Superb juniors

While the very supportive crowd of onlookers in the stands were greatly pleasured by each performance, the event was no mere exercise in triteness but a deep affirmation of positiveness on a higher level.

Here were youngsters displaying self-discipline and teamwork to craft beautiful melodies in presentations that reflect the very best of what we are as a people.

Many of the pupils of St Joseph’s College, San Fernando, who played a scintillating rendition of the late Lord Kitchener’s Toco Band would not have even been born when the song was written or indeed when the late Grandmaster passed in 2000. Yet they have embraced his greatness as their very own personal legacy, to pass the cultural baton down the generations.

At the same time, other junior bands gloriously translated into pan notes the modern sounds of soca stars such as MX Prime and Aaron “Voice” St Louis. We congratulate St Margaret’s Anglican Primary School for topping the Primary School category (followed respectively by St Paul’s Anglican and St Mary’s Government Schools). Likewise, congratulations are due to St Francois Girls College which won the Secondary School category (followed by Trinity College East and St Joseph’s College, St Joseph).

Yet we say that all bands were winners, whatever their formal placement. Every pupil who took part, and every adult who helped him or her to get to the venue, to train in the weeks beforehand, to get outfitted in their resplendent attire, is a winner. All have helped to sustain the national instrument that TT has bequeathed to the rest of the world.

We are heartened at the success of these finals despite the earlier rumblings in the pan movement over accountability and transparency, and glad that this conflict has not disincentivised our youngsters.

In fact, we hope the superb performance by our pan juniors will be an inspiration to adults within the pan movement and in the governance positions in the fields of education and culture to do all they can to continue to develop and refine the pan and to empower these youngsters to continue their musical journey.

We recall for example the journey of Exodus Steelband arranger, Mia Gormandy, from being a fourth former at St Joseph’s Convent, Port-of-Spain, playing Rimsky Korsokoff ’s Flight of the Bumblebee to then pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Illinois and Florida, USA, to now herself completing the circle to be mentor to a new generation.

Her journey illustrates for other youngsters the wisdom of broadening their repertoire to embrace as many musical genres as possible, any of which can be a vehicle for pan’s progress.

Even as we urge youngsters to see how far pan can carry them, we celebrate the presence at the Panorama Semifinals of Birdsong Academy, a veritable nursery for teaching the playing and reading of music to our young pannists, many of whom would have also performed on Sunday.

Youngsters and their bands must be given incentives — stipends, equipment, training — to develop pan and so in turn themselves be developed by pan, to create the next generation of Len “Boogsie” Sharpes and Ken “Professor” Philmores. So along with their counterparts in junior mas, kaiso and soca, we salute our pan juniors