This post is dedicated to one thing - the greatest pan tune ever
arranged and the ending of my eight year search for the original track.
And before I go on, huge huge thanks to
pukshop.com
- the "world's 1st Caribbean digital download, jukebox and live stream"
- for being seemingly the only place on the planet to provide online
Soca music sales, and the provider of the fine specimen stage left
(that's, erm, to the right then).
Ok, no idea what I'm on about again? What's new... Anyway, for nigh on 13 years I played the
steel pan in and out of school and college, and had the pleasure of being taught by probably
the best
proffesional pan player in the north of England. Not that it did me
much good, other than obsess me with various steel band music for the
rest of my life. So, back to this track. Sound Of The Ghost is a track
by Kernel Roberts, son of one of the greatest Soca composers ever -
Lord Kitchener, and was written as a tribute to his father. Anyways, the recording that got me in
to the track - a 2001 Panorama performance (that's Trinidad &
Tobago's national steel pan competition,
featuring ~100 players in every band, and far too many bands to
mention, get just a glimpse of it
here,
musically and physically a logistical nightmare with bands playing one
after another and moved into stadia on huge wheeled contraptions, but I
digress...) - was performed by a steel band
called
Renegades,
prefixed Amoco, BP, or god knows what else - they traditionally have
some big oil company sponsorship thing going on over there. The
10 minute masterpiece to the left is IMO one of the finest things to
come out of
Panorama
ever. Not like I've ever had more than one CD of the thing. Probably
the only one ever to make it over the Atlantic in to the UK
distribution channels. But
these guys are a huge help.
And just because it's the only other recording of the track I've ever found, here's
El Dorado secondary school's band's take, with a digression in to something familiarly
Wet Wet Wet.... Now I must be off to finally finish learning to play the
Monkey Island theme tune, and muse some more over that Sooz one from As If
joining the Navy; weirder than that time Vu ate a durian...
-
Chris-panjumbie-topher.
)