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  15th October 2000
eEd - tobagojo@trinidad.net

  World Steelband Music Festival 2000

 Swiss band takes early lead

© NEWSDAY - Sunday 15th October, 2000 - Page 4
By SEAN NERO
The John Schmidt Reports
News 18th OCTOBER 2000
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News 14th OCTOBER 2000
[ 1998 Ref to WSMF 2000 ]


JAWS DROPPED and eyes opened wide yesterday morning (3 am) following the announcement that PANch 2000 of Switzerland had topped the preliminary round of the World Steelband Music festival after two nights of competition.

   PANch 2000 which performed on Thursday's start of the contest scored a total of 798 points, a lead of 18 points over its nearest competitor Tunapuna-based Exodus Steel Orchestra who is a joint defending champion.

   Under the direction of conductor Yaira Yonne the band performed "Poets and Peasants" as its classical tune of choice and Len "Boogsie" Sharpe's "Mind Yuh Business" as its calypso, arranged by Claudio Pini.

   Friday night's second preliminary round of competition at the Jean Pierre Complex, featured nine conventional orchestras five of which are foreign-based.

   All delivered commendable performances. Northern Illinois University (NIU) of Chicago appeared to have created the biggest impact with its delivery of "Wood and Steel" where the national musical instrument was fused with several other percussion instruments including the African version of a xylophone called the "Amadinda".

   But while NIU sought originality, London's Ebony Steel Orchestra led by Trinidadian resident in that European country Augustine "Pepe" Francis ensured the band "flexed its musical muscle" signalling its ability to be on par with any of Trinidad and Tobago's most celebrated orchestras.

   With only 17 of the 24 bands expected to be part of the competition actually participating, only one band will not advance to the semi-final round. Tobago Buccooneers is that band.


Photo: [Not shown here: Young man in wheel chair playing a Tenor Pan to his left side.]
Caption:
FORMER MEMBER of Harmonites Steel Orchestra Garvin Roberts playing the tenor pan, makes a clear statement that being differently able does not hinder his performance. He took centre stage with Ebony Steel Orchestra of London on Friday night.
PHOTO By SEAN NERO


 Unknown band
 trounces Trinis

© SUNDAY EXPRESS - 15th October 2000 - Page 4
By TERRY JOSEPH
The John Schmidt Reports
News 18th OCTOBER 2000
Top
 A  -  B  -  C  -  D 
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News 14th OCTOBER 2000
[ 1998 Ref to WSMF 2000 ]


THE World Steelband Music Festival, currently taking place at the Jean Pierre Complex in Port of Spain, is turning into a Cinderella story for the Swiss entry, PANch 2000 – a band formed just nine months ago.

   By the same opportunity and after just two nights, the festival is already developing into episodes of horror for local steel orchestras and pan aficionados who once thought the indigenous product invincible.

   At the conclusion of the preliminary round, which played its final note at 2:45 a.m. yesterday, PANch emerged victorious with 798 points, beating top-drawer local band Exodus into second spot and by a whopping 18 points.

   PANch was founded just last January and played its first public performance only five months ago, a free street concert in Berne, Switzerland as a warm-up for the European qualifying round of the festival last May. In fact.

   "I'm somewhere between being very excited and very shocked," PANch conductor Yaira Yonne said yesterday.

   "I absolutely did not expect it, as that was certainly not our best performance. PANch has only played in public five times before last Thursday. We did two test performances in Berne and two in Zurich before the Paris contest and now Trinidad and Tobago."

   But whipping the 16 other bands that performed during the two-night preliminary round is even more astonishing than Yonne admits.

   At the Paris qualifier, PANch was beaten into fourth place by England's Ebony Steelband, France's Calypsociation and Steel Pan Lovers from Finland; all of whom have now suffered a reversal of fortunes at the hand of the Swiss band.

   Indeed, PANch 2000 was not even supposed to come to the finals, as only the top three bands from the European zone had originally been invited. It was a combination of circumstances that eventually got them included. Their tune of choice, Franz von Suppe's "Poet and Peasant" having won top honours in that category in Paris, coupled with the predicament of eight of the original 24 bands declining at the last minute; got PANch a spot in the Trinidad playoffs.

   Trinidad-born Jenny Lee, now associated with France's Calypsociation and who was part of the organising team for the Paris playoffs, shared Yonne's sentiments: "It is the instrument that will win, no matter who takes home the prize," she said.

