What do Africa, India, British WWII military surplus, Led Zeppelin, and Creekside Middle School in Woodstock all have in common?
Like Callaloo (a Caribbean dish that’s halfway between a soup and a salad), they’ve all blended together in a concave bowl – figuratively and literally.
On Saturday April 13th, Creekside Middle School will host the seventh year of the Great Lakes Steelpan Festival, organized by Woodstock’s Matt Potts and the Culture, Arts & Music educational group. Starting at 9 am, festival participants of any age and skill level will meet with instructors, artists, and even a founding legend of the Steelpan music scene – to hone their knowledge of the instrument, or to just tap their first notes on bumpy, concave sheet metal. At 7 pm, both the professionals and a mass band of the day’s amateurs will hold a concert, performing music that stretches its roots from Africa (Calypso), to India (Soca – or “Sokah”), to Europe (Classical), to the United States (Rock, Pop, and Hip-Hop).
According to Potts, if there’s any musical form that works for a concert featuring both lifetime performers – like Sterling Betancourt, this year’s guest of honor – and single-year or even single-day learners, then Steelpan is it. “It’s great for teaching people how to play,” Potts said. “We can teach a simple tune, so that anybody walking by can tell what it is, in about half a minute… there’s an initial sense of accomplishment right away, then once you get the basics down, there’s tons and tons of nuances that take years to perfect.”
Like its performance style, which takes straightforward percussion playing and adds a chromatic note scale, the steelpan is an instrument whose outward simplicity masks a surprisingly complex story. In the century that brought the airplane, the radio, nuclear fission, manned spaceflight and the internet to the world, the steelpan is argued to be the only non-derivative and widely used acoustic instrument invented – the last contribution to a tradition that goes back to the start of human time.
While it’s become synonymous with the free-and-easy spirit of the Caribbean, the steeldrum had its birth in the most destructive conflict of the Industrial age – after the Second World War, Potts said, “there were a lot of oil barrels on the [British] naval bases in Trinidad,” an island in the far southeast corner of ‘America’s Bathtub’. Over time, the surplus barrels made their way to the locals – descendants of both African slaves, and unique to the islands, indentured laborers from India.
Figures like Ellie Mannette – a two-time guest at the Great Lakes Steelpan Festival, whose recent passing is honored this year – discovered that the oil drums could be repurposed into exactly the instrument they were named after. But unlike traditional skin drums, there was a twist: by hammering the metal into a concave shape, with larger and smaller divots worked in from the edge to the center, a full note scale could be created.
The next step for the versatile new instrument was to find music to play on it – and like the steelpan itself, it came from everything the Trinidadians had on hand. “The birth of the pan itself was mostly on the African side,” Potts said, “but it wasn’t long before the Indian influence came in. Soca was created by taking Calypso, which is an African style, and putting in Indian rhythms and influences.” And in that same tradition, Potts’ own American steelband group, Potts & Pans, brings steelpan music all the way back around to the culture that made the oil drum in the first place: the band’s cover songs from Rush, Led Zeppelin, Maroon 5, Lady Gaga, Mozart, and Dr. Dre might not be a “cultural fusion” with anything but themselves and the instrument just yet, but it’s a start.
As one of the only builders and tuners of steelpans in the Great Lakes region – apprenticing himself to the art of this year’s second honoree, the late Cliff Alexis – Potts has great respect for the “juxtapositions” of both the instrument and its endlessly versatile range of music. “You’ve got what seems to be a super durable piece of steel, you wouldn’t think it’s fragile, but in reality… to get the finesse to play the instrument so you don’t damage it, that takes a while.” The challenge, he said, is that playing a steelpan and tuning it are almost the same thing – without intuitive skill from both the musicians playing them and the technicians tuning them, the instruments can lose their musical edge very quickly.
“It’s strategic hammering,” Potts said. “I have to hit different places to adjust this fundamental, different places to adjust that octave, different places for the third and fourth harmonic… every one of them is like a puzzle.” Perhaps there’s an analogy there that music teachers in d200 and around the world can appreciate.
The Great Lakes Steelpan Festival will begin at 9am on Saturday, April 13, at Creekside Middle School, with a concert open to the public at 7pm. For more information, registration, and tickets, visit steelpanfestival.com
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