U.S.: Reflections on pan and panorama

Tomorrow is panorama semi-finals in T&T, and I won't be there. Heck, who am I fooling? Even if I were in T&T, I wouldn't be there. As much as I love pan, I don't love crowds. So, I've always been content to listen to panorama via radio and tv. That way, you actually focus on the pan rather than the socializing. At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I remember, one J'Ouvert morning, my cousin and I were following Guinness Cavaliers. We were really young, about 12, I think. Cavaliers came down Coffee Street playing the theme from Is Paris Burning?. I don't think there was another soul behind another band in San Fernando that J'Ouvert morning. The crowd behind Guinness went from the top of Lord Street as far back as Prince of Wales Street, could be more because you really can't see Prince of Wales Street from Lord Street.

Anyway, everybody was moving to a happy chip because Cavaliers was on form. Then, the band headed down Lord Street and stopped at the junction of Mucurapo Street and alll hell broke loose. There, just before Mucurapo Street, Cavaliers played

bim bim bom-bim-bom
bom-bim bom bi-bom
bom-bim bim bom-bim-bom
bim-bim bom-ba-bom
taa da-da-de da-da-de de-da-da
taa da-da-de da-da-de de-da-da.

The mellifluity of the latter series of notes preceded a powerful percussive, staccato blast by the whole band. When Cavaliers shifted into staccato, they increased the volume and the tempo of the music. The crowd was caught off-guard. Nobody had heard the music before; nobody knew what to expect. Then, there it was. The crowd went wild, jumping up -- literally -- and reaching for the skies. I've never seen anything like that since. There was my cousin, both arms in the air, feet about two feet off the ground, screaming in delight. When Cavaliers repeated the musical passages again, revelers knew what to listen and wait for and madness erupted in on Lord Street San Fernando that morning.

A few years later, I was standing at the top of Cipero Street, Carnival Tuesday, just at that little bit of curb where Cipero and Medine Streets meet. Right there. By then, I think, Guinness Cavaliers had gone out of existence; Bobby Mohammed was either dead or in St. Ann's at that time. I can't recall. I have since heard that it was actually his mother, who taught piano, who was the true arranger for Cavaliers. I don't know. Anyway, there I am, at the top of Cipero Street when Fonclaire pulls alongside. Not the tenor section, but the base. Fonclaire was playing Maestro's Water in Your Eye. A young man who was dating an older friend of mine, Michael was his name, was playing base, and he smiled at me as the band pulled up and stopped.

Steelband boys, I begging you please (bim-bom-bom bom-bom)
Dig the beat, of this melody. (bim-bom-bom bom-bom)
I know, Kitchener is great
But in 71, he must feel my weight. (bim-bom-bom)
I say steelband boys, give the tune a simply try (bim-bom-bom)
Kitchie, boy, water in your eye!" (bim-bom-bom bom-bom)

The base section of Fonclaire grumbled and rumbled, and rolled up from the pans, down into the earth, up through concrete and pavement and into my body rising to the top of my head. It was mindblowing! I'd never experienced anything like it. That Carnival Tuesday, in the hot sun, Fonclaire spoke to me the way no panside ever had, not even Cavaliers. I was caught, hooked, netted, and landed. Years later, when I learnt to play pan with Nebulae in New York City, I played base. The tenors were always pitched too highly for my ears, but the base. Ah, the six-base. The rumble and the grumble and the sweet motion of the base. Scrunter captured the feeling for all eternity when he sang The Woman on the Base. It wasn't about me, but the sheer sweetness and depth of the base -- of pan, as a whole -- to get down inside you and root around and bring out things you never knew you had inside before, that is what The Woman on the Base is about.

Sometime in the 80s, I heard Boogsie Sharpe's arrangement of Denise Plummer's Woman is Boss. The song was nothing spectacular, to my mind. What Boogsie did with it was. Boogsie took the premise of the song and turned it into a question and answer with which he ramagered* Phase II into a Panorama championship. He took "woman is boss" and he questioned it upside-down, turned it around, flipped it up in the sky, watched it fall to the ground, picked it up, then recommenced the questioning all over again. When he answered the question, Boogsie asked the listener if the answer was the right answer; then he proceeded to ask the question another way again. The tenors asked it; the guitars and cellos asked it; then the base asked the question all over again. Woman is boss. Is woman boss? You think woman is boss? No answer was satisfactory. Boogsie swept up his listeners into a dialogue that made them ask profound questions about the man-woman relationship, even while pointing out that no answer would ever be truly satisfactory. It was a brilliant composition. A masterpiece! That night, with both the radio and the tv on in Princes Town, I couldn't sit still. The arrangement was boss!

Then there was Despers' rendition of David Rudder's Panama. At least, I think it was Despers. Rudder handed panmen a gold-mine that year. Nobody mined it successfully. Everybody missed the focus of Panama. It wasn't about "they gone, they gone, they gone." Instead, the heart and soul of Panama was "thief the money, thief the money, thief the money"! When I heard Despers play the song and miss the main point, I wanted to weep. Every poem has a theme; you don't get the theme, you don't get the poem. The arranger didn't get the theme that year, and Amoco Renegades won Panorama.

I don't think people realize how literary panorama is, in terms of the musical arrangement, I meant. Calypsos are about ideas; panorama is about restatement and explication of those ideas in musical form. For the arrangement to be successful, the arranger has to understand the ideas conveyed by the poet-calypsonian. You can't ramager unless you know what you're talking about.

Pan, in a lot of ways, represents the best of Trinbago's culture. It is New World creativity that has transformed how a region, even the world listens to music. If you doubt this, think of how many times you hear pan in ads on tv right here in the U.S. Pan music is ubiquitous.


*ramager: essentially means "sing like a canary" or talk at length about a subject well known to one. For usage reference, listen to Kitchener's One to Hang which has this deathless line, "you talk, you talk, you talk, you ramager."