Steelband Tales - Part 3

Here is the third installment of Steelband Tales. This time, George and Ruth are invited to play with local group the Harvard Harps. It would be a dream come true for most of us. Will it be for them? Read and find out.

I am sitting here on the deck of our catamaran, Makaru, with the sun beating down on me and the nice easterly breeze keeping me from being too hot and watching the sun playing on the water and I have to grin because crammed in my head and heart is our pan experience this year in Trinidad.  Carnival is over. We are very tired and drained. We have played pan literally night and day for 5 weeks. Have been home maybe 2 nights the whole 5 weeks. We have stiff shoulder and aching knees. But, I grin. Only in Trinidad would most of these things happen - period, and certainly happen to us. We feel filled up and we feel lucky.

Last year, George and found a band to play with, called Harvard Harps. It was a great find for us because it is a group of mostly older folks, like us, who play for fun at Carnival time and they have a truck, or old school bus chasse, which they play on during the Carnival parades. We joined with them last year, played and enjoyed ourselves immensely. We were looking forward to joining them again for this Carnival season, but when George came down here in December, he reported that sadly, the band had lost its base players, both of them, so no practicing, and some doubt as to whether we would play at all this season. In spite of the efforts of several members, they could not acquire a base player, so we were prepared for not being able to play this year. This was a very early Carnival date  and the date for the preliminaries for Panorama, the National Steel Band Competition, was Jan 7^th.  So, too late for us to hope to get in a Panorama band.   (Read more...)