Majesty of a panyard experience

DAVID BOOTHMAN

IT IS 2019 and Carnival is here again. Revellers and mas camp designers are busy applying the finishing touches to their costumes. The music is out. Radio stations are playing their selections on the airwaves. Panyards have been drilling their Panorama song. The competition is on. The past few weeks yards were swarmed with supporters and newcomers were bussed and carpooled to experience this phenomenal outdoor acoustic event. The excitement reaches a crescendo tonight.

I visited a panyard early in the season to witness and experience the process of the creative at work. To really experience the bliss and sophistication of the music in a panyard is to be without bias, without the competition, without the tribal gloating – when everyone, it seems, comes to judge and arrange the arranger.

The panyard for this exercise was Phase 2 Pan Groove with its arranger and leader Len “Boogsie” Sharpe – the Mozart/Art Tatum of pan.

This panyard has been the playground for this musical folk genius’ exploration of the science of boom acoustic of the pan and its musical phenomena and potential. He has explored the full tonal potential of the boom acoustic instrument and its music.

This savant-like skill in ascertaining rhythms and tonal clusters with undulating melodies and harmonics in the most complex asymmetry is beyond the conventional – and is uniquely his.

As an arranger, Boogsie has made Phase 2 his instrument with a palette of skilled pannists all technically set and ready to lay the canvas for his music.

Phase 2’s 2019 song of choice is Party Start written by Marvin Davis and sung by Swappi and Ultimate Rejects. During my visit to the yard, I sat next to Boogsie as he listened attentively as Akua Leith (artistic director/conductor of the National Steel Symphony Orchestra) drilled the musicians through the nuances of the parts and passages of the song and arrangement.

Party Start is a simple two-chords song. I sat listening and absorbing the majesty of the creative at play, Boogsie’s renditioning of a simple song.

Within a passing 24 bars passage, I was taken back into an art deco period – a memory of the Globe Theatre, Princess Building and Queen’s Park Hotel, then through the romantic period with the big-band era 50s sound of Edmundo Ross and Sel Duncan filled with Castilian lines, calypso dance riffs and montonos.

This passage in the midst of other parts of the arrangement can be fleeting according to the tempo. The historic visitation, the memory, the lingering deja-vu are akin to taste and subtleties of transcendence. As in yogic experience, the realisation only comes when you are at one in unity away from gross. The music offers that opportunity, that space and connectedness.

This is for the art appreciation students and music enthusiasts: a one-on-one with the music. When you travel inside the music, see if it is there the next day. The music changes, always changes. What stays is what we receive from it.

I have had a relationship with the Phase 2 panyard since its yesteryear inception in 1971 and, ever since, Phase 2 was always the rebel in the music. There was the early inclusion of conventional instruments collaboration with pan. Caribbean jazz musicians around in the early days were the likes of the Bailey brothers, Richard and Robert, Andy Phillips, Clive Zanda, Raf Robertson, Ian Villafana, Happy Williams, to name a few.

The first collaborative calypso jazz concert, Kaiso Caravan, which was conceived by my father, Oliver Boothman, was a collaboration with Family Tree the Band in which Boogsie played, along with Zanda (Gayap), Scofield Pilgrim (QRC Jazz Club) disciples and early Phase 2 managed by Peter Aleong.

This was the nexus which spurned the calypso jazz, Caribbean jazz and pan jazz throughout the region and back...to the panyard.