   Among the astonishing performances on Friday night was that of the Northern Illinois University Steel Orchestra, whose interpretation of Robert Chappel's "Wood and Steel" brought the audience to its feet. With three pannists moving to play the Ugandan Amadinda (an instrument based on the African xylophone) coupled with the jimbe drum and congas, the NIU band produced a rhythm to die for.

   Trinidadian virtuoso Liam Teague, who gained both his music degrees at NIU, appeared in the band's front-line.

   Along with PANch and NIU, three other foreign bands are now eligible for the semi-final round, which takes place on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the same venue. Ebony was scintillating with von Suppe's "Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna" and Annise Hadeed's arrangement of Hollis Wright's "Celebrating with Steel". Calypsociation earned rich applause for its renditions and the Defence Force Orchestra, under the baton of Deryck Nurse, kept the quality of the evening steady, with its interpretation of Tchaikovsky's "Symphony No 4 – The Finale".

   Tobago's Buccooneers became the only casualty of the preliminary round, with the other 16 bands going forward to the next tier of the festival.


Photo: [Not shown here: Section of PANch 2000 with their T-shirts displayed]
Caption:
MEMBERS of the PANch 2000 of Switzerland perform their calypso of choice "Mind yuh Business" by Boogsie Sharpe at the World Steelband Music Festival 2000 preliminary at Jean Pierre Complex, Wrightson Road on Thursday night.
PHOTO By ROBERTO CODALLO


 Familiar scenes
 from ‘foreign’

© SUNDAY EXPRESS - 15th October 2000 - SECTION 2 - Page 4
By DEBORAH JOHN
The John Schmidt Reports
News 18th OCTOBER 2000
Top
 A  -  B  -  C  -  D 
Bot
News 14th OCTOBER 2000
[ 1998 Ref to WSMF 2000 ]


IT WAS an deep moment as we looked at the members of the steelband from Switzerland, PANch 2000, jumping up, waving their pan sticks in the air and shouting "mind yuh business", like Trinis to the manner born, as they played the Boogsie Sharpe composition which was their calypso of choice.

   Couldn't help but think about pioneering years of the steel pan, when no "respectable" parent wanted their boy children to have anything to do with the instrument, and a girl child risked being put out or getting a good "cut tail" if she had a relationship with a pan man.

   Whether or not this band is going to beat the local bands in the competition is really not the issue. They have come to the Mecca and it is an act of homage.

   And while pan still fails to get the respect and support it deserves in the land where it was invented (the instrument, like the prophet, without honour in its own country) here they were, on Trinidad soil, in the year 2000, participating in the World Steelband Music Festival. Not only that, the Swiss came with their own pan invention. It was a history making moment and very moving.

   I wondered what impression a writer like Patrick Leigh Fermor would have had of the entire event.

   Fermor, in his seminal travelogue on the region, Travellers Tree, documented his first encounter with a steelband when he visited Trinidad in the 1940s.

   He was fascinated with East Port of Spain, in particular the mosque and the Dry River.

He writes:
   "Wandering beside it one evening, on my way back from another eavesdropping session outside the mosque, I was stopped in my tracks by a deafening hullabaloo from the other side: a metallic clangour that slowly resolved itself into the tune of The bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond. Craning over the balustrade towards the source of the sound, I asked a young Negro, who was leaning beside me, what it was. "It's a steel band," he answered.
   "The boys are practising for Carnival."
His guide takes him:
   "...to a street called Piccadilly ...down an alley-way between heavily populated wooden houses, over a wall and into a large pit built in the bay of the embankment. It was full of young Negroes hammering out, on extraordinary instruments, the noise I had heard. When we appeared with his friend, the leader rose, shook hands and gave us four little rum kegs to sit on, and went on playing. The leader or captain, was a Negro in his early twenties called Fish Eyes Rudolf Oliver."
Oliver introduces Fermor and his group to other members:
   "Neville Jules, my second in command, my managing director O Rudder. The ease of his manner was admirable."
He then showed them around the panyard:
   "It was a piece of wasteland, a-flutter with clothes lines jammed between the embankment and backs of houses, and the only way out was by climbing the six-foot wall we had just negotiated. The band was a little group of young men from the neighbourhood who had installed themselves here and turned it into a stronghold. A large blue banner, embroidered with the name of the group, was stuck in the ground, and beyond the minstrels, half a dozen familiars were playing gin-rummy on a plank between two kegs."
   "One or two of them worked on the docks, some of them were out of work, one was a mechanic's apprentice; all of them were between 16 and 17 and the early 20s."
Fermor then describes the instruments that looked like:
   "the rusty spare parts of motor cars and on closer inspection that is exactly what some of them proved to be."
Fish Eyes played the Tock-Tock described as:
   "the sawn-off bottom of a cylindrical kerosene tin with a range of 14 notes"
It was the dominating instrument, seconded by the Belly:
   "another kerosene tin, divided into seven deeper notes."
Then came the
   "Base-Kettle, made out of a large vaseline drum, and the Base-Bum, a vast biscuit container from a local factory. Other lumps of machinery, manhandled into shapes that produce the correct notes, form the remainder of the orchestra."
The band then played for Fermor and his party, the Ave Maria. He was only mildly impressed:
   "The sound that burst on the ears was hallucinating. From a mile away it might almost be agreeable; but it was Bach all right, and without a single false note. The long notes were held as with the clavichord, before the pedals were evolved, by repeated blows on the same one until it was time to move to the next."
   Fermor would not have been able to imagine, on that night, that one day pannists would come from 'foreign' to play in a World Steelband Music Festival and perhaps if he had a chance to revisit his Travellers Tree, he might be moved to write a chapter "where pan reach".


