"Out of pain this culture was born"Tamboo Bamboo By Gerry Kangalee August 21, 2008 Page I | Page II | Page III The carnival began to succumb to the blandishments of capitalist commerce - sponsorship of bands, paid competitions, the re-entry of the "respectable" bourge... "college boys" organising bands, attempts to sanitise and control the thrust of the Canboulay - pre-figurations of what the Steelband movement went through in the fifties and sixties. Although, the Canboulay went into retreat, it did not die, but was forced to change its form. With the restrictions on drums, the masses developed the tambour bamboo. The stickfighting retreated, in large part, to the barrack yards and began to revolve around individuals and not bands. Drumming continued, but it did so more in the environment of Orisha feasts and off the carnival streets. Of course, there were numerous occasions when the restrictions were defied and torch lit crowds roamed the streets on Carnival Sunday night and there were occasions when bands clashed as of old. The use of bamboo was not peculiar to Trinidad. It occurred in West Africa and was utilised in other Caribbean islands and in Venezuela. The bamboo bands used three basic instruments - the boom (bass); foulé (mid-range) and cutter - of different lengths and thickness. The boom was struck on the ground. The foulé was struck end to end and the cutter was struck with a stick. Of course, there were variations on this basic framework. The boom could also be struck with a stick and thus produce more than one pitch. An essential part of the tamboo bamboo band was the bottle and spoon, which sometimes were filled with different levels of water to produce different tones, foreshadowing the tuned drums that made up the Steelband. The bands also used shakshaks and scraping instruments which were akin to the scratchers used in the modern Steelband. The bands did not play melodies, but they did have a range of tones and produced polyrhythms as a foundation for call and response singing by the chantwells who led the bands and their choruses. The barrack yards that spawned the kalinda band, now housed the tamboo bamboo bands and the spirit of the Canboulay lived on. The decline of the Canboulay marked the increasing influence of the small professional middle class that struggled for leadership of the masses. This class had its genesis in the Coloured middle class of the nineteenth century. During the attacks on the Canboulay they adopted a seemingly contradictory position. They supported the position that the Canboulay was violent and obscene and a degenerate festival of the lowly ex-slaves, but they defended the festival against the attempts by the colonial masters to suppress and eliminate it on the grounds that it was a Trinidadian festival. This reflected the in-betwixt and in-between social position of this class. It is they whose interests are reflected in the 'all ah we is one' position today and it is their interests that are served by presenting themselves as the "true Trinidadians". Around the turn of the century they began to exert political influence over the African masses and the history of the twentieth century is a history of the unity and struggle between them and the masses against colonialism and for political hegemony in the society. But that is a story for another time...another forum. The working class movement took off after the First World War and reached a tremendous high point in the period 1935-1937 which is a seminal period in the modern political history of T&T. The anti-colonial insurrections and general strikes of 1919 and 1937 ushered in the period of bourgeois democracy and eventually lead to independence and neo-colonialism. It is no co-incidence that this is the very period when the modern Steelband came into being. At the very time that the working class was fashioning the trade union and political instruments to carry its interests forward it was fashioning the Steelband to carry its cultural interests forward. Let us be clear. There are a lot of nancy stories going around about how somebody in a tamboo bamboo band snatch up some old pan on the roadside during carnival in the thirties and it sound good and gradually take over the carnival and about which band invent Pan and which man invent Pan. History is much more complex than that. The truth is metal percussion is widespread in Africa and the "New World". Bells, iron cymbals and hoe blades have been used widely as percussion instruments. Antigua is famous for its iron bands. There are reports of tin kettles being beaten on the streets in the 1848 Canboulay. There are reports of olive oil containers being used post-emancipation and that large biscuit drum basses were in use in the early tamboo bamboo bands post-1881. By 1912, bamboo bands included old tin pans, graters, pot covers, pitch oil tins (favourite percussion of the jab molassi), tubs, triangles, buckets and bottles and the knockabout sailors of the twenties and thirties (who deserve a study of their own) used chamber pots as costume and as percussion. During the 1930's metal containers appeared more frequently and the balance shifted in their favour over the bamboo as time passed. Metal was more durable than bamboo. It gave out a more intense sound. It possessed a wider tone range. Bamboo often shredded and had to be discarded during the course of the day. Metal was more at hand and was easy to acquire and metal had the capacity to be tuned. While this was recognised for hundreds of years, the genius of the Steelband lay in that it created a mechanism for the metal to preserve its tuned notes. It is on this foundation that the increasing sophistication of Pan developed. What is clear is that the transition toward the Steelband took place in the late thirties and that what differentiated the Pan from previous percussion agglomerations is that Pan is a percussion instrument that began to play simple melodies and through a process of creative experimentation from the late thirties to today has developed not an instrument but a family of instruments capable of playing the most complex melodies and chords. The thirties was the period of transition. Research into the period of the thirties shows that, once we put away our big city bias, the transition to the Steelband was taking place all over the island. Newspapers which reported on the 1937 and 1938 carnivals are replete with stories about the use of metal instruments in Tunapuna, San Fernando, Arima and Princes Town. By 1940, Pan had become according to one commentator "a clearly identifiable part of carnival festivity." By 1941, steel bands had begun to dominate, particularly in Port of Spain, although there were still a range of bands that were semi-steel and not yet all steel. The British banned the carnival from 1942-1945 as a danger to the war effort. Interestingly the leader of the nascent workers' movement which