Steel Drums Play In The Holiday Season

Lucy Gellman Photos. Lisa Yarbor is pictured at the bass pan at the bottom. 

Patricia Daniel stood at her bass drum, letting the beginning of "Black Cake & Sorrel" wash over her. In the back row, Michael Gittens and Lawrence Downs laid down a heartbeat, the percussion so consistent it could have gone right through the floorboards. She leaned forward, watching conductor Kenneth Joseph’s hands glide through the air. Then on a downbeat, she joined in, hitting the drum with a sharp, succinct stroke that took flight.

Saturday, musicians conjured the holiday spirit—and a rich tradition of resistance—at the Dixwell Community Q House, as the St. Luke's Steel Band celebrated its 25th year in existence and the Q House's 100th anniversary on Dixwell Avenue. In a season when joy has sometimes felt hard-fought and harder-won, band members harnessed the power, resonance and history of steel pan to turn a Dixwell gymnasium into a bright and merry concert hall.

The band will perform once more on Saturday, in the New Haven Symphony Orchestra's Holiday Extravaganza, and again next month in an annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day concert with Music Haven. More information is available here. 

"It's amazing, when you think about steel pan," said director Kenneth Joseph, who has played steel pan since the 1990s and directed the band at St. Luke's since 2010. "At the end of the day for us, having the instrument is the bridge between humanity." 

That bridge begins and ends with the instrument itself. Steel pan—like the barril  in bomba, or the atabaque in capoeira—is an instrument bound to resistance, whose very sound is a call to push back against the long violence of colonialism. In the first half of the twentieth century, the instrument grew out of an oppressive colonial government in Trinidad and Tobago, where free, formerly enslaved Black people were largely limited in what percussion instruments they could play.  

In the 1930s—three decades before formal independence from the British crown—people began using the concave metal bases of oil drums to create percussive sound. What began out of necessity stuck: steel pans are now a widely used and celebrated art form across the globe, including the renowned annual Panorama in nearby Brooklyn. 

In New Haven, the band has brought that joyful sound to Whalley Avenue since 1999, when musician and composer Debby Teason founded the group (Teason still conducts the church’s liturgical band). At the time, a steel band had just played at the church, and parishioners—many of whom hail from the West Indies—were so excited that they pushed for a band. When Rev. Victor Rogers acquired several used steel drums through a gift to the church, he reached out to Teason, who was teaching steel pan at Neighborhood Music School. 

“We had no idea what we were doing, but everybody loved it, and we slowly built a repertoire, ” Teason recalled in a phone call Thursday. After a Christmas Eve calypso debut in 1999, demand for the band was so high that Teason had to hold three back-to-back rehearsals per week. Then citywide organizers started calling the church for performances.

“That was never what we expected, but who could say no?” she said, crediting the late Ed Mapp for serving as both the band’s business manager and its sort of father figure (she was, of course, the mom). “There were lots of adventures, lots of ending up in places that we didn’t expect. It was really fun and very difficult.”

When Joseph came to New Haven from earning a graduate degree in Illinois, Teason already knew to expect him, thanks to a tipoff from her colleague and pan player Liam Teague. As he got settled teaching music at Highville Charter School, it made sense to her that he would take over the band. 

“I wanted somebody from the culture to be directing it,” she said. She remained in the group for several years, and then left when other parts of her life took over. To this day, “the opportunity to make that band and make that relationship with St. Luke’s Church is probably the thing in my life I am most grateful for, in terms of opportunities.”

For the last two and a half decades, it has grown into a multi-generational steel pan orchestra, with performances at Caribbean festivals, holiday concerts, cross-cultural collaborations and summer camps designed for young musicians who are just starting to learn. When the group gathers to rehearse each week, Joseph said, his biggest goal is still for musicians to enjoy the instrument and spend time understanding each other and their shared humanity through the music.

While he hails from Trinidad, he added, anyone can join the band: members include fellow immigrants from the West Indies and wider Caribbean, as well as lifelong New Haveners who are both white and Black. 

Saturday, that understanding was on full display. Even before the band began to play, Logan Foreman took a moment to steady his nerves, hands hovering above his tenor pan. Raised in New Haven, Foreman started playing the pan when he was in fifth grade, and Joseph became a music teacher at Highville Charter School. Joseph taught his students the history, and invited them to become a part of the musical family at St. Luke's.

The rest was history, Foreman remembered. For years, he balanced steel pan practice with school and sports, sticking with pan because he loved the sound and the camaraderie. After a short time away from the group during college, he was thrilled—if also a little nervous—to return Saturday. "It's just great to be back," he said. It's doubly special this year: his cousins, Chase and Blake Adorno, are also members of the band. At 13, Blake is the youngest member.

Nearby, partners Lloyd and Patricia Daniel shared in the evening’s growing excitement. As immigrants from Antigua and Barbuda—Patricia came first, in 1982, and then Lloyd followed a few years later—both have played in the group since its early days in 1999. For Patricia, it was a breath of fresh air: she grew up in an environment where women weren't allowed to play steel pan. So when she saw that the church was starting a band, she was one of the first people to add her name to a sign-up sheet. 

"As I said, I'm glad to be doing it," she said. "I'll play until I can't do it anymore."

It was easy to see why. From where he stood among musicians, Joseph brought the group to attention, ushering in an undulating, buoyant take on "It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." In the first two rows, the sound rang the gymnasium into being, as if the drums were bells, and the room a giant, collective set of lungs. From the first seats to the bleachers, a full house listened, a few people bobbing along. 

Joseph never stood still for more than a moment, smiling at Foreman for a second before whirling around to direct the guitar pans and percussion section behind him. He swayed, and the notes seemed to bounce, their edges warm and tinkling. Somewhere on the left side, the bass pans waltzed over the ground, the sound floating as one drum box-stepped in time with another. 

So too in “This Christmas,” played with a kind of sparkle that made it hard not to move to the sound. As tenor pan danced its way in, Joseph let his gaze travel between sections, cuing in musicians with a nod here, a sweep of his hand there. On the makeshift stage, they were deep in it, filling the room with cheer as they spun Donny Hathaway into percussion and steel. Blake Adorno, who had admitted he was nervous before the performance, beamed with the sound, swaying as his mallets came down and the  

At other moments, musicians slowed it down, the music becoming measured and steady enough to make the room feel more like church. In an arrangement of Buddy Greene's "Mary Did You Know," musicians shrugged off the too-saccharine, oversimplified schmaltz of the song for something genuinely reverent, the pans played with a touch so delicate it made them whisper. Minutes earlier, a version of “Give Love On Christmas Day” breathed a sort of momentary calm into the space, a stillness that was fleeting and delicious all the same. 

"Tonight really illustrates what the Q House is all about," said Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, who helped get the renovated Q House over the finish line, and has more recently co-chaired a Q House Centennial Committee, during a short pause in the set. "This is for everyone across this city. We have to each one, reach one, teach one."

Nowhere was that enthusiasm clearer than in the band's final performance of the night, a mix of carols that blended one into the next until the house was on its feet. No sooner had the soulful strains of "Angels We Have Heard On High" rung out—Joseph encouraged attendees to sing along—than people sat up a little straighter, some holding their programs, squeezed in closer to the people they’d come with, and started in on the first long chorus of Glo-ooooo-ooooo-ooooo-ria, in excelsis Deo! 

If the room had started to loosen up somewhere around Glenn Miller's "In The Mood," it had fully exhaled by “Black Cake & Sorrel,” a Christmas melody that the group Da Spirits first released in 2007. Named after the traditional, beloved fruit cake and sorrel drink eaten across the West Indies at the holidays, the song became an invitation to dance, from listeners still crawling through the room to those who now need mobility aids to walk. 

On one side of the gym, several generations of New Haveners jammed out to the song, letting themselves groove to the thumping, steady percussion that runs through it. On the other, a few attendees whipped out their phones and cameras to record. In the center, dozens waved their arms, tapped along with their feet, and stood from their seats to dance.  

“It feels great” Lloyd Daniel had said earlier in the evening, and it was easy to see why as he danced along to the beat. “The camaraderie is very wonderful.” 

With the first quarter of a century behind them, Joseph said, the band is already focusing on—and playing into—its future. When the church started a steel band in 1999, it did so with a handful of used drums. Twenty-five years later, Joseph has finally been able to buy new instruments with funding from the state's "Good To Great" grant program.

That money, a $49,420 infusion that came through last year, is enough to get 16 new instruments. Joseph credited Mittco (Musical Instruments of Trinidad and Tobago Company Limited), a steel pan distributor that operates out of  Trinidad and Tobago, with creating the pans specifically for the group. It's a point of personal pride too: he is Trinidadian himself, and began studying the steel pan there in the 1990s. By the time he came to the U.S. to pursue music education, he was well on his way to becoming a virtuoso.

Saturday, he savored the moment. For him, pan has long been an expression of exuberance, particularly during the holiday season. While the performance normally takes place at St. Luke’s Whalley Avenue home, he was glad to partner with the Q House to round out a year of centennial celebrations, he said. He praised Yakeita Robinson, chief of staff at LEAP, for helping the band feel welcomed in the space. 

“Tonight is going to be a lot of fun,” he’d said shortly before the show, and the words remained in the air long after the final number had ended. “It’s meant for them [musicians] to really just enjoy themselves.”