They start practising again - the Steelband

Take a rusty, discarded oil drum, a heavy cannon ball, a blazing fire, a hammer for the fine-tuning, plenty noise, a pair of strong arms and a pair of good ears, surrounded by a bunch of "youts" from the neighbourhood - and you get a sound that is so soft and tinkling that it could be the soundtrack to Peter Pan's flying fairy. Or, it could be a thundering sound, pounding in your ears like a horde of Mongols thundering with their horses over the steppes of Tadjikistan.

The steelband is, in the best sense, a child of the oil age, both as a musical and as a social phenomenon. It is a 20th century phenomenon, and as such has become a part of history. But let us go 8 decades back, to the 1930s.

It was a hard time in Trinidad, as it was elsewhere in the world. The great depression in the United States had also affected the British crown colony. The British Empire dragged on like a wounded elephant. England's economy was not buoyant, which meant that her raw-material producing colonies saw their markets dwindling.

In Trinidad, thousands of people had no work. Tens of thousands of others were employed at hunger wages by sugar companies or in the oil fields. It was hard for the local population to see the foreign managers live in relative wealth and distinctive comfort, whilst Trinidadians saw their children hungry, without shoes or not able to afford school books.

However, people were far from being apathetic. For about 50 years now, the local reform movement had been attracting brave hearts and bright minds, who tried to walk the fine line between illegal sedition and necessary speaking up for His Majesty's subjects. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and Marcus Garvey's black nationalism, the reform movement and the budding union movement was relevant for Trinidadians of all skin tones and many social backgrounds, who sought social justice for themselves and for their countrymen and women.

They called their demonstrations "Hunger Marches", bringing to a point what it was all about. Retrenchment, undignified and unsanitary housing conditions, a lack of education and future prospects were things that the majority of the people had to live with in those years (not only in Trinidad, it must be remembered, but in the western world all over). It was not only workers who took to the streets, bringing sugar production and oil production to a halt, but also members of the educated black and coloured middle classes, who had been the true Creole backbone of the colony for many generations.

People like Elma Francois, Captain A.A. Cipriani and Uriah Butler emerged in the political arena. Civic courage was contagious: the calling for local representation gave birth to a whole artistic movement, a first independent Trinidadian expression, in particular in the writing arena: C.L.R. James, Alfred Mendes, Ralph de Boissière to name just a few. A couple years later, also Albert Gomes, who excelled in both, the political and the writers vocation. Free-thinking newspapers came on the scene, first and foremost "The Beacon".

The emergence of the steelband towards the end of the 1930s can be seen as a noisy, rhythmical, carnevalesque interpretation of what was left for local people: scraps (in this case scrap metal). At the beginning, it was not more than percussion, getting together and making noise with brake pads, biscuit tins and other metal pieces. But quickly, the tins got “tuned”, and the bigger oil drums started to be used.

Steelband became yet another musical expression of the African diaspora, and as such a part of that 20th century musical phenomenon that influenced popular music like no other. In the Caribbean, African musical expressions mixed with the relevant European administrative culture, creating such distinct genres like merengue and rumba in the Spanish islands, bele and compas in the French Antilles, and reggae and calypso in the British West Indies. With the exception of reggae, it is interesting how localised those artforms remained: just listen to your radio in Trinidad and try to find Cuban mambo or Martiniquan zouk!

Steelband, however, is not a musical genre, and was able to “travel”, so much so that the whole Caribbean now identifies with it as a folk artform. It seems to have been just what the tourist industry and the media needed!

The emergence of the Steelband is closely linked with Carnival. Carnival, a Catholic custom, was brought to Trinidad by the French settlers in the 1780s. At first, the African slaves were not permitted to participate in the celebrations and masked balls of the French families. However, they were allowed to celebrate “canboulay”, when lit torches were carried through the street to mark the end of the sugar cane harvest - a custom which has been recently adopted in the popular “Crop Over” Festival of Barbados.