Full Page 1
Photo: [Not shown here: Pyramid Pan and Player]
Main Caption:
Swiss band brings ‘crooner' pan
Lower Caption:
SWISS PANNIST Dudly Dickson [Esa Tervala] on pyramid pans, a special arrangement of the instrument, invented in Switzerland just over a year.
[Dudly Dickson is one of the tuners of the pans and co-inventor/developer with Esa Tervala - eEd]
PHOTO By ROBERT CODALLO


Page 3
Upper right Photo: [Not shown here: Left side view of Pyramid Pan and player - Esa Tervala]
Caption:
This pan can croon says Starlift vice captain Carllyle Oliver.
PHOTO By ROBERT CODALLO


Page 3
Bottom left Photo: [Not shown here: Right side view of 2 sets of pyramid Pans and players - Esa Tervala (left) and Project leader PANch 2000 (Captain) Martin Grah]
Caption:
SWISS PANNIST Martin Grah [Right] and Dudly Dickson [Esa Tervala] on pyramid pans.
PHOTO By ROBERT CODALLO


 Pans in a Pyramid

© SUNDAY EXPRESS - Sunday 15th October 2000 - SECTION 2 - Page 3
By UCILL CAMBRIDGE
The John Schmidt Reports
News 18th OCTOBER 2000
Top
 A  -  B  -  C  -  D 
Bot
News 14th OCTOBER 2000
[ 1998 Ref to WSMF 2000 ]


WHEN THE story is told about the about steelpan, and about it being invented in Trinidad, somewhere before the end of the tale, in parenthesis perhaps, the exceptions will be mentioned.

   Like the pyramid pan.

   If anyone knew of its existence, nothing was said until questions were asked when Swiss steelband PANch took the stage in the World Steelband Festival at the Jean Pierre Complex last Thursday night.

   The pyramid pan is a structure of six instruments arranged as its name suggests like a pyramid. Two of them stood out in the front-line of PANch's orchestra. On enquiry we were informed that it was invented in Switzerland just over a year ago.

   Band leader Martin Grah, who played one of the instruments on Thursday explained that the instrument came about due to the collaborative efforts of two individuals, a Finnish musician Esa Tervala attached to a band Cosmo Pan in Switzerland and Englishman Dudley Dickson of Harpsi Drum in England. They invented the instrument together. Dickson [Martin Grah] was the man on the second pyramid pan.

   Explaining what range the instrument gives, Grah said it starts from A "like a low cello" and has three full octaves. He compared the range to a harp, which goes from very low to very shrill sounds. He said it is "sweet."

   The men liming in the Strarlift panyard agreed, and Starlift's vice captain Carlyle Oliver explained the sound of the pan a lot more simply.
   "The pyramid pan is a crooner. Like Bing Crosby. You know that kind of middle voice, but a really strong voice, that is what it's like," Oliver said.
   He continued.
   "When I first saw it I went to it. I saw the shape and the layout. It is a great invention in that it can replace the middle on of a band" he said.


    World
   Steelband Music Festival
  2000
The John Schmidt Reports
News 18th OCTOBER 2000
Top
Swiss band takes early lead
Unknown band trounces Trinis
Familiar scenes from ‘foreign'
Pans in a Pyramid
Bot
News 14th OCTOBER 2000
[ 1998 Ref to WSMF 2000 ]


The Steelbands (Pan) of Trinidad & Tobago   
http://www.seetobago.org/trinidad/pan/2000/news/wsmf2000new15oct.htm

  © 2000: tobagojo@trinidad.net - 20001015
Last Update: 05 November 2000 00:00:00
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