American musician and educator Vance Umphrey on the love of baking that brings him year after year to the Trinidad Carnival – as told to Attillah Springer
It was like Beethoven was alive and you could go and join his orchestra [Phase II]. We see Len “Boogsie” Sharpe as a living legend.
The first Boogsie deal I experienced was “Pan Army”. My professor had been in Trinidad that year and transcribed all the music, and the next year he brought it back to Humboldt State [in California], where I had just joined the steel band. I was playing for two seconds.
During my time at Humboldt, I played a number of Boogsie’s compositions – “Fire Down Below”, “Birthday Party”, “Pan Rising”, “Misbehave”, “Woman is Boss” and many more. So to get to Trinidad, to be there in person in the yard and see him create on the spot – to be able to be a part of that was living a dream for me.
In the yard I had to learn to do many things that I did not learn in school. I got to exercise my other musicianship skills by joining Phase II.
I have experienced a lot of use of sheets with other steel strips. Not only does Boogsie not use sheet music, but many times he composes pieces on the spot. He will change the music quickly at the last minute.
I was late for a test once and by the time I got there all the variation in seconds had been removed. When we started playing the tune, the band was playing something I hadn’t heard before!
Adaptability and flexibility are definitely characteristics that Phase II requires. It will be the night before Panorama and he is still composing. He can draw the bottom. I heard stories in the yard about when Phase II won with “The Woman is the Boss” – he was still putting notes on the track!
The other thing I remember about my first time in Phase II was the overwhelming beauty of the community and the culture in the yard. The characters, the community members, the supporters, the players – everyone was so beautiful in their style, their atmosphere, their love for the music.
Boogsie’s magic is that he will go to any pan and start composing their parts. It is incredible to see someone so virtuoso on any instrument in the steel orchestra.
The other stylistic thing about Boogsie is that he has the catchiest, but also the catchiest, tunes. It’s not always the most notes, but there’s always a lot of music. And the groove, especially in his background pans, is so weird and cool and cool.
Boogsie is a unique arranger in the steelband community. He’s writing for the whole orchestra, he’s not just writing a crazy tenor part and the background is doing whatever. He hears the whole orchestra as a unit – almost like Bach would play the organ … or like when he wrote a fugue or toccata for an organ, with all the bass all the way through, all the rhythms working together.
Many of the steel bands in Panorama will from the start pick a song that has already been written and do a theme and variation of this previously composed tune. Ray Holman was the first to bring an original arrangement to Panorama. Boogsie took that practice and throughout his career he has composed music for pan.
It is important in the steelband world to have original music written. When you’re thinking about copyright, you can’t get royalties out of your deal if you cover, say, Kesi’s tune.
Eventually with interventions like the PanNotation site with Mark Loquan and Mia Gormandy-Benjamin, hopefully composers will be able to capitalize on their creative work of original compositions for pan.
