The Magic Drum - Musical Escapades in Paris

Ca y est. I finally made it to my first concert in Paris. This Sunday evening gone, I hauled my lazy (and slightly hungover) ass out of my warm cottage and braved the stinging Parisian winter winds to head down to a theatre in a small town called Acheres, just west of Paris proper. Let me tell you, I am so glad that I did, because the performance that I witnessed that evening was nothing short of pure musical magic. From the very first notes that danced sweetly off the stage and echoed thorough the wonderfully intimate Le Sax theatre, I was lulled into a delightful trance that was to carry on throughout the first half of the performance.

I was surely not the only one to experience this magic. One look at the serene faces of the audience would tell you that they too were completely absorbed in the haunting melodies of Schubert and Bach which drifted along gently and sweetly until culminating in a thunderous performace of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which jarred the audience out of their sweet reverie just in time for them to prepare themselves for the electric second half of the program.

Now hear this, the group in question was not the local Paris National Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic touring through Europe, but was none other than the Renegades Steel Drum Orchestra fresh off the plane from Trinidad and Tobago. Yes man, let me tell you, they rocked the Frenchness right out of the French that night and infused the theatre with all the warmth and energy of the Caribbean.

It was a demonstration of Trini culture at its finest. From the very first calypso, an infectious joie de vivre swept through the crowd like a dry season bush fire on a windy day. Boy, if you see these French people break away! I telling you it might as well have been Carnival Tuesday because every man jack jumped out of their seats and started to dance. There was something truly special of seeing how much of an impact the pan was having on them, and keep in mind that this was just a sample of the group; a mere shadow of what could be experienced with a full pan side.

The Renegades literally left the crowd begging for more, and in their best English accents at that...whan more pleeze...whan more pleeze...whan more pleeze...they made so much noise that they were successfully able to call the band back out for not one, not two, but three, count em' THREE encore performances, and believe you me they would have continued begging if the organizers didn't turn on the lights in an effort to shoo everybody out.

It was the simplicity of the whole affair that really struck me. That was the beauty of the performance, the essence of what pan is all about - making complex and beautiful music out of the simplest of instruments. It was our unassuming steel pan which lured this crowd forward to the stage during the intermission to inspect these strange instruments with bewildered expressions. It was clear that they were mesmerized by how something so sublime could come out of something so banal as an oil drum.

To me, the sophistication and simplicity of the concert stood in stark contrast to the tawdry, disjointed macafouchette that was the opening ceremony for the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Trinidad last week. Who knows, maybe Patos and company would have been better off inviting the heads of state for an intimate pan/tassa session at the good old Queen's Hall instead of subjecting them to that chaos. Might have saved our country an odd five hundred million dollars or so.