November 27th, 2024

​Seeing that the STEEL PAN has OFFICIALLY been announced as Trinidad &Tobago's National Instrument, here's some history about it and its founder.
𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 "𝐒𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐞" 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧?
In the year 1930, Winston Simon was born at Rose Hill, East Dry River, Port-of Spain, Trinidad. He went, however, to live with his brother at Clinton Street (now Foster Street) in another community of the East Dry River, called John John.
John John was an area surrounded by factories, which produced biscuits and other products that used tins and drums. The discarded containers were used by the youth in the area as instruments for their percussion band, which was a response to the official banning of the drum. In the John John band, Winston was a kettle drummer and played his kettle-drum, a rudimentary one-note instrument.
It is believed that one night when the band was taking a 'jam' through the district, Winston loaned his instrument to a fellow member. When the kettle drum was returned, Winston noticed that the instrument had been destroyed, as much of its original convex playing surface had been beaten inward.
As he tried to repair the instrument and return it to its original shape, by beating it from inside with a big stone, Winston observed that there were different sounds, tones or pitches emanating from various points of the surface of the tin.
This discovery encouraged experimentation with the pounding of the surface of the tin using stone and wood alternately, which led to Winston being able to hammer out 4 distinct musical notes, thus producing a four-note pan in 1943 at the age of 13.
In that same year, Winston was able to further develop his instrument into the eight note 'ping pong', which is considered the fore runner to the tenor pan of today.
By 1946, Winston 'Spree' Simon's ping pong evolved into a pan of fourteen notes but the top of the pan was still convex, was beaten with plain sticks without the rubber and was not chromatically tuned.
Following the ban of Carnival from 1939-45 as a result of World War 2, on March 5th 1946, Carnival Tuesday of that year, Winston 'Spree' Simon publically launched his fourteen note pan at the Broadway Carnival Competition in down town Port-of- Spain.
At the competition Winston 'Spree' Simon played to an audience, which included the Governor Sir Bede Clifford and Lady Clifford, the Honourable Norman Tang, Audrey Jeffers and calypsonian, Lord Kitchener.
He played classics, hymns and calypsos on his 14 note pan, including Schubert's Ave Maria, Kitchener's Tie Tongue Mopsy and God Save the King.
Winston 'Spree' Simon was selected to join the Trinidad All Stars Percussion Orchestra in 1951, when the band went to tour London and Paris, in order to introduce the steel pan as an instrument to Europe.  (Source: We are trinis, July 4, 2024)

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