Since the colonial import of Catholicism and the European pre-Lent Carnival tradition in the 1700s, the Carnival celebration in Trinidad has drawn from many varied sources. Although there are plenty of eye-popping sights (think Rio, bikinis, etc.) to behold during the main parades on Carnival Monday and Tuesday, you get a different type of eye-popping costumes at traditional parades. Friday morning was 'Kiddies Carnival', featuring adorable kids dressed up as traditional characters and archetypes that each tend to have their own interesting histories.
These are Pierrot Grenade, descended from the Commedia dell'arte character Pierrot.
The groups of kids started out gathering in the Savannah. I saw the 'red galleon' imagery several times, often as a hat - it's likely some sort of Sailor variation.
We saw this person (couldn't tell gender!) a few times at different events. Some people work on and refine their costumes over years, and become known for their characters.
After gathering at the Savannah, the Kiddie Carnival parade proceeded down Frederick Street. This is one of those "I know this name from calypsos" places, one of the longtime traditional parade routes. Regarding the yellow flyers on the pole, I would see similar ones posted around town, advertising different groups to join, and wondered what they were all about. I would find out a few days later, on Monday, J'ouvert morning!
The Minstrel character originated from slaves' turning around of blackface costumes worn by the plantation owners, hence whiteface!
The Fancy Indian character is one of the more popular ones, drawing from Native North American imagery.
A view down Frederick Street.
In between groups and providing the omnipresent dancing rhythms are trucks - this is one playing a soca rhythm.
Another soca truck, you can see the 3 'iron' (brake drum) players on the back. That is what they play, over and over, for the entire parade!
Another great Fancy Indian.
There are a lot of different characters that you will recognize after a few examples, and wonder what their histories are. Often they will include specific behaviors or dances.
Here is a tassa group similar to the previous post's Unity Tassa. It was even more impressive remembering how heavy those tree-trunk drums were, and looking down the street at how long the parade was going to be.
Something is in the water that makes every kid in Trinidad unfailingly cute.
Double bullwhips, I think this may be a Blue Devil variant.
Another appearance, this was one of my favorite costumes.
It was exciting to catch the rare sight of a Tamboo Bamboo group. At one point in the colonial history of Carnival-related suppression, drums with skin heads were banned, and the response was cutting lengths of bamboo to give different pitches, and hitting them on the ground and with sticks, leading to a new musical form. Notice the metal drum with two notes beaten into it, high and low - this was the first step in the development of the modern steel pan.
This was our first peek at people playing Blue Devils, the leader of this group is opening a tub of black paint..
..and re-applying. This guy was intense.
Many of them had red bloodlike paint, sometimes dribbling from their mouths.
It's tough to explain how disorienting and chaotic it is, so here is a video. Loud whistles, primitive beastlike screaming and behavior, often one player will be tied with a chain and 'restrained' from the crowd by another. One of the 'beasts' will target and point at an onlooker, writhing around them until they hold out a dollar, quickly snatched away. They are accompanied by people playing biscuit tins hung around their necks, playing a specific pattern with a weird, disorienting feel. More on Blue Devils later, on Monday night we would go to the 'source'.
Saturday morning at the Queens Park Savannah featured even more groups of young masqueraders, getting to cross the famed grandstand stage in competition. Some traditional characters, but many more of the custom large contraptions. (click to enlarge)
Great jellyfish costumes, and functional for sun-shading too!
Some characters' traditions are a bit more recent - Candy Crush, and..
Fruit Ninja!
Here was my favorite band, they come from all over the island.
The Dame Lorraine character started from mimicking the French plantation owners' Victorian party dresses.
Certain features are more pronounced.
Here they go, across the QPS grandstand stage. Each band picks the soca that plays over the loudspeakers as they do their competition display.
The rhythmic swaying was so mesmerizing that while taking this video, I didn't realize my group had moved on, and I had gotten myself left behind. I stopped recording, looked around, and was on my own among thousands of revelers on the Savannah. An old traveling instinct kicked in, taught by my parents, that "in case of being split up, wait at the last place you saw each other". So I stood there patiently for a while, but then finally remembered that rule was instated before the age of cell phones..
The Panorama Finals are being held here later in the evening, so here come the pans from the panyards!
The Desperadoes 12-Bass. One person plays this.
Imagining what sounds will be coming out of here in 12 hours' time..
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.
My last-minute opportunity to go to Trinidad involved a chaperone opening for a school trip full of steel pan players led by their teacher Jim, who I know from his running the steel band I have been part of since 2001. The group of middle and high schoolers were great travelers, causing no trouble (remember *I* was the one who got himself lost on the Savannah), so I got to piggyback on a ready-made itinerary full of events and educational activities far better than any tour I could have imagined.
Here is the leader of a "Moko Jumbie" troupe, which took time from their Carnival preparations to lead a great stilt walking workshop for the students.
At one point his phone rang from a bag on the ground, and someone had to reach up on tiptoes to hand it to him. Guessing the reception was a little better up there.
That buckle should look familiar - the stilts are handmade, and he said the quick tightening airplane seat buckle worked like a charm.
Here he is playing with some ballet poses. They are describing how parades can be tricky, when people get too close and run into the stilts, and that they are accompanied by a couple of minders on the ground, to help traffic control and to perhaps cushion a fall. The man in light blue is my friend Newton, who grew up in Trinidad and is one of those people who seems to know everyone. His tireless planning and favor-pulling made everything happen on this phenomenal trip.
Every one of the students that tried the 2' stilts was able to stay up and walk around after a few minutes' adjustment.
We wondered how they were going to cross the fence - the leader was on slightly longer stilts and was able to lean and lift one leg at a time over the top. I loved watching how utterly comfortable they were that high up in the air. Note right at the end, the walker in the green shirt softly eases back into the fence without touching it, in complete control.
This guy was a bit of a firebug.
That's kerosene in the water bottle.
He backed away from every spray, but sometimes the flames raced close. I saw him smearing vaseline around his mouth and goatee, and he drinks a gallon of milk both before and after, to counteract the bits of kerosene that make it down.
Even from 20 feet away, you could feel the hot blasts. One thing this clip reminds me of is the way every waking minute (sleeping minutes too, actually) had a pulsing soundtrack. I'm sure it's more pronounced around Carnival time, but you heard soca at all times wherever you were, from car stereos, storefronts, giant speaker racks pulled behind semis, portable Bluetooth speakers.. After a week of acclimation, it sounded strange after returning home and not hearing the soca bass beat thumping from a couple streets away.
