Caribbean creative and cultural institutions that have reached the half-century mark are not uncommon – the National Dance Theater of Jamaica and the Trinidad Theater Workshop, for example. But the constant disdain and news value sometimes fade – not so much as a sign of poverty, but perhaps as a signal of lagging public awareness and commercial support.
In 2022, HADCO Phase II Pan Groove turns 50 years old. With that benchmark, he joins the pantheon of legendary bands that paved the way to sustain an original Caribbean-born sound and raises the idea that “the daring of the Creole imagination,” as coined by scholar Kim Johnson, has gone global. The group can be a case study for a modern consideration of steel orchestras.
The names of the pioneer generations formed in the 1930s and 1940s – Renegades, All Stars, Desperadoes, Casablanca, Conquerors – suggest a fighting spirit that was a hallmark of the pants’ early life, and the fantasy of the cinematic imagination. Phase II Pan Groove, on the other hand, was born in the turbulent 1970s. It was a time that saw Trinidad influenced by American black power animus, heralding an awakening of cultural pride among a new generation of musicians. They sought new sounds and to distance themselves from the colonial past.
Phase II would be the bellwether of the steel generations born in this era, as it traversed a bumpy road to self-identification, self-sufficiency, innovative creativity, and commercial independence. It survived the influx of Caribbean entrepreneurship. But before we get to 50, a little historical context is in order.
In Trinidad’s steelband movement, those early gatherings — once described by fellow travel writer Dane Chandos as “serving as the nucleus for the organization of petty criminal gangs” — had evolved in 20 years into what Chandos later described him as having “done much to reduce delinquency in the islands, both by giving interest to young people and by directing any antisocial tendencies of Trinidadian youth against rival gangs rather than against society at large.” By the 1970s, musical competition was paramount and growing commercial ties were developing beyond patronage to a music industry.
In the new setting of 1972, a 19-year-old Len “Boogsie” Sharpe and five other similarly young steelheads, all from the popular band Starlift – Selwyn Tarradath, Rawle Mitchell, Andy Phillip, Noel Seon and Barry Howard – they decided to separate. away to create an identity of their own making, to “try and make it out,” as Sharpe puts it.
First practiced in Tarradath’s garage as, in Sharpe’s words, “a six-piece combination using the pan”, before making their way across the road to the present garden, they evolved into a phenomenon. Youthful arrogance, Caribbean bravado – call it what you will. The results after half a century tell their own story: nearly two dozen top rankings to date, including seven National Panorama Championships (Pan World Cup) starting in 1987 – and all with original compositions and arrangements by Sharpe .
With his extraordinary skill and talent as a pan player, Sharpe has been called the “Mozart of Pan” and “our steely genius” and has been the heart and soul of the band for 50 years, serving as musical director, arranger . , composer and de facto leader. “I was born in a garden in Benares Street, St James’s,” he says – and that environment nurtured an aptitude for music that still amazes.
In the year 2002 Caribbean Beat article by respected musician and artist Pat Bishop, Sharpe was described as “a composer who can neither read nor write music, but whose sense of musical adventure is highly developed” and whose music “can hold its own in the wider world of music composition, if Trinidad were ever to take its music seriously.”
In the 20 years since Ms. Bishop’s charge of the island, Sharpe and Phase II Pan Groove have benefited from a wider public awareness of the importance of steel music to its national identity, and the public has in turn benefited from the new music that exalts and continues to create. new fans. “The band was young and we were doing things differently,” says Sharpe.
Beginning in the 1980s, as the group began to garner acclaim, Sharpe was prolifically composing and arranging music that flirted with jazz improvisation and fusion of world music—even classical—and also recording. His influence on a generation of players is noted through recordings by players in many countries who cite him as a major influence.
Sharpe was unconsciously competing to be the face of steel in the world music industry with foreign-based musicians such as Rudy Smith in Scandinavia and Othello Molineaux and Andy Narell in the US. His brand was in demand, doing recording sessions with jazz giants such as Monty Alexander, and live concerts with Max Roach and Gary Burton. By the 1990s, the band was touring across continents.
Within the group, there was an internationalization of the players and a democratization of the court: women were at the forefront as section leaders and drill masters. Different nationalities, races, ages, sizes, all came to do service in the “house of Boogsie” – Japan, France, UK, South Africa and all the ethnicities within it made up this global conglomerate. The yard became a place for creativity, for community—for a congregation of curious suburbanites looking in.
That yard, now called D’Village, began as a clearing at the end of a cul-de-sac in Woodbrook, a middle-class port on the outskirts of Spain. It’s “a liminal place,” says Sharpe, that today—with the help of its new sponsor HADCO (a Trinidad-based distribution company)—is a commercial hub of music appreciation and social recreation that’s unique to the country.
Sharpe says they were proud to be an unsponsored group for many years, only receiving an official sponsorship from a state-owned oil company, Petrotrin, in 1999. This lasted 16 years until the HADCO tie-up. In what can be described as a synergy between mavericks, this commercial tie-up goes far beyond HADCO’s goal of “creating shared value” with its sponsorships.
Sharpe tearfully expresses his gratitude to the company’s co-CEO, John Hadad: “That man is responsible for my life.” Biographies of musical geniuses often come to a harsh reality of drug addiction. Hadad’s company paid for a detox program that Sharpe insists was necessary for him to continue toward this milestone with the band. “I have been clean for four years. My life is pan. The instrument? This is my life,” says Sharpe as he reflects on his renewed personal existence.
In 50 years, a lot can happen. A life can be fully explored from birth to death. For collectives in the music industry – in a country like Trinidad & Tobago with a constant ebb and flow of choice and loyalty – maintaining a level of relevance and functioning as a stage for ongoing engagement with a broad section of the population are prized attributes.
Phase II Pan Groove, its players, sponsor, and director represent the possibilities for developing a native musical language that resonates in academic and leisure spaces everywhere. The band evolved from a group of young men who, as Sharpe describes, would “walk the pan all the way to Savannah” for Panorama in 1973, to today being hailed as one of the Big Five Steel Bands, and Sharpe receiving national awards and an honorary doctorate for his cultural significance.
Pan Groove’s Phase II journey was blessed by a suburban environment that reflected an international face, by inspired corporate connections that have brought positive benefits to the community, and by leadership from a sometimes tortured genius who continues to make music that people still love to listen to him. “Band is an atmosphere,” says Sharpe. And this is not a common cliché. It is a youthful destiny fulfilled.
