Strings, Steel & Song Play The Planet Into Focus

Maëlle Davenport and Malia Long usher in the rain. Lucy Gellman Photos.

In the parish hall at St. Luke’s Church, a rainstorm was brewing.

The clouds gathered overhead, at first so quietly that no one noticed them at all. Rhea Williams rubbed her palms together, and drops began to fall from the sky. Sixth grader Malia Long swayed with the sound, a rainstick printed with zigzags and polka dots in her hand, and thunder seemed to rumble in the distance.

“Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain,” a chorus of young voices urged, in unison with each other as the sound of steel pan shimmered beneath them. The beads in the rainstick slid from one end to the other, whispering against layers of tape and paper. “Lis-ten to the rain! Lis-ten to the rain!”

A moving and mellifluous message to honor the planet—and all of its creatures, great and small, winged and many-legged, moss-covered and sneaker-wearing alike—came to St. Luke’s last Saturday morning, as young members of Music Haven, the St. Luke’s Steel Band, and Possible Futures Bookspace teamed up for the 14th annual strings and steel summer camp.

A collaboration between Music Haven and St. Luke’s that dates back to 2012, when the organizations shared a building off Whalley Avenue, the camp gives young musicians a chance to learn about steel pan and also hone their skills in string music. For the first time this year, the camp wove in singing, an extension of the choir that Music Haven launched last year.

Teachers included Williams (chorus), Saleena Holder Bascomb (steel pan), Music Haven alum Cristofer Zunun (strings), Possible Futures founder Lauren Anderson (so many books), as well as guest artist Adina Salahuddin and drummer Kareem Victory. Deborah Teason, who founded the St. Luke’s Steel Band in 1999, reprised her role of camp coordinator.

Fifteen years ago, Teason helped midwife the camp into being with current steel band director Kenneth Joseph; violist Colin Benn brought Music Haven in the following year.

With Possible Futures, the literary brainchild of Anderson, students also did research on trees, bees, and mushrooms—all topics that dovetailed with a theme of “Forests and Gardens.” That academic enrichment, paired with an influx of new funding from the United Way of Greater New Haven and the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, allowed teachers to run four class periods from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day for two weeks.

“I think it worked really, really well. It allowed kids to get to know each other,” said Saleena Holder Bascomb, a veteran music educator at Conte-West Hills Magnet School who has been teaching steel pan at the camp for four years, and playing with St. Luke’s Steel Band for a decade. “It means a lot [to have the camp]. Pan is not a luxury that a lot of schools have, but it’s an art form that a lot of kids, especially because New Haven has a large Caribbean population, might want to learn.”

What was unexpected, Zunun added, was how much the theme of “Forests and Gardens” took root. Usually, he joked, students choose the theme based on video games they’re playing, or social media they’re consuming. But as they learned a repertoire that ranged from Marcus Gad’s “Honoring the Soil” to Olivia Dean’s “I Could Be A Florist” to Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” the knowledge and appreciation for the natural world started to stick.

“I learned a lot about royal jelly and nurse bees,” said 8-year-old Haneif Robinson, who is going into the fourth grade at Worthington Hooker School and studies violin at Music Haven. This summer marked her first year in the camp, and it was one of eye-opening revelations about the world around her. “Like, a hive holds up to 60,000 bees!”

A person could hear that flow through the music itself, a set that ran just over an hour and included students presentations on the research and reading they had completed at Possible Futures, from nurse logs to oak trees and acorns. From the moment Gad’s reggae “Honoring the Soil” filled the air, students were fully immersed in it, bringing lyrics like Honoring the soil, fills our hearts with joy! and Honoring the soil, the micronutrients feed the rhizomes to life.

Standing tall at the steel drums, musicians let the song roll in slowly, the notes so full and round it felt like a person could reach out and touch them. Over a slow ba-buh-bum-bum of the melody, a string of high notes gleamed, shining as they made their way out over the crowd. Every so often, Victory’s drums pushed their way in, slicing through the bounce of the pan. Then the sound would rise again, buoyant.

At the center of the action, Bascomb swayed comfortably at her hips and shoulders, an orange lei vibrant around her neck. Everywhere, students seemed to get the memo: Theodore Felton looked down at his pan with a kind of steady calm, as if he was studying for something the audience didn’t yet know was coming. In the righthand corner, Kenneth Felton, III bounced between two large pans, beaming each time his mallets touched down.

If a person closed their eyes and listened, they could hear a world of separate organisms all moving in sync with each other, interdependent as a rich, fragrant soil after a summer rain. Somewhere, the parish house’s doorbell rang, and someone in the back sprang up to get it. Every other ear in the room was glued to the musicians playing at the front. A poster of trees and greenery had unfurled behind them, as if a forest had appeared in the middle of Whalley Avenue.

“Honestly, it’s just the joy of seeing a lot of musicians come together,” said Felton, a rising sophomore studying music education and percussion at the University of Delaware, after the performance. Because his family hails from Saint Kitts in the Caribbean, the pan tradition is very close to his heart. He’s played for years, making the pilgrimage from Pennsylvania to New Haven each summer to study at St. Luke’s.

