Richard Lord

Pan Trin­ba­go pres­i­dent Patrick Arnold says it was "very un­for­tu­nate" that Hum­ming Bird Medal (Gold) win­ner, Len "Boogsie" Sharpe be­haved in an "in­ap­pro­pri­ate man­ner" at the end of Mon­day's In­de­pen­dence Awards cer­e­mo­ny at Pres­i­dent's House.

Arnold said the in­ci­dent hap­pened when he went over to Sharpe to con­grat­u­late him on win­ning the Hum­ming Bird Medal (Gold) for long and de­vot­ed ser­vice to T&T in the field of cul­ture. Sharpe, who was be­ing in­ter­viewed, told Arnold: "You and your crew (na­tion­al ex­ec­u­tive) should step down...time to go." Sharpe, wide­ly con­sid­ered to be the great­est steel­pan arranger ever, con­tin­ued: "Patrick I think it's time to rest. We need peo­ple with (busi­ness) qual­i­fi­ca­tions to run steel­bands be­cause right now steel­bands down on the ground (and) no­body re­spects us." Arnold laughed off Sharpe's com­ment.

Par­lia­men­tary sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Cul­ture and Gen­der Af­fairs Ju­nia Re­grel­lo, who was present said: "Gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to the de­vel­op­ment of the art form...We're go­ing to con­tribute." Even though Arnold re­ject­ed Sharpe's claim yes­ter­day, he said Pan Trin­ba­go had tried un­suc­cess­ful­ly to achieve that ob­jec­tive. He said the ini­tia­tive was be­ing frus­trat­ed by suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments' fail­ure to pro­vide ad­e­quate re­sources to make it vi­able. To Sharpe's claim that the steel­pan was dead, Arnold said that was not so, as steel­bands had grown larg­er and the win­ning prize for the Panora­ma com­pe­ti­tion was in ex­cess of $1 mil­lion.

He said when he joined Pan Trin­ba­go, the first prize was about $37,000. With­out elab­o­rat­ing, Arnold said when a sim­i­lar in­ci­dent took place pre­vi­ous­ly, the un­named pan­man was ex­pelled from the or­gan­i­sa­tion. He did not say whether a sim­i­lar course of ac­tion may be tak­en against Sharpe.

About boogsie

He be­gan his ca­reer with Star­lift where he worked as a co arranger with Ray Hol­man. He is most strong­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the Phase 11 Pan Groove Steel Or­ches­tra. They won Panora­ma in 1987 and 1988. Boogsie start­ed to play the steel­pan at age four. He played with In­vaders be­fore mov­ing to Star­lift. At the same time, Hol­man was mov­ing to­ward tak­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary step of com­pos­ing mu­sic specif­i­cal­ly to­ward the in­stru­ment.

Boogsie was nev­er taught to play it. He just lis­tened to sounds on the street and took part in jazz ses­sions with oth­er mu­si­cians. Al­though he could not read or write, his mu­si­cal sense is very high­ly de­vel­oped. In 1984, he treat­ed the crowd to his own com­po­si­tion of I Mu­sic–this time play­ing the pans from the front side of the in­stru­ments, rather than from be­hind the pans. The lat­ter was the cus­tom­ary po­si­tion.