Take a rusty, discarded oil drum,
a heavy cannon ball, a blazing fire, a hammer for the fine-tuning, plenty
noise, a pair of strong arms and a pair of good ears, surrounded by a bunch of
"youts" from the neighbourhood - and you get a sound that is so soft
and tinkling that it could be the soundtrack to Peter Pan's flying fairy. Or,
it could be a thundering sound, pounding in your ears like a horde of Mongols
thundering with their horses over the steppes of Tadjikistan.
The steelband is, in the best
sense, a child of the oil age, both as a musical and as a social phenomenon. It
is a 20th century phenomenon, and as such has become a part of history. But
let us go 8 decades back, to the 1930s.
It was a hard time in Trinidad,
as it was elsewhere in the world. The great depression in the United States had
also affected the British crown colony. The British Empire dragged on like a
wounded elephant. England's economy was not buoyant, which meant that her
raw-material producing colonies saw their markets dwindling.
In Trinidad, thousands of people
had no work. Tens of thousands of others were employed at hunger wages by sugar
companies or in the oil fields. It was hard for the local population to see the
foreign managers live in relative wealth and distinctive comfort, whilst
Trinidadians saw their children hungry, without shoes or not able to afford
school books.
However, people were far from
being apathetic. For about 50 years now, the local reform movement had been
attracting brave hearts and bright minds, who tried to walk the fine line
between illegal sedition and necessary speaking up for His Majesty's subjects.
Inspired by the Russian Revolution and Marcus Garvey's black nationalism, the
reform movement and the budding union movement was relevant for Trinidadians of
all skin tones and many social backgrounds, who sought social justice for
themselves and for their countrymen and women.
They called their demonstrations
"Hunger Marches", bringing to a point what it was all about.
Retrenchment, undignified and unsanitary housing conditions, a lack of
education and future prospects were things that the majority of the people had
to live with in those years (not only in Trinidad, it must be remembered, but
in the western world all over). It was not only workers who took to the
streets, bringing sugar production and oil production to a halt, but also
members of the educated black and coloured middle classes, who had been the
true Creole backbone of the colony for many generations.
People like Elma Francois,
Captain A.A. Cipriani and Uriah Butler emerged in the political arena. Civic
courage was contagious: the calling for local representation gave birth to a
whole artistic movement, a first independent Trinidadian expression, in
particular in the writing arena: C.L.R. James, Alfred Mendes, Ralph de
Boissière to name just a few. A couple years later, also Albert Gomes, who
excelled in both, the political and the writers vocation. Free-thinking
newspapers came on the scene, first and foremost "The Beacon".
The emergence of the steelband
towards the end of the 1930s can be seen as a noisy, rhythmical, carnevalesque
interpretation of what was left for local people: scraps (in this case scrap
metal). At the beginning, it was not more than percussion, getting together and
making noise with brake pads, biscuit tins and other metal pieces. But quickly,
the tins got “tuned”, and the bigger oil drums started to be used.
Steelband became yet another
musical expression of the African diaspora, and as such a part of that 20th
century musical phenomenon that influenced popular music like no other. In the
Caribbean, African musical expressions mixed with the relevant European
administrative culture, creating such distinct genres like merengue and rumba
in the Spanish islands, bele and compas in the French Antilles, and reggae and
calypso in the British West Indies. With the exception of reggae, it is
interesting how localised those artforms remained: just listen to your radio in
Trinidad and try to find Cuban mambo or Martiniquan zouk!
Steelband, however, is not a
musical genre, and was able to “travel”, so much so that the whole Caribbean
now identifies with it as a folk artform. It seems to have been just what the
tourist industry and the media needed!
The emergence of the Steelband is
closely linked with Carnival. Carnival, a Catholic custom, was brought to
Trinidad by the French settlers in the 1780s. At first, the African slaves were
not permitted to participate in the celebrations and masked balls of the French
families. However, they were allowed to celebrate “canboulay”, when lit torches
were carried through the street to mark the end of the sugar cane harvest - a
custom which has been recently adopted in the popular “Crop Over” Festival of
Barbados.
Before the abolition of slavery
in 1834, the life of the African slaves did not take place in a cultural
vacuum, however. The dominant culture of Trinidad was French, albeit the fact
that the administration was British since 1797. Syncretic cultural expressions
like Shango, Santeria and Voodoo (mixed of Catholicism and the African
pantheon) are as much part of this syncretism as are Carnival, stickfight, bele
dancing and other folklore that have their roots in the first decades of the
19th century. Steelband can be seen as a 20th century extension of that
syncretism, albeit with other parameters: trash from the industrial society was
used in a rebellious movement against a ruling ethnical minority.
With emancipation, Carnival
changed dramatically. The former slaves and their offspring started to
participate in it. The first “noisy” devices were added to revelries: kettles,
salt boxes, chac-chacs etc. Carnival definitely lost its “polite” upper class
touch immediately! The Europeans started to shun this kind of Carnival, which
they called “Jamette Carnival”, the Carnival of those beyond the circle of
polite society. Stick fighters, shantwells, drummers, prostitutes and bad
johns! This was only to change towards the turn of the 20th century, when the
“upper classes” once again took part in the festival.
With this, the Trini Carnival was
quickly approaching a format that was to last for another century. Competitions
were held in the various categories, and the raucousness of the street festival
often clashed with the ideas of the British authorities as how His or Her
Majesty’s subjects should behave!
Steelband started in 1937 or
1938, when “Alexander Ragtime Band” from Newtown, formerly the Calvary Tamboo
Bamboo Band, came out to play. Their leader was “Lord Humbugger” Forde. The
pans were made of paint tins, biscuit tins, linseed oil tins, carbide pans,
zinc buckets and dustbin cover. Tuned into two notes, they were beat furiously
and rhythmically together with the tamboo bamboo. What a novelty! What a
spectacle! No wonder it caught!
A year later, the pan craze
brought forth many more steelbands, all from depressed areas with great
poverty. Inspired by the American cinema, the tradition of bombastic names was
started: Destination Tokyo, Sun Valley, Hellyard, Cross of Lorraine, Red Army.
It was the eve of World War II, which also was reflected in the steelband
names.
From 1942 to 1945, Carnival was
banned due to the war. It seems to have been a gestation period for the
steelband. When in 1945 victory was celebrated by the allied forces and
Trinidadians had a spontaneous Carnival in the middle of the year, steelbands joined
in the street party with much refined instruments. The dudups of the pre-war
days was joined by the first tenor pans made of oil drums, called “ping pong”.
From then on, there was no
turning back for the development of this instrument. Socially, the steelband
went the way of a lot of popular music of the second half of the 20th century.
Much like ragtime, jazz, rock & roll, it all started with a couple
rebellious youths from depressed urban areas, and ended up some 50 years later
in dignified symphonic orchestra halls, carrying Trinidad’s indigenous musical
genre (calypso) far beyond the island’s shores.
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