Steelbands kick off 2027 Panorama single pan preliminaries

NARIS­SA FRAS­ER

GML Cor­re­spon­dent

Steel­bands in Point Fortin and San Fer­nan­do kicked off the 2027 Na­tion­al Panora­ma sin­gle pan pre­lim­i­nar­ies on Wednes­day night, per­form­ing tunes from a range of lo­cal artistes, in­clud­ing Black Stal­in, Machel Mon­tano and Voice.

The com­pe­ti­tion’s 2027 theme is “Bring Yuh En­er­gy, Match D Rhythm”, and pays trib­ute to The Mighty Spar­row for his con­tri­bu­tion to ca­lyp­so and T&T’s mu­si­cal her­itage.

Jah Roots Steel­band of War­den Road, Point Fortin, got things start­ed with their ren­di­tion of Play One by Black Stal­in, arranged by Jesse Lessey and mem­bers of the band.

PanTrin­ba­go’s cen­tral ex­ec­u­tive pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer, Mar­cus Ash, brought greet­ings on be­half of the as­so­ci­a­tion’s pres­i­dent, Bev­er­ly Ram­sey-Moore, who was un­able to at­tend.

He praised the first band for main­tain­ing the tra­di­tion of hav­ing the steel­pans around their necks, adding: “If we don’t re­mem­ber where we came from, we don’t know where we go­ing.”

Band­leader Biko Lessey said one of their main goals was to keep that tra­di­tion go­ing for as long as pos­si­ble.

“The pans around the neck al­so sym­bol­ise that part of slav­ery (where) mu­sic (was used) to fight through all the tri­als and tribu­la­tions to be able to keep the mu­sic trav­el­ling,” he said. “So when I don this pan around my neck, I re­mem­ber all my an­ces­tors who had those chains around their neck, fight­ing for sur­vival, and for right now I am fight­ing to keep the re­mem­brance of (them).”

He said that even be­fore the re­cent deaths of ca­lyp­so leg­ends The Mighty Spar­row and Broth­er Valenti­no, the band had planned to ho­n­our late mu­sic leg­ends.

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly, more of them have fall­en this year, so we de­cid­ed to play one for them.”

The judg­ing then moved to San Fer­nan­do, con­tin­u­ing with Pan Pro­fes­sion­als Steel Or­ches­tra at the Mileage Mack com­pound at Union Hall. They played This Par­ty Is It by Christo­pher “Tam­bu” Her­bert, arranged by An­dre Munroe.

Epic Koskeros Steel Or­ches­tra kept the en­er­gy go­ing at Skin­ner Park with Kion Robin­son’s arrange­ment of Too Own Way by Aaron “Voice” St Louis. Sup­port­ers from the com­mu­ni­ty came out to cheer, and PanTrin­ba­go praised the band for reach­ing the fi­nals ear­li­er this year af­ter on­ly re­sum­ing its par­tic­i­pa­tion two years ago.

The vibes then moved to Pan El­ders’ Carib Street pa­n­yard for LA44 Steel Or­ches­tra’s per­for­mance. Their song of choice was Machel Mon­tano and Patrice Roberts’ Rollin, arranged by Shaquille “Fl­o­go” Forbes. It was al­most im­pos­si­ble to find a park­ing spot out­side the pa­n­yard as scores of sup­port­ers came out, and the per­for­mance even end­ed with a fire­works dis­play.

Clos­ing off the night was La Ro­maine Su­per Vibes at Fon­claire’s pa­n­yard on Dot­tin Street. They en­ter­tained their sup­port­ers and the judges with Cyah Be­have by Voice, arranged by Dar­ren Shep­pard.

The sin­gle pan pre­lim­i­nar­ies will con­tin­ue across both is­lands un­til No­vem­ber 12.