The Steel Pan Detour
Years ago, I had the pleasure of playing double seconds at Brooklyn Panorama — the largest steelband celebration in the world outside Trinidad and Tobago itself. I was privelaged to join Crossfire Steel Orchestra’s performance of Scene, arranged by Kendall Williams, made up of players from Trinidad and Tobago, the wider West Indies, and all over the United States.
Before that, in 2000, I played bass pan with Northern Illinois University’s steelband at the World Steel Band Festival in Port of Spain. We placed second. It was the first U.S. group to place in the finals of that competition.
Relatively speaking, very few people I know in music have walked these musical roads. It doesn’t appear in the “standard” literature, and it will not help you win an orchestral audition. In fact, many percussion programs are severely lacking in exposure to non-Western styles comprehensively.
A steelband arrangement for Panorama is eight to ten minutes of continuous music, memorized, played by somewhere between sixty and a hundred people, most of whom are reading nothing at all. There is no conductor keeping you honest. The arrangement lives in the room, distributed across everyone, and it stays alive only because each section knows its part cold and knows where every other section is at all times.
That is a completely different model of ensemble from the one I was trained in. In the music I usually play, precision comes from the page and from a person out front holding it together. In a steelband it comes from everyone having internalized so much that the thing is load-bearing without either.
I think about it constantly when I work with a percussion ensemble. The instinct is always to add structure: more rehearsal marks, more cues, more of me. The steelband answer is the opposite — put the information in the players until the structure isn’t needed.
Playing in the NIU and Crossfire Steel bands remains some of the single most useful ensemble experiences I have had, and ironically, it is the one nobody asks me about.
