The Island That Invented an Instrument
The steelpan is the only acoustic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century. It was invented in Trinidad, out of oil drums, by people the colonial authorities had banned from drumming and then banned from playing bamboo. What that says about carnival, calypso and the country is most of the story.
In a panyard in Port of Spain on a February evening, a hundred people are standing behind instruments made out of oil drums, playing a Beethoven arrangement from memory at a volume that arrives in the chest before the ears. Nobody is reading music. The youngest player looks about eleven; several of the men at the back have been doing this for fifty years. In three weeks they will compete in Panorama, and the entire country will have an opinion about the result.
The steelpan is the only acoustic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century, it was invented here, and it was invented by people the colonial authorities were actively trying to stop from making noise.
How you get an instrument out of a ban
The sequence runs through a century of prohibition. African drumming was restricted under colonial ordinance in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Canboulay riots of 1881 when police attempted to suppress the carnival procession that commemorated the burning of cane fields under slavery.
With skin drums banned, players moved to tamboo bamboo — tuned lengths of bamboo stamped on the ground, pitched by length. That was banned too, in the 1930s, after it proved usable as a weapon in street fighting.
So the bands moved to metal: biscuit tins, dustbin lids, brake drums, whatever the industrial waste stream provided. And at some point in the late 1930s someone noticed that a dented metal surface produced different pitches at different points, and that the dents could be controlled deliberately.
The oil drum was the breakthrough, and Trinidad had them because Trinidad had oil. A 55-gallon drum sunk into a bowl and grooved into note areas, then tempered with fire and tuned by hammer, produces a chromatic instrument with a range that can be built as a family — from the high tenor carrying melody down through double seconds, cellos and the six-bass — capable of playing anything written for an orchestra.
By the 1950s steelbands were playing classical repertoire and calypso with equal seriousness, and the same authorities who had banned the drums were sending bands abroad as cultural representatives. The steelpan is now the national instrument by act of parliament.
Carnival, and what it is actually about
Trinidad Carnival is the largest in the Caribbean and its structure is unlike Rio’s. There is no stadium and no ticketed parade route as the centrepiece; there are bands of masqueraders in costume moving through the streets over two days, judging points along the way, and an enormous participatory infrastructure of fetes running for weeks beforehand.
The part that matters most, and that visitors most often miss, is J’Ouvert — from jour ouvert, daybreak. It begins around four in the morning on Carnival Monday, in darkness, with participants covered in mud, oil, paint or chocolate, playing traditional devil characters: the blue devils of Paramin, jab jab, jab molassie. It is deliberately dirty, deliberately frightening, and it is the direct descendant of the Canboulay processions the police tried to stop in 1881.
The other traditional characters survive alongside the modern bikini-and-feathers bands: Dame Lorraine parodying the planter class, Midnight Robber with his elaborate spoken boasts, Moko Jumbie on stilts, Pierrot Grenade. They are performed by a small number of practitioners and are the reason the National Carnival Commission and cultural organisations run mas camps and workshops to keep the knowledge transmitting.
And the music: calypso, which is the sung commentary tradition — political, satirical, competitive, judged at the Calypso Monarch competition — and soca, its faster dance-floor descendant, which now drives the fetes and the road. Panorama, the steelband competition, runs in parallel with a seriousness that outsiders find startling.
How a pan is actually made
The craft is worth describing because it is unusual: the instrument is manufactured, tuned and played by overlapping communities of people, mostly by hand, mostly in yards rather than factories.
It starts by sinking the head of a 55-gallon drum into a concave bowl with a sledgehammer — the process is called sinking and takes hours. The depth determines the range: a shallow bowl for the high tenor, deeper for the lower voices.
Then marking and grooving. Note areas are laid out on the sunken face in a pattern that is not arbitrary — the standard tenor layout places notes a fifth apart around the circle, so that harmonically related notes sit adjacent and the player’s hands move economically. The areas are outlined with a nail punch, which acoustically isolates each one.
The drum is then burned — heated over a fire and quenched — to temper the steel, and the skirt is cut to length. Only then does tuning begin: the tuner works each note area with small hammers, listening for the fundamental and the overtones above it, and adjusts until the octave and the twelfth ring true within the note itself. A good tenor takes a skilled tuner many hours, and pans are re-tuned regularly through their working life.
The result is an instrument with a family: tenor, double tenor, double seconds, guitar pans, cellos, tenor bass and the six-bass, which is six full drums played by one person standing in the middle of them. A large steelband is a hundred players, and the arrangements written for Panorama are original compositions of real complexity, memorised rather than read.
Trinidad exports pans worldwide and there are steelbands in Britain, Japan, Switzerland and across the United States. The tuners are still overwhelmingly Trinidadian, and the good ones travel.
The oil island and the quiet one
Trinidad is not a beach economy and has never needed to be. Oil was found here in the nineteenth century and the country became one of the earliest commercial producers in the world; natural gas and petrochemicals dominate now, and Trinidad and Tobago has one of the higher per-capita incomes in the Caribbean without depending on tourism at all.
That produces a genuinely different island: industrial in the south around Point Fortin and Pointe-à-Pierre, urban and busy in the Port of Spain corridor, and largely uninterested in whether you are enjoying yourself — which is, for a certain kind of traveller, an enormous relief.
The natural draws are specific rather than general. The Caroni Swamp at dusk, when thousands of scarlet ibis come in to roost and turn a mangrove island red, is one of the great wildlife spectacles of the Caribbean. The Asa Wright Nature Centre in the Northern Range is a legendary birding lodge. The Pitch Lake at La Brea is the largest natural asphalt deposit on earth and looks like a car park that is very slowly breathing. Maracas Bay on the north coast supplies the bake and shark that is the national beach food.
Tobago, twenty minutes away by air, is the opposite: small, green, quiet, with reef at Buccoo and Speyside, rainforest that has been protected since 1776 — the oldest legally protected forest reserve in the western hemisphere — and none of Trinidad’s industry. Trinidadians go there to rest, which tells you what it is for.
Two islands, several peoples
The demography follows the same sugar-and-indenture pattern as Guyana and Suriname. Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians each make up around a third or more of the population, with mixed, Chinese, Syrian-Lebanese and European-descended communities alongside.
The public holidays reflect it without embarrassment: Divali, Eid, Christmas, Corpus Christi, Indian Arrival Day, Emancipation Day, Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day. Divali Nagar in Chaguanas draws crowds across communities; the food does the same, and doubles — curried chickpeas between two pieces of fried bara, eaten standing up, from a stall, with pepper sauce if you can take it — is the great national street food and costs almost nothing.
The politics has often run along ethnic lines and the tension is real and openly discussed. The culture, particularly the music, has been where the mixing happens — chutney soca is literally the fusion, and the argument about who owns what in Trinidadian music is conducted, appropriately, in songs.
Sara shoots on assignment across four continents and develops half of it on film. Her long-term project on harvest seasons — coffee, saffron, olives, rice — has been exhibited at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan.