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Panorama (music Competition)
Panorama is an annual music competition of steelbands from Trinidad and Tobago, taking place since 1963. It is usually held around Carnival time. History The first official Trinidad Panorama was held during Carnival celebrations in 1963. It was originally pioneered by Chairman of the Carnival Development Committee, Ronald Jay Williams, who gave the festival its name. Similarly styled "Panorama" steelband competitions are also staged at Carnival time in other Caribbean communities. Typically, each steelpan orchestra plays a popular Calypso that is arranged into a piece with original introductions and variations. As part of the International Conference on Pan (ICP) in August 2015, Trinidad hosted the International Panorama Competition. The international edition of Panorama was held over a two-day period, 8–9 August 2015. The competition brought together participants from the approximately 38 steelband-playing countries from around the world to compete against each other for ...
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Robert Greenidge
Robert Greenidge (born 28 April 1950 in Success Village, Laventille, Trinidad) is a steelpan player. He is a member of popular music singer Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band and the instrumental group Club Trini. Greenidge has also collaborated with artists such as Robert Palmer, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Taj Mahal, Ringo Starr, Earth, Wind & Fire and Carly Simon. Career Greenidge began performing as a pannist at age eight and performed internationally beginning in his teens. During 1970 he represented Trinidad and Tobago as a soloist and as a member of Trinidad and Tobago National Steel Orchestra. Within the next year he migrated to the United States where he studied and played music. Greenidge went on to play on Carly Simon's 1976 album Another Passenger, Ringo Starr's 1976 LP Ringo's Rotogravure and Robert Palmer's 1978 album Double Fun. He then performed on Grover Washington Jr.'s 1980 album Winelight and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1980 LP Double Fantasy. He also featured ...
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Steelband
The steelpan (also known as a pan, steel drum, and sometimes, collectively with other musicians, as a steelband or steel orchestra) is a musical instrument originating in Trinidad and Tobago. Steelpan musicians are called pannists. Description The modern pan is a chromatically pitched percussion instrument made from 55 gallon industrial drums. ''Drum'' refers to the steel drum containers from which the pans are made; the steel drum is more correctly called a ''steel pan'' or ''pan'' as it falls into the idiophone family of instruments, and so is not a drum (which is a membranophone). Some steelpans are made to play in the Pythagorean musical cycle of fourths and fifths. Pan is played using a pair of straight sticks tipped with rubber; the size and type of rubber tip varies according to the class of pan being played. Some musicians use four pansticks, holding two in each hand. This grew out of Trinidad and Tobago's early 20th-century Carnival percussion groups known as ta ...
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Desperadoes Steel Orchestra
The Desperadoes Steel Orchestra, also called Despers, are a steelband from Laventille in Trinidad, formed in 1945. Origins and evolution A number of youths in the Laventille Road area began calling their group Morocco/Dead End Kids, before some of them saw a movie entitled "The Desperadoes" at Royal Cinema on Charlotte in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1943. The name Desperadoes as in Steelband first came out at carnival in 1947.Thompson, Dave (2002) ''Reggae & Caribbean Music'', Backbeat Books, , pp. 96–97Dudley, Shannon (2007) ''Music From Behind the Bridge: Steelband Aesthetics and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago'', Oxford University Press, , p. 73 There were several rival bands at the time: Sun Valley, Hill Sixty, the Crusaders, and Destination Tokyo. In the early 1950s, Wilfred "Speaker" Harrison and Donald "Jit" Steadman began bringing Mas and later a professional focus that saw the band sign a sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola in 1962 with the band name changing to the Coc ...
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Steelpan Music
The steelpan (also known as a pan, steel drum, and sometimes, collectively with other musicians, as a steelband or steel orchestra) is a musical instrument originating in Trinidad and Tobago. Steelpan musicians are called pannists. Description The modern pan is a chromatically pitched percussion instrument made from 55 gallon industrial drums. ''Drum'' refers to the steel drum containers from which the pans are made; the steel drum is more correctly called a ''steel pan'' or ''pan'' as it falls into the idiophone family of instruments, and so is not a drum (which is a membranophone). Some steelpans are made to play in the Pythagorean musical cycle of fourths and fifths. Pan is played using a pair of straight sticks tipped with rubber; the size and type of rubber tip varies according to the class of pan being played. Some musicians use four pansticks, holding two in each hand. This grew out of Trinidad and Tobago's early 20th-century Carnival percussion groups known as ta ...
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Lennox Sharpe
Lennox "Boogsie" Sharpe (born 28 October 1953 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a successful and popular composer and arranger of steelpan music. Biography Sharpe began his career with Starlift steelband where he worked as a co-arranger with Ray Holman. He is most strongly associated with the Phase II Pan Groove Steel Orchestra, a band he has taken to several finals of the Panorama steelband competition, as well as winning the first place in 1987 and 1988.Panorama
Sharpe does not teach steelpan privately one-on-one; instead, he teaches it publicly at the panyard. Sharpe started to play steelpan at a young age when he was just four years old. He used to play with

David Rudder
David Michael Rudder OCC (born 6 May 1953) is a Trinidadian calypsonian, known to be one of the most successful calypsonians of all time. He performed as lead singer for the brass band Charlie's Roots. Nine years later, Rudder stepped outside the band, entering the calypso tent as a solo calypsonian in 1986, which was followed by an unprecedented rise to fame. "Almost overnight he became a national hero of the order of Marley in Jamaica, Fela in Nigeria and Springsteen in New Jersey," wrote Daisann McClane, American journalist and Worldbeat correspondent for ''Rolling Stone Magazine''. Rudder's music quickly became the subject of music critics around the world: "From New York to London to Tokyo, where the Japanese have released a CD of Rudder's greatest hits complete with lyrics translated into Japanese, Rudder has been described as modern calypso's most innovative songwriter." Early life Born in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, one of nine children, Rudder spe ...
