NAPARIMA COLLEGE FOREVER
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Classy sounds of NC Steel-band !
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...long-time Naps man writes...
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In the towns and villages of sunny downtown Trinidad, almost everyone grows up within earshot of casually played and practised steel-band music.
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Day and night, the local band-players can be heard tuning their pans or practicing solo or group parts. The music tinkles and twitters brightly, intently, thoughtfully, gaily in the near distance, repeating the rhythms of waving sugar-cane, forest birdsongs, crashing surf, or hanging in the still, pregnant, tropic air like the charmed perfume of orchids in a sultry night-curtained garden.
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In Toronto, some Trinidad people, including former Naps students, have been playing pan there for years, training natives of Canada and such. In the summer of 1999, I bounced up some of my former NC school-mates, compadres, playing at a house party organized by Naparima Alumni Assoc. for G.W. Mackenzie (TT ambassador to the UN).
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(You can still see highlites of this event on the NC NAAC webpage at:
http://www.naparima.org/ncnaac.htm
including a RealAudio clip of NAAC's group "Panache").
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Charmed anew by the magic music, I managed to get NAAC's "side" up to play at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario (four hours north of Toronto) that September, and again in Sept 2000. On the second occasion Rustin Oree gave me two CD's executively produced by himself, featuring "Pan-Man" Pat McNeilly, and also Rustin and others.Steel-band used to be notoriously difficult to capture well on recordings, but they must have solved that problem because these CD's are wonderful cuts, warm, brilliant, exciting, sweet, slick.
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The CD's misplaced me, and we only just found one another again, and I am listening to them now for the first time, all alone in a glassed-in space in the midst of wintry Quebec. It's ten below and two feet of snow outside, but warm inside, specially with the gentle evocative pan. nc~forever . . . nc~forever . . .
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The music selections are middle of the road, but deftly, expertly and imaginatively arranged and played. You won't find any driving bram or road music on these CD's - it's a smaller band, and more refined, but very listenable and quite beguiling. As a long-time evaluator of pop-music, I can say it has a lot of grab: the first-pan is all liquid gold and caring, specially on the second CD, "Ramachez". The selection "Sorrento" is pure class - takes years off your life listening to it....
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In between the tracks on the first CD, these men put in the sound of waves on the beach (don't cry); and bird calling so real that you keep looking out the window for a bird-cage, or wishing you still had a slingin' shot... I've never heard recorded steel sound so good - it will bring back them rum-and-coke days down at Oxford, and more.... and make you proud, too. All the history and heritage of the islands is in the sound of these recordings. Fellows beating iron definitively straight and clear, while a facile first-pan corvettes around in an aggressively positive declaration of what life is about - makes a statement to the world about who we are and what our people are about...
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A TOUCH OF CLASS - Pantastixnc~forever . . . nc~forever . . . nc~forever
RAMACHEZ - Pan Man Pat
produced by the Steel Pan Company
rusty@pathcom.com
Phone: 416-745-4814
Thanks, Rusty! Thanks, Pat!
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(The CD's have been out for a while - just new to yours truly. If you want copies, contact the email or phone number above. The foregoing is a completely unsolicited endorsement, just a standard spontaneous rambling of...)
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krm 2001-01
www.naparima.org
NAAC
NC-FOREVER
another CD review
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