A good pan tune owns me for a long time. It takes hold of my spirit and shapes my outlook. I still listen to Len Boogsie Sharpe’s 1982 arrangement of Party Tonight for Brooklyn’s Moods Pan Groove. I enjoyed Ray Holman’s Pan Woman every single day for six months after Carnival 1987. Clive Bradley’s 1998 Panorama version of In My House is a fixture on my play list.
Every year, a new pan tune seduces me like a Tabanca. I over-dose on its sweetness. I wring every drop of pleasure it brings. By the time I am sated I am lost in some other piece of pan music, or the next carnival is around the corner.
This year what nailed my attention the moment I heard Desperadoes run it slowly two nights before finals is Pan Redemption. I listened carefully then, with the intensity of one who is here for a week of carnival, soaking everything in.
There was sharp focus in that first rehearsal I heard, in the keen attention on the players’ faces and their embrace of everything the tune suggests. They danced confidently to their own performance, appreciating the exquisite quality of Robbie Greenidge’s arrangement and the music and lyrics of Jason Issac and Ingrid De Peiza.
I could feel that rush serious pan lovers get from a masterpiece. This one is textured with some of the richest melodic lines in any Panorama piece, and Robbie’s orchestration is so handsomely integrated the band sounds like one instrument.
Robbie’s precise layering of notes and his phrasing in a tune that gets expansive with his deft touches shows his immense skill and experience. In this efficient rendition, he evokes the best we have heard in Panorama music from the hill, and elsewhere, paying tribute to all the competition’s conventions and rituals.
In Pan Redemption we hear loss and nostalgia, but there is quiet triumph, too. Robbie’s music moves into mature moods and involves Despers in much needed introspection. Seeping through are ambiguous feelings about where he and the band find themselves today and what their options are for the future. He works the melody so that it bares new promises, and opportunities for redemption.
My friend Keith Louis says Belmont welcomed Despers with open arms, but others believe they looked almost emasculated practicing in that empty space by the Savannah. Certainly, they must have felt an acute sense of dislocation. Panmen get creative stimulation from the same intangibles as other artistes. We may dwell sociologically or psychologically on what Laventille brings to Despers’ attitude, but who knows how much it feeds their Panorama performance?
The fine musicianship of past Despers’ Panoramas is robustly alive in Pan Redemption. Robbie draws inspiration from the band’s history in the competition to resonate with its fans and all pan lovers, if not with the judges. He returns to many traditions of Panorama and to the legacy of great arrangers like Earl Rodney, Ray Holman, Jit Samaroo, Boogsie, and the master himself, Clive Bradley. This is Robbie’s own act of redemption, and in meeting the challenges of the process he uncovers his own genius.
Despers’ historical contribution to national culture means the band will always matter in music. Its presence on any stage brings huge expectations. By repurposing Despers’ ambitions, Robbie will always matter too. This year he delivered for pan lovers the OMG response that Pan Redemption deserves.
I have no time to argue about where the judges placed the band, or why. I am too busy enjoying the music and celebrating the real victory for Robbie: this arrangement will stand up longer than lesser ideas we heard this year. It dramatizes for lovers of this instrument pan’s response to itself. (Btw, Anise Hadeed’s arrangement of the same tune for Ebony Steel Band in the UK also deserves attention).
Robbie keeps the introduction short and sweet with a simple run, then steps into the melody and lets the tune build its own energy. Laying out the melody a second time he gives the lines tender overlays and tinkers with the phrasing.
Less than three minutes into Pan Redemption Robbie fires a couple of familiar lines into an old fashioned breakaway reminiscent of early calypso and pan music. He returns to that breakaway at the end, by the way, feistier than the first time, and even gets cute with it.
After a quick bridge, he lets the low pans talk rudely to the tenors, then builds new lines in the melody as he extracts a crescendo before changing key, which comes almost as unexpectedly as what he did in1991 in Musical Volcano, a broadly optimistic and finely technical arrangement. He also did something similar in Fire Coming Down, a composition that lived up to its title and won him first place in 1994.
In the new key Robbie wrings from Pan Redemption’s melody more pathos, something Despers wears regardless of the arranger of the moment. It’s in their pan demeanor, how they play and how they dance the music. There is also defiance, big time. They want to engage everyone in a debate about the hill and where it fits in a small island state hurtling into post modernism.
This piece of music is brutally honest in the anxieties Robbie explores, in the message of the lyrics and in what he communicates beyond the notes on the scale. He carries you one passage at a time to the next logical musical possibility, each a step in the direction of redemption as he builds anticipation.
So when you realize he has taken you to Caribbean great Bob Marley’s Redemption Song you must applaud the tribute. It’s a brilliant touch! Respect, Jamaicans would say. Then he lets the tune turn somber with the kind of gospel mood redemption implies, before a controlled flourish of an ending that makes this tune sound like the symphony it is for me.
Perhaps Robbie gave pan lovers something special this year to show he still has energy and ideas. Like Despers, he hasn’t had a big win in many years. He is also the kind of musician who needs assurance. His confidence doesn’t always match his enormous talent, and it doesn’t help that the competition results can often give a false sense of who did well and who deserves rewards.
What is gratifying about his treatment of Pan Redemption is that even when not winning Robbie can still offer a memorable, quality user experience. Despers certainly owes this accomplished composer and arranger for his tirelessness and his selfless contribution, even if he was often coming off the bench.
Trinidad music owes him for what he has done here and abroad. I know I owe him for nights of sheer joy almost obsessing about Pan Redemption, and mornings when his music lifted my spirits and colored my world. Go listen if you don’t believe me, especially the slow versions on Youtube. This one truly owns me.
Knolly Moses, a writer and former journalist, leads a team of young professionals at Panmedia, a digital marketing and web development company in Kingston, Jamaica.