Fast pan, slow money

What could possibly separate Noel La Pierre from his two pan sticks and his  steel drum? He knew what couldn’t.  “No woman,” he smiled coyly, “could get meh away from it.” It was indisputable.

He’s a one-man band, an entertainer and true pan lover; and his listeners can easily sense that in his music. When playing at Hi-Lo Glencoe, one of  the venues where he was booked for performances for the season, children “would stop their parents just to stand and listen to the music”. What he witnessed was heady. This was a man who had been honoured by the mayor of Le Tampon of La R?union, an isle off the coast of South Africa on the final day of the week-long cultural event, Floril?ges. He had travelled the world with his pan including the Caribbean, Japan, Canada, the USA and was special guest at the 2000 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. In 2001, he was invited to perform at  the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Unions in St Maarten. “I had to play 18 national anthems. To pull that off, that feeling was great.” Come July he will be doing it again in Aruba. “The foreigners embraced the music,” he said. However, the locals’ response to pan, he said, was disheartening. Introducing the pan to those who had never heard of it abroad, perfecting  his talent at every chance he got came with devoting a lot of time and hard work. “It’s hard trying to develop a professional attitude, and something that is worth selling when our people don’t feel the same,” said Noel. His experiences are rarely short of obstacles. He told People: “People are not committed. Prominent people would call and book you and secure your time, and the day you show up they tell you they don’t need you. Or when you’re on the way they call and cancel.

“Another thing is you have to fight to get your money. They wait three,  four, five weeks after you already give service to pay you, not forgetting  that they call you same day for same day performance. “They figure an artist don’t have a light bill to pay, or TSTT to pay and I have to stand all these additional charges when I call back for the accountant to tell me to call back next hour. “That is my disappointment. I feel society loves to deceive. They way I know it, your word is your bond.” He cited another grievance: “They don’t accommodate you. I am my own roadie,  transport, engineer, arranger and performer. When somebody books you for  8-10 I can’t come for eight to start. I have to come early to set up,  prepare myself mentally to perform and they don’t provide place for that.” Noel believes that local acts were seen as “problematic”...(by some). “Our  people don’t love up their own, they chase their own... If you don’t want to pay attention to your history because of false pride, I don’t know. Nobody  teaches that form of history. “Your past is your present. I love it to the metal, not to the bone.” A pan/music assistant at Maple Leaf School, he didn’t purport to know  everything about pan but felt that encouraging it “will depreciate the high level of crime in this country.” Other countries are teaching about the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago. Here we want it free. The pan is  yours, mine, ours. Not because you cannot play means you have to run away from it, not because it has a stigma of hooliganism or it was made from a drum. The stigma was then, this is now.”

In 1975, from age 11, Noel made a natural gravitation towards pan. His  father, Earl La Pierre at the time was arranger for Invaders steelband of  Woodbrook and Metronomes of Newtown. Earl was also one of the country’s  leading ping pong soloists. “I always wanted to be like my father,” he said. To the chagrin of his grandmother, he persisted in learning and playing pan.  “They used to call me ‘boom’ because I used to collect panmen sticks. I  remember that same year (1975), when I reached the pan yard they say ‘look  Earl La Pierre son, what yuh playing?’ and I said tenor. Before the band started to play at 7.30 that night I already knew three songs. “I was the first student from Newtown Boys to play pan. They used to send me home to sleep to play for Panorama.” He was steelband captain at Belmont Boys’ Secondary where he learned his first formal training in music theory from his teachers Roland Gordon and  Desmond Waithe. He then moved on to playing with Invaders Steel Orchestra and later Phase II Pan Groove. He enjoyed a four-year stint playing on cruise ships and at clubs nightly  with the “Coca-Cola Steelband” when he moved to Bermuda in 1987. He currently works on board cruise ships as a solo pannist. For Carnival 2003, he teamed up with calypsonians Hollis Wright, Valentino, Mudada, D Diamond, Twiggy, Princess Monique and Shinaqua at Kaiso House.  In 2000, Noel released his first CD album Waterflow.