Culture & Community | St. Luke's Steel Band | Arts & Culture | Music Haven | Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills | Arts & Anti-racism
Lucy Gellman Photos.
The gentle roll of the steel pan carried will.i.am’s “Reach for the Stars” upward, orchestration bouncing. Beneath it, cello began to breathe, deep and deliberate. In another universe, someone was fitting a space helmet over their head, preparing to explore life on another planet. Violin and viola swept in, so bright they nearly lifted off from the ground as they played.
Over 100 million miles away, it seemed entirely possible that Mars was listening in, and dancing along.
Galaxies, bursts of starlight, and interplanetary conversations all came to life Saturday morning at 117 Whalley Ave., as St. Luke’s Strings and Steel Summer Camp roared back to life with an “Outer Space” theme. A collaboration between St. Luke’s Steel Band, Music Haven, and Possible Futures, the concert transported New Haveners from a baking hot black top to worlds beyond their reach, all before a donut-and-popsicle break brought it back to a sizzling summer on Earth.
It marked the culmination of a two-week camp that exposes young musicians to both strings and steel pan—as well as book breaks, author visits, and time with New Haven’s resident bookspace dog, Sugar. This year, teachers included music educator Saleena Holder, steel pan player Adé Ben-Salahuddin, and Music Haven alumni Christofer Zunun, Ayana Salahuddin, and Maelle Davenport.
Possible Futures founder Lauren Anderson and author Ainissa Ramirez also worked with students throughout the two weeks.
“I feel like this is the most challenging and most advanced music that students have played so far,” said Holder, a music teacher at Conte West Hills Magnet School who has taught at the camp for four years. For the past three years, students have been asking for harder music, and she was excited to provide them with it. The theme, which one of last year’s students suggested, lent itself to new and harder arrangements for the 18 students.
As the thermostat climbed toward 90 degrees Saturday, that approach rumbled to life in the parking lot, home to both the former offices of Music Haven and Possible Futures’ literary precursor, People Get Ready Books. Introducing the group’s arrangement of Coldplay’s “A Sky Full Of Stars,” steel pan virtuoso Debby Teason praised students for their hard work, shouting out instructors who have taught through heat and humidity.
The camp holds a special place in her heart: Teason founded the steel band in 1999, and taught alongside current director Kenneth Joseph when he launched the camp in 2011.
From beneath a white tent, musicians held their mallets still for just a moment, letting a breeze pass through the space. In the audience, parents and grandparents steadied their phones, ready to hit record. Sugar, with a Jamaican flag bandana tied around her collar, padded over to a pool of sunlight, eyes darting from the musicians back to the audience. Hayden Worrell, who has played in the steel band for years, beamed as he found a spot close to the group.
As Holder counted them in, students sprang into action, the drums suddenly bell-like and lush. The sound became buoyant, cutting through the morning’s low-hanging heat and ringing out like laughter on the hook.
In place of the lyrics—Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars/I'm gonna give you my heart—students had found something somehow even brighter, conjuring that brilliant glow without any words at all. Beneath them, a steady drumbeat kept time, punctuating Holder’s occasional count of “One! Two! Three! And!”
On a tenor bass pan in the second row, 13-year-old Malaysia Bowden could feel herself relax into the music. A student of Holder’s at Conte West, she first heard about the program through school. As a young percussionist, she’s already experienced the way music can help her de-stress and re-focus her energies. But even after years of studying the drums—with piano and guitar peppered in, she said with a smile—steel pan was completely foreign to her.
“It was fun,” she said. She later beamed as she and fellow student Malia Long took the mic for a short presentation on physicist George Carruthers, who appears in Ramirez’ 2021 book The Alchemy of Us. During his lifetime, Carruthers made history when he built the ultraviolet electronographic telescope, which in 1972 made its way to the moon as part of the Apollo 16 voyage into space. The two learned about him when Ramirez, who lives nearby in Beaver Hills, visited during both weeks of the camp.