Before the abolition of slavery in 1834, the life of the African slaves did not take place in a cultural vacuum, however. The dominant culture of Trinidad was French, albeit the fact that the administration was British since 1797. Syncretic cultural expressions like Shango, Santeria and Voodoo (mixed of Catholicism and the African pantheon) are as much part of this syncretism as are Carnival, stickfight, bele dancing and other folklore that have their roots in the first decades of the 19th century. Steelband can be seen as a 20th century extension of that syncretism, albeit with other parameters: trash from the industrial society was used in a rebellious movement against a ruling ethnical minority.

With emancipation, Carnival changed dramatically. The former slaves and their offspring started to participate in it. The first “noisy” devices were added to revelries: kettles, salt boxes, chac-chacs etc. Carnival definitely lost its “polite” upper class touch immediately! The Europeans started to shun this kind of Carnival, which they called “Jamette Carnival”, the Carnival of those beyond the circle of polite society. Stick fighters, shantwells, drummers, prostitutes and bad johns! This was only to change towards the turn of the 20th century, when the “upper classes” once again took part in the festival.

With this, the Trini Carnival was quickly approaching a format that was to last for another century. Competitions were held in the various categories, and the raucousness of the street festival often clashed with the ideas of the British authorities as how His or Her Majesty’s subjects should behave!

Steelband started in 1937 or 1938, when “Alexander Ragtime Band” from Newtown, formerly the Calvary Tamboo Bamboo Band, came out to play. Their leader was “Lord Humbugger” Forde. The pans were made of paint tins, biscuit tins, linseed oil tins, carbide pans, zinc buckets and dustbin cover. Tuned into two notes, they were beat furiously and rhythmically together with the tamboo bamboo. What a novelty! What a spectacle! No wonder it caught!

A year later, the pan craze brought forth many more steelbands, all from depressed areas with great poverty. Inspired by the American cinema, the tradition of bombastic names was started: Destination Tokyo, Sun Valley, Hellyard, Cross of Lorraine, Red Army. It was the eve of World War II, which also was reflected in the steelband names.

From 1942 to 1945, Carnival was banned due to the war. It seems to have been a gestation period for the steelband. When in 1945 victory was celebrated by the allied forces and Trinidadians had a spontaneous Carnival in the middle of the year, steelbands joined in the street party with much refined instruments. The dudups of the pre-war days was joined by the first tenor pans made of oil drums, called “ping pong”.

From then on, there was no turning back for the development of this instrument. Socially, the steelband went the way of a lot of popular music of the second half of the 20th century. Much like ragtime, jazz, rock & roll, it all started with a couple rebellious youths from depressed urban areas, and ended up some 50 years later in dignified symphonic orchestra halls, carrying Trinidad’s indigenous musical genre (calypso) far beyond the island’s shores.

Jamette Society

La Vida Loca behind the Bridge

We associate barrack yards and the jamette society with the history of East Port-of-Spain. But Carnival aficionados know: there is more, mucho more to historical Laventille!

As night falls in the city of Port-of-Spain, its eastern reaches seem to have flowed down from the hillsides and to have settled into the flat lands that stretch south and west to the sea. The full moon rises over it, making the impression of a ‘liquid Christmas tree’ even more spectacular.

In the hard light of day, however, this illusion vanishes. Laventille, as the eastern hills are known, might have gotten its name from the ‘levanter’, as the Spaniards called the wind that came from the eastern Mediterranean, bringing with it the smell of the deserts in the Levant. Very old houses, shacks, yards, disused quarries, winding lanes, steep steps - all these represent another side of life which was always very different from the lifestyle lived by those who inhabit the hills to the north and the west of the city.

The East Dry River was a creation of the last Spanish Governor Don José Maria Chacon. Before his governance in 1784 - 1797, it was known as the Rio Tragarete or Rio Santa Ana, and it ran its course as far as the hospice on Observatory Street, turned west and ran across Park Street, along Frederick Street, across Woodford Square and along Chacon Street into the sea.

Causing much damage through flooding in the rainy season, the river was deviated in 1787 to its present course. Governor Woodford widened its bed in 1817.

In those days, the hills of Laventille were covered in thick woods. A few freed slaves lived there, hunting and collecting firewood.