came to the fore in 1937, Uriah Butler, was held in detention for the duration of the war for the very same reason. The original steelbandsmen came through the tamboo bamboo experience and the panyards were the original yards of the bamboo bands. Meadow Williams, an early Pan pioneer in San Fernando says that his Grandmother and Great Uncle played mas with the bamboo band situated at the corner of Coffee and Drayton streets, where Windsor Hall was located. "It had a big open yard in the back. Even as a lil fella from 8 years I beating bamboo." It was known as German Camp. Meadow was born in 1926, so he spans the period from bamboo into Steelband. He further states that there were two other bamboo yards in San Fernando - one on the Wharf and the other at Tollgate (corner of Cipero and Rushworth Streets), a historic spot where in 1884 the colonial authorities massacred indentured workers who came into Sando with their Hosay which was banned by the colonial government. According to Meadow, Bamboo bands in San Fernando only died out in 1946. Interestingly Meadow Williams says that he used to play tassa for Hosay and credited that experience for helping with his technique in the early pan round de neck days. While Pan developed all over the island, Port of Spain was undoubtedly the centre of innovation and development. Meadow says that Tall Boy, Julian Benjamin, befriended him and introduced him to the burning of pans. He took Meadow to Port of Spain, to Hell Yard where he met Fish Eye, the legendary leader of what became Trinidad All Stars. He recalls that all day Pan was being beaten, dice was being rolled and cards being played. Meadow says there was ping pong with 4 notes, kittle, grumbler, boom, biscuit drum and bugle. They played a tune called "This Gun for Hire". He spent three days at Hell Yard and tried his hand at all the Pans. He was still a minor. He started going to Port of Spain "regular" and he got a Pan from Fish Eye. He began to tune; played "Mary had a little lamb" and put in an extra note on the Pan. He played old bamboo tunes like "Fire Brigade" and "Brown Girl". He said when he thought he had made progress with his tuning, the guys in town had already been there and done that. While the bamboo players morphed into steelbandsmen, the development of Pan brought a whole new cohort of youth onto the centre stage. They had no connection with the bamboo. They were infants at the beginning of the war and were young teenagers by the time the war had ended. They were fascinated by the new instrument and plunged into it wholeheartedly. Angus Lalsingh born of the 'Fighting Sea Bees' speaks of the children in Mon Repos, San Fernando, six, seven and eight years old being fascinated, during the war, by the new instrument. They used to pick up any metallic object and beat the hell out of it as they saw the older guys in bands like Bataan on the Coffee; Pearl Harbour (Meadow's band) on the wharf and Free French in the Bideau. The captain of Bataan, a noted bad john named Teddy gave them a ping pong, a Pan that was pressed upward, no more than six notes and held in one hand while beaten with the other. Lalsingh says, "a lot of people in the area use to complain about the noise..." "Miss Taitt used to get vex and at one time throw down all the pans in a big canal down the hill." Miss Taitt was the mother of Nerlin (Lin)Taitt, one of the most skilful Panmen to come out of Sando, a man who had a profound effect on the shaping of Reggae music and who is a leading jazz musician in North America. Lalsingh continues: "...we used to thief pans, rubbish pans; people couldn't put out rubbish pan in the area...as we thief them we used to paint them overnight... Nerlin Taitt is the first among us who started to tune pan. We try and try from we own experiences because nobody had time with anybody...so we developed our own thing through Nerlin..." Lalsingh's testimony was just a variation on a theme that was being played out throughout the country. The youth, during the war invested a lot of effort and energy into developing the Pan, so that by the time the Steelbands hit the streets on VE and VJ days in 1945, the Steelband of 1940 was a distant memory and a whole new world had begun to open up for this latest vanguard of the Canboulay, which over the next thirty years moved back into ascendancy over the Mardi Gras against, once again, police attacks and the disapproval of the newly ascendant professional middle classes. The cycle was being repeated yet again. If you can't defeat them, co-opt them. The businessmen moved in; the middle classes joined the movement to attempt to steer it in their direction; the commoditisation of cultural expression began to sideline the new vanguard of the Canboulay on the fringes of the carnival and boxed it in to the Panorama syndrome, at once a boon for Pan as an instrument and a lethal blow for Pan as a movement. The story of the track taken by the Steelband movement from the 1940's to today is, in essence, no different to the story of the nineteenth century Canboulay, except that conditions had changed to that of an increasingly moribund, increasingly dysfunctional capitalism that turns all human relationships into a commercial nexus; one that says Carnival is colour and colour is Kodak; one that pretends that pretty mas is what Carnival is all about and steupses and frowns when Steelbands come on to the road at Carnival and grumbles that ent panorama gone...like dey ent see dey holdin' back the big truck. This article is not geared to examining in detail the process of the struggle to survive of the early Steelbands, the victory of the modern vanguard of the Canboulay as the country hurtled toward independence on a frenzied wave of baseless optimism, and the increasing pressure that the movement has been forced to endure over the last thirty years as the old enemy transformed itself into more insidious forms. Some of these forms include the planting of false consciousness within the movement itself and the growing influence of the neo-colonial state on the cultural expressions of the masses to ensure that it conforms with the face of modern imperialism under the smoke screen of a so-called globalisation that in its frenetic effort to survive subsumes man's cultural treasures to its function of capital accumulation and concentration at all costs. Maybe a detailed examination of this period should be undertaken just as a profound look at the struggles of the Indo working class from Hosay to Indian Arrival Day must be done to understand the role of culture in sustaining the children of the indentured who, like the children of the slaves, fought tremendous battles to survive on the cultural front and who at the very time when their cultural forms are becoming more sophisticated, its content is becoming more banal. In the final analysis, aren't we all children of the plantation? Page I | Page II | Page III |