Top: Sisters Jennifer (on mic) and Johana (in pink top). Bottom: Malaysia Bowden and Malia Long.
Behind her, student Jennifer Sebastian leaned into her steel pan, a long ponytail bobbing as she played. A rising sophomore at High School in the Community, Sebastian joined the camp with her younger sister, 10-year-old cellist and Music Haven student Johana. As a first-time pan player, she took the two weeks to both immerse herself in steel pan and learn a little about its long and powerful history in Trinidad and the Caribbean.
“It feels pretty awesome,” she said. “I feel like we both learned a lot.”
Back at the mic, Teason rolled the clock back from Coldplay to The Beatles, with a string arrangement of “Across The Universe” that Zunun had worked on between his time as a teacher at Morse Summer Music Academy and prep for another year teaching at Cold Spring School. Snapping as he counted musicians in, Zunun slowly made way from the front of the group around to the back, keeping time even as he lifted his own violin and began to play.
Every so often, his gentle exclamations of “Pizzicato!” or “Repeat the chorus!” floated over the strings, hanging for a moment in the sticky air before they disappeared. After years of knowing about the camp but always being away during the summer, “it was exciting” to come onboard as a teacher, he said.
That later showed through, as he joined fellow faculty members on a string-and-steel arrangement of “Moonlight Sonata,” then played beneath an impromptu vocal rendition of “Happy Birthday” for Johana.
Between numbers, students kept the educational mood going, with presentations on 20th century Black trailblazers from inventor James West to engineer and astronaut Mae Jemison. Anderson, who has collaborated with the camp since 2022, said that working with the students each day, including a daily reading of Jack Cheng’s See You In The Cosmos, made the sweaty mile-long walk from her Edgewood Avenue bookspace well worth it.
But nowhere, perhaps, was the spirit of collaboration more alive than in the final number, a steel and string arrangement of will.i.am’s “Reach for the Stars” that brought together students and faculty for a sweeping finish. Just over a decade ago, NASA and will.i.am broadcasted the song from Earth to Mars, a trip that reaches 140 million miles across space. Saturday, the song transported listeners to the Red Planet and back, without ever leaving a humble lot on Whalley Avenue.
Top: Adé Ben-Salahuddin, Ayana Salahuddin, and Maelle Davenport. Bottom: Cris Zunun and Ayanna Salahuddin.
As musicians prepared for liftoff, all 18 students gathered beneath two tents, strings on one side and steel pan on the other. With a gentle nod from Holder and count from the string teachers, students were off, sound weaving through the lot and wrapping around tent poles and old roof beams that are on their way out. Where a synthy, Trekky rush of sound from will.i.am once was, campers delivered an orchestra, so full that it seemed to contain universes.
Why they say the sky is the limit/When I've seen the footprints on the moon? Three young musicians rapped into the mic, and listeners let out a dozen murmurs of approval. Why they say the sky is the limit/When I've seen the footprints on the moon? They were in the zone, the words hitting one by one before the next verse inevitably tumbled forward.
And I know the sky might be high/But baby it ain't really that high
And I know that Mars might be far/But baby it ain't really that far
Let's reach for the stars
As she rejoined her mom after the concert, Malia praised the camp, bubbly as she described how much she’s enjoyed playing the pan. As a lifelong member of St. Luke’s—her mom, Michelle Royster, also grew up attending the church—she’s heard the pan played at services and special concerts for years. But this was her first time joining in.
“It feels fun!” she said. When she wasn’t playing, Malia added, she was still learning—including about her newest interst, the sub-arctically cold planet, Pluto.
Nodding as she listened, Royster added that the camp is culturally significant: her family hails originally from Nevis (she is related to the late Judge Constance Baker Motley, another Black trailblazer whose history is often unknown). While she doesn’t yet play the steel pan, she now has a musician in the family with the knowledge.
“She can teach me,” Royster said with a smile.