Laventille, high in the hills above Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, may be a poor part of Trinidad but it has historic cultural riches. Chief among them is Desperadoes Steel Orchestra, a name that speaks of a community battling chronic disadvantage. Active since the mid-1940s, the group is known for electrifying performances and the unwavering loyalty of its players. Some sign up for life.
“One of the members just celebrated his 81st birthday, and he’s been in the band since he was a little kid,” Leon Foster Thomas explains. A steel pan player who lives in London, Thomas has been rehearsing with “Despers” for their appearance at the steel band competition Panorama, a key part of Trinidad and Tobago carnival, which takes place in February every year. “It’s generations and generations of people [in the band]. I’m inside this thing now … It’s kind of surreal. This is heavy, just to get the call to work with them.”
While the chance to temporarily trade winter in Britain for the clear blue skies of the Caribbean would have been enough to tempt Thomas to board the plane, the prospect of working with esteemed arranger Carlton “Zanda” Alexander also made the trip worthwhile. But the opportunity came because of the stature that Thomas has steadily gained in the past decade.
Born in San Fernando, in the south of Trinidad, he has been playing in steel bands since his childhood, and has grown into a formidable improviser, composer and leader in his own right. His 2010 debut album, What You Don’t Know, and its 2016 follow-up, Metamorphosis, garnered great critical acclaim, and his new offering, Calasanitus, consolidates his reputation, drawing astutely on his command of jazz as well as Caribbean and Latin music.
Thomas’s artistry showcases the steel pan, an oil drum ingeniously heated and tuned to produce chromatic scales. It is an instrument with great expressive scope, but Thomas willingly acknowledges that it has an image problem. Perhaps because of the prevailing association with the raucous nature of carnival, questions linger over its legitimacy.
“There are people who just don’t think that it’s a serious instrument. Some universities didn’t accept my application because I played pan. I had to get in as a percussion major,” the 41-year-old says over Zoom.
Also troublesome is the expectation for steel bands to just reprise the hits of the day. “Bandleaders would always say we have to play what people like, and hopefully keep touring,” Thomas notes drily. “And we never really got the chance to properly express ourselves. We were being put in a box, but also keeping ourselves in that box.”
With that in mind it comes as no surprise that Thomas foregrounds his own material rather than covers, and Calasanitus reveals his versatility above all else. The album has a fair amount of rhythmic fire, but Thomas also plays with a flickering lyricism that reflects deep immersion in the music of Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett, two of the artists who have brought a notable poetic gravitas to the jazz canon.
“I tried to emulate him in my playing,” Thomas says of Jarrett, the pianist whose renowned Standards Trio has been a major source of inspiration. “It gave me a great understanding of what I needed to do, how I needed to sound,” says Thomas. “I wasn’t looking at things from a steel pan point of view, just a musical point of view, as I want to make sure that when I speak through the pan it’s what I want to say and how I want to say it. This is me … This is my sound, and it’s still sophisticated, as if a saxophone or trumpet was playing. I think we can accomplish that. It’s just my voice and how I hear music. I want you to whistle it, for it to stay in your head as long as possible.”
Indeed, Thomas’s music makes it clear that the steel pan is capable of poignant, even haunting moods as well as raw percussive drive. While he aims to scale the virtuosic heights reached by other “pan jazz” players, such as Robert Greenidge and Othello Molineaux, who famously collaborated with electric bass innovator Jaco Pastorius in the 70s, Thomas is also intent on using his songs as a vehicle for very personal stories. Calasanitus is the middle name of his late mother, who raised him and his siblings as a single parent. She became his guiding light and was uppermost in his mind when he set about the task of composing for this latest work.
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More than 70 years ago, three Trinidadians – Sterling Betancourt, Ralph Cherrie and Russ Henderson – were among the first steel pan players to settle in Britain and capture the imagination of an unsuspecting public with an instrument that had never been seen before. They took pan to jazz clubs, Oxbridge balls and ultimately the Notting Hill carnival, creating a steel band movement in Britain and laying a foundation for future generations. Thomas is well aware of this rich history but also knows that he has a duty to extend it.
“The only way people will achieve their potential,” he says, “is if they stand out and do something different.”
Calasanitus is out now.