Pan pi­o­neer Neville Jules, who found­ed the Trinidad All Stars steel or­ches­tra and in­vent­ed the bass pan, died yes­ter­day just three months short of his 93rd birth­day.

News of his pass­ing was an­nounced on the band's Face­book page, ac­knowl­eg­ing him as "the foun­da­tion up­on which #all­stars is built - be­cause of him we can look for­ward to an­oth­er 85 years."

Born May 21, 1927, in East Dry Riv­er, Port-of-Spain, was one of the most in­flu­en­tial fig­ures in the steel­band move­men. He was a tam­boo bam­boo play­er be­fore join­ing the band that even­tu­al­ly evolved in­to All Stars in the 1940s.

He is cred­it­ed with tun­ing the first bass pan by us­ing a caus­tic so­da drum. He then com­bined two caus­tic drums to ex­pand the range of the in­stru­ment.

Jules al­so start­ed a tra­di­tion in All Stars where the steel­band would hit the road on J'Ou­vert morn­ing play­ing a clas­si­cal mu­sic se­lec­tion witha ca­lyp­so beat. Oth­er bands soon fol­lowed suit and this ac­tiv­i­ty be­came known as "The Bomb." For that rea­son, the an­nu­al J'Ou­vert Bomb com­pe­ti­tion was named in his ho­n­our.

It was dur­ing his lead­er­ship of Trinidad All Stars, from the post -World War II pe­ri­od through the 1950s and 60s that Jules in­vent­ed sev­er­al of the in­stru­ments that are part of the mod­ern steel­band.

Jules mi­grat­ed to New York in 1972 but con­tin­ued to be ac­tive­ly in­volved in rhe steel­band move­ment for many years.