A last hurrah

Everywhere you turned on Sunday at the Panorama semi-finals it was Digicel scarlet versus the brilliant green of TSTT’s bmobile. Digicel and bmobile banners presided over North Stand orgy and Grand Stand moderation alike.

Lining the sides of the Track nearest the stage, were Digicel and bmobile booths, standing one after another, side by side, stiff rivals, or alert sentinels. On the T-shirt front though, bmobile, TSTT’s Carnival child had the home advantage and was undoubtedly the victor. Mother, father, child, uncle, couples, families, limes, posses were draped in bmobile green. If you weren’t green, you weren’t seen.

Digicel, nevertheless, pulled off its own Panorama coup: it had agreed at the last minute to sponsor the reigning champions, Phase II Pan Groove, after State-owned Petrotrin suddenly re-scinded its sponsorship of the side late last year. Scarlet banners borne by attractive young women in red an-nounced the band’s arrival on the Big Yard stage. Red was definitely not playing dead.

I wore neither red nor green. I was clad in black, in a tank top variation of Witco Desperadoes’ 2004 T-shirt, from the year of Clive Bradley’s unforgettably sweet arrangement of Shadow’s "Whop Cocoyea." It was my tribute to the recently deceased brilliant arranger to whom every pan woman and man — or almost everyone — was paying melodic homage Sunday. Bradley’s face too, was everywhere, stamped onto the T-shirts of the women and men and girls and boys of pan. The big little man of pan was as present in the Savannah as ever — almost.

As I wandered around the Big Yard Sunday, lingering here to listen to these Harps and stopping there to hear those Tones, pausing to watch this girl in a Hijab play tenor or study that young man with locks beat his guitar pan, I was filled with a sense of passing, not just because Bradley was gone, but because this was also the last year of the Queen’s Park Savannah as we knew it. Change seemed as certain as death. The PNM Government had announced that the Grand Stand was going to be demolished after Carnival and shows such as Sunday’s pan semi-finals would be relocated. A new underground cultural centre would stand one day in the Grand Stand’s stead. Pan patrons would in there feel neither the dry season’s sun beating down on them in the daytime nor its chilly breeze whipping their legs and arms at night.

Perhaps, I concluded, I was simply too sentimental because when you looked at the flimsy metal barriers and at the row of bulky policemen trying to restrain supporters from crossing the stage Sunday evening you had to wonder if change wasn’t more than overdue. Moreover, the Grand Stand was no architectural masterpiece and the annually erected North Stand was just that, annual and thus, ephemeral. For pan shows, particularly this one, the North Stand had become the place where the bourgeoisie and the wanna be bourgeoisie gathered to fete with their rhythm sections and their coolers in the latest fashions and skimpiest of clothes. The patrons in the North Stand probably heard no pan Sunday. Nor did they have any desire to.

But then again, who knew what we would do without the bacchanal of the North Stand overcrowding and without the late starts and the 3 am finishes, the trekking home "in the dew?" And what would and could replace the Track? For me nothing could or would. The Track was Panorama’s dressing room, its dress rehearsal, too and we were privileged to be on it to listen and watch artists put the finishing touches on their work and on their instruments, to be able to help them push the shining drums onto the stage. Would there be a place next year for the thousands like me, the much maligned, so-called freeloaders of pan, a place where we who were in truth and in fact, shadow pan players, vicarious musicians, hopeless romantics and steel snobs, could immerse in the tempos, melodies and harmonies of the instrument? We didn’t know how to sit when the bands were playing, either: we were incapable of being passive in our admiration of Panorama pan.

I sought consolation in the thought that wherever the show was temporarily relocated — and the National Sta-dium was one rumoured spot — there would have to be a stage and somehow the bands would have had to get on it, so perhaps wherever, there’d also be a Track. Still I felt a sense of great loss.

Unless, there was a definite plan to preserve the culture of the Track in the PNM’s new Savannah, unless the architects understood the dynamics of Panorama, it seemed as if the day of the active pan supporter was soon going to be over. I could only hope that consultation would be the order of the day with regard to the new cultural centre but I knew that I was being more than na?ve: this Government didn’t have a clue what consultation meant.

As I savoured the Savannah Sunday, I surmised that it was also more than a little ironic how we were about to erect a cultural complex and how in the process, we might lose a major component of Panorama culture. It was hard to say if we were on the right track or on the wrong one.

suz@itrini.com