That sense of unity, and of reverence, permeated the rest of the show. In the choir’s performance of Kacey Musgraves’ “Heart of the Woods,” which yokes human behavior with the microscopic universes that exist underfoot, it became a reminder that shared responsibility is the only way forward. As students sang It’s in our nature / To look out for each other / In the heart of the woods, it was easy to imagine two worlds spinning into one, creatures existing side by side as a matter of necessity.

In one, right there in front of the audience, Williams conducted and coaxed musicians forward as she sang, a gentle smile on her face. When a young, small voice wavered—which it rarely did—students gave each other little nods of encouragement, and the sound rose to full volume again. In another, worms burrowed through the soil. Tiny springtails, their bodies translucent, nibbled through dead leaves. Soil mites and centipedes went about their day, turning detritus into a life force.

Suddenly, the concert felt like a bridge—between Music Haven and nearby sites like the Armory Community Garden, yes, but also between New Haven and the land that was here before it was ever called New Haven, and between this little room off Whalley Avenue and the West Indies, where the tradition of steel pan was born, and where environmental harm done by countries like the U.S. has an outsized and devastating impact. How could they not, students seemed to ask, all be knitted together?

Both teachers and counselors (Jasmine King, Kenneth Felton III, and Maëlle Davenport) wove that lesson—to take care of the Earth, because it’s the only home humans have—into all of the music and student book presentations. In Jerry Estes’ “Rhythm of the Rain,” vocalists patted their thighs, rubbed their flattened palms together, and tilted handmade rain sticks back and forth until the sound of a storm undulated through the space. When steel pan joined in, it seemed as though warm, fat drops could have been falling inside, landing softly on the carpet.

In John Forester and Tom Chapin’s “This Pretty Planet,” performed as a round with a resonant solo from counselor-in-training Cameron Cotton, a person could close their eyes and see the planet tilting gently on its axis, a whir of blue and green. In “I Could Be A Florist,” Adina Salahuddin’s voice glimmered over pan and strings, lulling the audience into a kind of trance that broke only after the song had ended.

The result was an audience that often learned, and listened, right alongside students. When student Tomas Girmay announced that “if you cut down a tree, you cut down oxygen,” attendees nodded thoughtfully with the words. When, during a presentation on pollinators, Haneif went quiet, attendees and counselors alike leaned in and cheered her on.

“Can you tell them what you know?” King asked her, and Haneif relaxed, the exhale palpable, and she continued.

When Cairo Straun burst in to announce “Okay, so I’m gonna tell you all about the beehive!” a few moments later, a wave of tickled laughter drifted through the room.

Nowhere, maybe, was the camp’s sense of learning—and the joy within it—more heart-pullingly clear than in Amy Grant’s “Trees We’ll Never See,” performed with strings, steel pan and vocals after student presentations on the forests, gardens, pollinators and mycelia they’d spent weeks learning about (a nod to both Anderson and to Teason’s husband, beekeeper Michael Bergman, who came into Possible Futures for a special session on bees).

As over two dozen students and teachers gathered at the front of the room, strings gently played musicians in, the sound of pan bright above pint-sized cello and the short, shrill-edged pull of early violin. Voices entered the fray, rising above the instruments but never overpowering them.

Good sweet earth
Sleeves rolled up and hands buried in the dirt
I can see you there in one of dad's old shirts
Showin' me how life's supposed to work

Around the room, at least three generations of New Haveners looked on, some misty-eyed as others lifted their phones to record. A handful of them fingered newly-gifted lavender sachets, gifts that students had made at Possible Futures (where lavender grows in thick, fragrant bunches beside the Edgewood Avenue pavement) during the program. Younger siblings, some still too tiny to be in the program, stood on their tippy-toes to ensure they didn’t miss a moment.

Back at the front of the room, the sound was rising now, students swaying in the choir and as pan players bounced with the beat. At the left side of the room, young vocalist Javion McKinney let the sound wrap around him, extending his arms briefly like an invitation for the audience to join in. When he stepped forward for a short solo a verse later, he pulled his hands behind his back, and let his voice fill the whole room.

King, a recent graduate of Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School who plans to attend Western New England University for medicine in the fall, said she was thrilled to participate as a mentor this year, and learned along the way. Growing up in New Haven’s Whalley/Edgewood neighborhood, “I always wanted to have my own garden,” but she never felt like she could have one because of the urban setting in which she lived. Now, she feels more inspired to work with what she's got.

That was also true for Cameron Cotton, a rising freshman at Eli Whitney Technical High School and counselor in training who has played the cello and the bass for four years (fellow counselors in training included Camissa Salahuddin, Eliana Ortiz, and Malaysia Bowden). Somewhere between checking in on students and making sure his bass was ready to go, he said that music gives him a sense of community that has been very much alive during the camp.

When he plays or sings, “I feel like me,” he said. “Like, I feel alive and I feel like I really belong.”