Valerie Gladstone, an American writer on dance who authored a book on the famous dancer George Balanchine, is particularly insightful about Trinidadians. “ I understand your temperament now,” she said boldly one day during a visit. “You guys have the happiest music I’ve ever heard.”
We dance a lot, certainly, perhaps more than most cultures. Our music is that infectious. The rhythm and the tempo bring their own impetus. Add the energy of pan, however, and that’s where we leave everyone in the dust.
Pan easily hits the G spot equivalent of the part of the brain that responds to music. It can manipulate moods, and make moments memorable, especially Jouvert and at last lap.
What Andy Narell does with Tatoom: Music for Steel Orchestra, his new CD, is capture these moments exquisitely. The resonance that reaches raw emotions we feel chipping in the street springs vibrantly from his work. His skill in the studio captures the sound of pan as we hear it at such times. His growth as a composer is now evident in these compositions and their innovative arrangements.
Narell makes pans work effortlessly on Tatoom. His rhythms and melodies score the pans’ seduction of his New York psyche. He may be an American jazz musician, but sounds very much like a Trinidad composer and arranger with this tribute to the music of the pan yards he has frequented. He captures everything he has heard in the concerts where he has performed with Len “Boogsie” Sharpe, Robert Greenidge, Ken “Professor” Philmore, Liam Teague and, of course, Ray Holman. If nothing else, his phrasing tells you that.
Tatoom may well be the way he expresses his gratitude, which, perhaps, is why he named one selection Appreciation. That tune and much of this CD seems a gracious nod to Holman and Boogsie, two of our best composers. The music certainly says so. Loudly.
The subtle, seductive phrasing of Holman enters much of what we hear on this CD. Boogsie’s raucous repetitions and phrase inversions get new meaning in Narell’s arrangements.
Where Narell finds rapture is in the tempo he chooses. His pacing is more like the groove one hears often in the pan yard before the band has a firm grip on the tune. Or, when it’s being run the night before Panorama so the skaters can get those passages right.
Playing around the world, living in South Africa for a few years, and now in Paris doing that city’s jazz and world beat circuit, Narell has come to terms with the jumbie in pan. It now owns him fully, possessing his vision and his mission.
The jumbie took him to a steel band yard in Paris. Once he heard Calypsociation his juices began to flow. It is clear from this CD that pan has its own agenda for him even as he tries to use all his musical influences to expand the scope of his own work. Just as he sought to keep it a novelty years ago when he still played jazz piano, now more than anything else pan has taken over his music. The full orchestral work on Tatoom is now trumping his pan as lead instrument efforts.
He still uses conventional instruments on this CD, often with striking effect. But it is clear his heart is in those pieces where pan is dominant.
In Appreciation, Narell displays Ray Holman’s prodigious talent perhaps more effectively than the master does so himself, at least in the recordings he has made. The lyricism will make you sob. It flows easily from melodies ripe and sweet as a Julie mango. Smooth and silky tenors warm these melodies as double seconds hum agreeably in the near background.
Indeed, it will make you shake your head and move your body with your feet. Narell recognizes a groove Holman gave the bands from the West years ago. It’s almost a Woodbrook sensibility in sound. The tempo Andy plays with comes straight from the West, with a blend of sounds that all echo Phase II, Starlift and Invaders, if not of recent vintage, certainly what we heard in the sixties and seventies. Clearly, he has listened, and learned.
The mood is what is important here. It is music for the cognoscenti, who, I assume, understand perfectly what a composer or arranger, or any creative person for that matter, must do on a Sunday afternoon. Andy knows how to let those moods embrace an open mind that expects stimulation but is eager for subtle surprises.
Appreciation opens robustly and optimistically, heralding what might be called a symphonic groove. The tune’s structure and movements borrow Holman’s exploration of chords we have come to know and love. It then bridges into a melody that is more optimistic than Deepak Chopra. It’s spirit-lifting stuff if you like pan, and an admirable arrangement even if you only tolerate it.
Andy wrote Appreciation for Panorama 2000. What’s recorded here, however, is an expanded version of the Skiffle Bunch rendition. He says it includes a tribute to Lord Kitchener, who died while Narell was in Trinidad writing the piece.
Narell isn’t afraid to mix his influences on Tatoom. Right in the middle of what could conceivably be a tribute to Holman, he arrogantly drops a recognizable Clive Bradley device where the middle pans strum a rhythm for several bars to build tension and expectation. The bass plays an abbreviated melody line here in a challenging answer to the strumming of the front line pans.
The tenors return rigorously. The seconds support judiciously. The melody is layered logically, one phrase at a time. Resolution builds slowly. Then there is more tension. A bridge appears. The melody creeps back with a Phase II bravura and range.
It gets more involved and more textured the way Boogsie weaves all his impulses into a Panorama tune. Narell knows exactly what to take from Boogsie and what to do with it. He borrows Phase II’s ideas, but tastefully edits the extraneous, leaving the listener at peak. The notes are rapturous, ringing like steel but with the resonance of harps. The tune collapses on itself as the rhythms build and the frontline pans break away.
These passages are very, well, Narell. His delays and the California jazz phrasing of his early CD’s are evident. But Holman’s hold on him is tenacious. Each new movement picks up yet another bit of something we heard first in Woodbrook.
It took Andy two years to put together these compositions, as he worked with Calypsociation steel band in Paris. He recorded the entire album one instrument at a time.
It is clearly a labour of love we hear on this CD. A generous musician, – see the exposure he gave David Rudder on earlier albums – Andy brings to the steelband brilliant solos from tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, percussionist Luis Conte, who was on his earlier albums, and guitarist Mike Stern. These three add depth and sophistication to Tatoom in the same way Hugh Masekela, Paquito D’Rivera and Michael Brecker lifted The Passage, his first CD with Calypsociation.
The instruments are key to the textured sound Andy gets on Tatoom. His logistical nightmare was assembling a 22 piece steel band, entirely using Ellie Mannette’s instruments, which Andy has been playing since he was twelve when his father gave him a tenor.
As an adult jazz musician and fine pianist, Andy found the pan too beguiling. In his early albums he used the pan to solo in inventive ways that brought him attention in this part of the world.
With Calypsociation, the energy of a full steel band has captured Andy’s imagination entirely. He says he hopes he has added to the conversation going on in steel band music and that he has contributed something that wasn’t there before. Only Andy can be so modest. “I sincerely hope people will enjoy this music and love the sound of steel band as much as I do,” he says. I have no doubt.