Panorama Finals

In the weeks before Carnival, Preliminaries and Semifinal rounds have winnowed the steel bands down to a set of 10 competitors for Panorama Finals, held Saturday night.  Back to the Savannah!

Outside the grandstands, this is where the steel bands will start pushing on to stage.

Each band starts several blocks away, running through its song, starting at a slower, warmup tempo.  As they get closer, each runthrough's tempo ratchets up, and by the time they are about to push on to stage, they are at their fastest and loudest.  This year they held both Medium (fewer than 80 players) and Large (80-120) Finals on the same night.  We caught the end of the last runthrough for the final Medium band (Joyriders), right before they pushed on.

This whole trip had felt like a dream, but this moment was the most surreal, holding a ticket for an event I had been imagining for 20+ years.  ($300 TT is about $50 USD)  I suspected at some point during the trip I would be overcome with emotion, and wondered when it would be - turns out it was right after this, after they tore up the ticket and we were actually standing inside the QPS Grandstands on Panorama night.

The Large band competition is the main event.  You can see that 5 bands are playing arrangements of one of the current soca hits "Good Morning", and 2 are playing "Full Extreme", the one we got to see sung live a few days before by the special guest at the David Rudder show.  (11 Large bands made it to Finals due to a tie in Semis)

A pan-and-scan from inside the grandstands.  At the end you can see the mass of thousands of people in the Savannah field and the rectangle of pan carts, that is Desperadoes doing their last run-through before pushing on.

You can see the metal turtled rectangle of Despers back in the crowd.

Here they are pushing on to stage.  Each band has 10 minutes to push on, 8 minutes to play their song, and 10 minutes to push off.  While they are pushing on, the original vocal soca that they are playing an arrangement of is played over the loudspeaker.  This one is "Good Morning", which we heard all over the place.

Desperadoes on stage, ready to go.

From the live TV broadcast, Desperadoes in action.  The basic form of a Panorama tune is typically a 30-60 second introduction, the verse & chorus of the original tune, then variation after variation, modulations to different keys, Major and Minor, capped off with a big ending.  If you are familiar with the original vocal tune, you hear its melody hidden all over the place during the crazy variations.

We got to watch the second band Silver Stars from closer up, before we got shooed back to our seats.

Traditionally "Flag Women" dance around in front of the bands, you can guess that there are old calypsos about them.  These days, women are allowed to play in the steel bands and not just be eye candy, so it's nice to see 'Flag Men' as well.

A shot from the video screen of Robert Greenidge, arranger for Starlift (whose panyard we visited but didn't hear play).  They had an OK score in Semis, but put on a great performance this evening and jumped up a couple spots.

Robert Greenidge is my favorite pan player, as well as being a great composer and arranger.  (he has a great gig as Jimmy Buffett's touring pan player)  Our steel band has been fortunate enough to host him twice as a guest artist.  Please excuse the self-promotion, here he is playing "Just the Two of Us" (he played on the original recording!) with us a few years ago, with Santana lead vocalist Tony Lindsey, check out his pan solo starting around 2:00.

Supernovas, with decorations and costumes appropriate for their tune "Rumble in the Jungle".  This was the 8th Large band we saw, at about 2 A.M.  Some of us felt up to pushing through to the end, but we ended up heading back to the hotel and watching the last two bands on TV.

The next-to-last band was one of the usual favorites, Trinidad All-Stars.  We caught them on TV, but the live experience is so different that we couldn't compare their performance to all the other bands we saw.  They ended up placing 1st, which you could kind of see coming.  Although "Good Morning" had been a huge hit song around the island for a few months, it was somewhat old news.  "Full Extreme" was the new hotness, and the crowd jumped up like crazy when it started playing before the earlier band playing an arrangement of it (Invaders).  All-Stars was already a general favorite, and I figured the crowd response would be nuts when they fired up their own "Full Extreme".

My personal favorite was Renegades, you may remember my video taken from the panyards, that great breakdown section starts at around 6:40 in this video.  I loved the arrangement, their costumes, and all the traditional characters that they had dancing around!  They ended up 3rd, with Desperadoes 2nd.

From a wall under the Grandstands.  Like fans of sports teams, everyone you talk to has their own favorite band, their own opinions about who should have won such-and-such year, who got robbed by the judges..

Here is a recording of the 1966 Panorama-winning arrangement of "Obeah Wedding" by Beverly Griffith as a contrast.  Although those early pans had a more primitive sound, the arrangements were already complex and musically creative.

The arrangers' wall of fame, people have their own favorites and argue about their relative merits too.

It was a many-year buildup for me, and attending Panorama in person certainly did not disappoint.  As my friend Jim describes this event, there really is no other place that you can see this many performers (more than 1,000, among the 10+ bands) playing incredibly complex music, extraordinarily well, at ludicrous speeds.  And after it is done, nearly all of the players won't touch a steel pan for another 10 months, until the next Carnival season prep begins.