The first major infrastructural change took place in 1783, when Don Cosmo Charruca had an observatory built in the hills. A road needed to be constructed along the ridge leading to it - Observatory Street. It was here where the first meridian of the New World was established by the Spanish astronomer. Charruca’s building is now called Fort Chacon. A few years later, another fort, called St. David’s Tower or Fort Picton, was built a quarter of a mile to the west of it.

In 1795 the Masonic Lodge, ‘Les Frères Unis’ (United Brothers) was established at Mount Moria. It is still located in there.

By the 1820s, Rose Hill Estate was established by Edward Jackson in the area opposite to Park Street. When slavery was abolished in 1834, many of the freed slaves found refuge in Laventille’s forested hillsides. By the 1840s, these were joined by a large number of Africans who had been liberated as a result of action taken by Britain again foreign slave ships to suppress the slave trade north of the equator. Africans from many tribes settled in Laventille, among them were Mandingo, Ibo, Yoruba and Krumen. The entire area was for many years called ‘Free Town’.

For years, the only existing bridge across the Dry River consisted of a few planks at the crossing at Cadiz Road. The boys who had built it would extract a penny from any pedestrian who would use the bridge at his or her own risk. Later, the first real bridge was built at this spot, called ‘McCarthy’s Bridge’.

The inhabitants of Laventille retained West African customs to a considerable degree. Being comprised of several barrack yards along (sometimes secret) religious or tribal lines, there were many gangs or bands. These bands were devoted to singing and dancing, and their rivalries often led to feuds and open fighting. There were wakes, dances and religious ceremonies accompanied by big drums, chac chac and banjoes.

In 1865 it was reported that a serious street battle had taken place between two factions of women - the ‘Mousselins’ and the ‘Don’t Care Damns’. Other bands were called ‘Immaculate Conception’ or the terrible ‘Beka Boys’, who had the awful habit of tossing foul-smelling bits of cloth in the faces of respectable women!

The streets of east Port-of-Spain came to be known as the ‘French Shores’, and those who inhabited them were known as jamettes (from French ‘diamètre’). The term referred to those outside the circle (the ‘diameter’) of polite society. In the eyes of the colonial government, the jamette society was outrageous, vulgar and obscene. There were famous whores, bad johns, panders, touts, chantwells, stickfighters, thieves and murderers. It is from this social matrix that such present-day institutions like the steelband and many aspects of Carnival and calypso sprang.

Jamette Society

Jamettes (female):

Darling Dan, Ling Mama, Mossie Millie, Ocean Lizzie, Piti Belle Lily, Sybil Steele, Alice Sugar, Cariso Jane

Jamettes (male):

Cutaway Rimbeau, Shiffer Brathwaite, Jo-Jo, Thunderstone, Surisima the Carib,

‘Djab se yo neg, me Die se nomla bla’ - song of the stickfighters used to ‘deaden’ the skin

A little more than a century ago, the festival of carnival in Port-of-Spain was firmly in the hands of the jamette society. During the canboulay parades, stickfighters or batonniers came out on Saturday night, and as the people gathered into bands, they fought with ‘bois’, whips and words. Lead by chantwels, the bands carried lighted torches, and drummed away on goatskin drums, as well as produced the eerie sounds of tamboo-bamboo.

The higher classes of Trinidad - white and coloured - were appalled by the ‘disgusting gestures, bad songs, women wearing men’s clothes and vice versa’ of the jamette carnival.

Comment on the Birth of the Steelband by Albert "Bertie" Gomes

“The second World War saw the birth of the ‘steel band’. It was both an innovation in musical expression and a social explosion in Trinidad. It also provided an unparalleled instance of Puritan humbug. It would be impossible to trace the origins of the steel bands. These must always remain shrouded in mystery and a subject of endless speculation - all things considered, a not surprising genesis for this musical aberration and gimcrack orchestration whose romantic odyssey spans an arc of picaresque adventure that began in the slum areas of Port-of-Spain, recently reached Cape Kennedy, and is still orbiting. The actual mechanics of its emergence seem to me unimportant.”