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Jit Samaroo
Jit Sukha Samaroo (24 February 1950 – 7 January 2016) was a Trinidadian composer and steelpan musician. Life and work Jit Samaroo was born in Surrey village, in Lopinot, Trinidad and Tobago, the seventh of 13 children in a family of Indian origin. At the age of 10, he joined the short-lived Village Boys pan-round-the-neck side. His mother, who loved playing the dholak, died in 1962, and so, young Jit, appointed the task of taking care of younger siblings, formed the Samaroo kids combo. They were initially Parang players but by the age of 14, already a self-confessed "slave to steelpan", Jit joined the Lever Brothers Canboulay Steelband. There he learned and mastered all the orchestra's instruments. Recognising young Jit's talent, the musical director Landeg White allowed him to help arrange the band's calypsos, and also arranged for him to have music lessons. He was hailed as the country's most clinically accurate arranger, arranging one tune by the instrument and composing add ...
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Superblue
Austin Lyons (born 25 May 1956), better known as Superblue, Super Blue and Blueboy, is a Trinidadian calypsonian, soca musician, and lyricist. Early life Lyons was born on 25 May 1956 in Point Fortin. His mother is a Grenadian and his father is Trinidadian. Career Lyons became famous from his first entry into the calypso tent world in 1980 with "Soca Baptist," a song he penned in 1979. "Soca Baptist" won him his first Carnival Road March Monarch award in 1980. He won the annual T&T Carnival Road March title ten times (in 1980, 1981 and 1983 he won under the moniker Blue Boy, and as Superblue in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2013 and 2018). He won the Trinidad & Tobago Soca Monarch (now the International Soca Monarch) title seven times, making him only the second man in the English-speaking Caribbean to win the Soca Crown seven times after Grynner of Barbados who the Road March crown in Barbados the same number of times (1983, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1998). Super ...
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Clive Bradley (musician)
Clive Bradley (4 November 1936 – 26 November 2005) was a known arranger of steelpan music. Person Bradley grew up in Diego Martin, Trinidad, where he attended elementary school. He then went to Fatima College. He did not play steelpan himself, but in 1968 he was asked by Mr. Rudolph "Charlo" Charles, manager of the Desperadoes Steel Orchestra from Laventille to try his arranging talents for the band. Besides Mr. Bradley's 6 panorama arranging victories with Desperadoes, he led them to wins at Pan Fiesta in 2003 and 2005, and Pan in the 21st Century in 2005. Mr. Bradley is the only arranger to place 3 steel orchestras in the top-three at panorama in 3 decades. Desperadoes 1st in 1977, Pandemonium 2nd in 1988 and Nutones 3rd in 1999. In 1973, Bradley founded an advertisement agency together with historian Gérard Besson. Bradley also was a teacher of mathematics at Fatima College and later on at the University of West Indies. Clive Bradley also arranged for a number of ste ...
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Ray Holman
Raymond Anthony Holman (born 1944) is a musician, composer, pannist and performer from Trinidad and Tobago. Biography In 1957, Ray Holman began playing steelpan at the age of 13 with the Invaders Steel Orchestra, led by Ellie Mannette, for whom he composed his first pan piece, "Ray's Saga", recorded by the Invaders in 1961. At 20, he became the youngest player to win the solo Ping Pong (an early version of the tenor pan) competition in the 1964 Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival. Later, he became arranger for Invaders Steelband, doing classical pieces such as "Dream of Olwen" and "Etude in Ab." In 1963, he moved to work with the steel band Starlift, whom he achieved consistent success with in both the Panorama competition and the informal "Bomb" played on the road at Carnival. Two of his most renowned arrangements were "I Feel Pretty" and "Penny Lane". During the 1960s his arrangements placed Starlift in the top 3 twice (1964: "Mas in South" – Kitchener, 3rd place; 1968: "Jan ...
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Bobby Mohammed
Lennox Sylvanus "Bobby" Mohammed (2 June 1942 - 25 May 2021) was a musician and pannist from Trinidad and Tobago. He was the youngest arranger to win Panorama. Career Lennox Mohammed was born on 2 June 1942 in Siparia; his family moved to Mon Repos in San Fernando when he was nine years old. He attended Presentation College, and was a founding member of the Gondoliers steelband. He left and founded the Cavaliers in 1961 with 18 pannists. Later that year, the Gondoliers and the Cavaliers faced each other in a competition to win sponsorship from Guinness Caribbean Ltd, with the Cavaliers winning. The Cavaliers went on to win the 1964 Southern Steelband Competition. In 1965, the Cavaliers took first place at the Panorama competition, making Mohammed the youngest arranger to win. After placing second in 1966, Mohammed and the Cavaliers finished first again in 1967. Mohammed was awarded the Gold Hummingbird Medal in 1992. In 2019, the Harris Promenade East Street in San Ferna ...
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Trinidad And Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago (, ), officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the southernmost island country in the Caribbean. Consisting of the main islands Trinidad and Tobago, and numerous much smaller islands, it is situated south of Grenada and off the coast of northeastern Venezuela. It shares maritime boundaries with Barbados to the northeast, Grenada to the northwest and Venezuela to the south and west. Trinidad and Tobago is generally considered to be part of the West Indies. The island country's capital is Port of Spain, while its largest and most populous city is San Fernando. The island of Trinidad was inhabited for centuries by Indigenous peoples before becoming a colony in the Spanish Empire, following the arrival of Christopher Columbus, in 1498. Spanish governor José María Chacón surrendered the island to a British fleet under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1797. Trinidad and Tobago were ceded to Britain in 1802 under the Treaty of Amiens as se ...
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