance of 67 in that year's Panorama. So, no. Make that a confectionery delicacy. It is the most photographed band of the evening.
Exodus' turn. Their trademark step ladder platforms pull into view. The band's set-up is the longest of the bands so far.
The business of Exodus is business and it plays that card in its music as well. Desperadoes' Rudolph Charles once lectured a TV interviewer about the value a band places on organising itself on stage. Like Exodus, Despers makes it a key ingredient in their presentation, though this has always been the band's trait. They must mean business, too. Strange how the Laventille band faces the Grand Stand with gloom in its eyes. Everybody is in the shadows. But when they come out to play, you could tell that arranger Andre White, 21, of Freeport, Long Island, New York, is carrying their swagger, too, by what David Rudder, himself a Rado, addresses as "the cleanest sound." So you missed Trinidad All Stars in the burger smoke and all that humanity edging this way and that, and now that the band is heading for its sweet spot on the stage you angle toward arranger Leon "Smooth" Edwards to question his mood, the $2 million band at this high-strung moment. Is it on edge? Is he? "I'm cool. Does it make a difference? My intention is to put that in the past. You'll hear the difference when we play, OK?" Oh, okay then. From the get-go, Smooth cuts loose with his statement. His mark. Just by the introduction of Play Yuh Self alone, then phrasing a verse that straightens your back so you could take note of the well-balanced, strong-willed basses working in tandem with the spanking tenors.
It's feasting time for the frontline pans as they gobble up all those spiffy notes spinning off the drum face in the wizardry of the remark that came from a Casablanca fella when he heard the 1950s version of the band. "Boy, all ah all yuh is stars, boy." Whatever the tenors did on their own, rampaging through the song, they never forget to shepherd you back to the melody. Going off again on a romp down the spine of the dry river in their inimitable style. As if. They are playing themselves, of course. It is a complex, complicated score that keeps you bolted. Sure, the coda is one for the ages, that's why the performance, as Rudder terms it, grabs the loudest applause of the night. "Fabulous," says Ray Funk, the Alaskan judge whose cultural homeland is Trinidad and Tobago. "They'll win again," says Calypsonian Crazy, who recorded the song, a composition by All Star Clive Telemaque. "The runs and the dynamics will get them." Leon Smooth Edwards is a mad man. Well, a mad genius. Still and all, you ask him a simple question and he goes off on a mad man's rant. Rudder isn't bemused. "Can they top that? Sure. Every performance is different. And you always want it to be better. If I left you flat now, my next journey is to leave you flatter."
Neither does Harmonites leave us high and dry. Solo is back, with Archbishop of Pan in its hip pocket. It's distinctive bookend 12-basses flanking all that gold and chrome. One expects Dennis Clement, for years the legendary dancing guru of the wild instrument, to make his usual splash, but Stephanie Bascombe, a nine-year veteran who swapped the less glamorous guitar pan for the humongous boom box, stands her ground and slugs it out with her colleague at the far end. "It stresses other people out because it's tiring," she says, "but the 12-bass is me." It is 12.45 a m, and patrons are thinning out faster than you can say Phase II will blow people away tonight. The Rama took off 14 hours ago and there's a ways to go yet. The Phase being Boogsie, some folks creep back in, maybe so they could boast that they were "there" for years. Diehards know better. The Phase is on a roll with Archbishop of Pan, a paean to the iconic Pat Bishop, the composer-arranger's mentor. Through God's grandmotherly high-mindedness, one morning Boogsie slipped out of his crib, crawled to the front door, down five steps leading to Crossfire's pan yard where chickens scratched the dirt for sustenance and steel pans lay idle and mute, when his mother caught him pounding an old pan with a small stone. It's why Bishop had this urge to protect and defend Len Sharpe, Boogsie's alter ego, for the rest of her life. It's why it behooves both Sharpe and Boogsie to sing her praises. Why Pat's sister, Gillian Bishop, has spent long hours seated on a folding chair directly in front of the band during practice sessions.
"It's a little more involvement, this tune compared with Boogsie's other works," Gillian says. "He had asked me how I'd feel if he took this song to Panorama in Pat's honour. I said I'd support him. She was extremely proud of his musical life which stretched a considerable length of time. So I didn't hesitate to give it my blessings, such as it is." Hear Keith Maynard, Phase II tenor player and an originator of the idea for the PHI pans, "Pat saw the vibrancy of his music and would encourage him, not to be afraid, for he is an outlier, way ahead of everybody in this business. She described his music as urban contemporary. So, there's bebop in the introduction. And he samples a clip from Hallelujah Chorus and another from Glory Glory Hallelujah. He's paying homage. "Regarding the major minor he's talking about, the quads and the four pans engage in a call and response, and there's beauty taking place with the melody, alternating major and minor keys. Like he's creating a church organ swelling among the pans, the four pans singing in a male voice. The ending is hip. It swells with tension. The bass dwells on A, moving chromatically above with other pans. This is a salute to Pat. So it plays on the riff, Pat Bishop, we'll always love you, over and over till the final note. He got that brain wave about one o' clock two mornings ago." The audience got it all right. This Monday morning. Boogsie ensured they'd know the real deal. The score. "Oh, the ending of the Panorama piece? All I can say is that it's religiously dramatic. Plenty drama. That's who Pat Bishop was."