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Andy Narell
(August 2004 Issue)
Steel Pan Worldview Primarily known as a steel
pan player in the jazz
idiom, Andy Narell is expanding his musical
universe and exploring his version of "The French Connection." The
first foreigner
to compose for Trinidad's Panorama steel band
competition (in 1999), Narell is now working with Calypsociation,
a
world-class thirty-piece steel orchestra in Paris, on a continent not
normally associated with steel band music.
"Most of my work
is in a jazz context with conventional instruments, and I'm the only
person playing steel pans," Narell
explains. "Calypsociation is an
orchestra of steel pans, from soprano all the way down to bass. They
commissioned me to
write their music for the 2002 European Steelband
Festival, and when the festival was finished, I offered to keep working
with
them to develop a whole repertoire of music that we could play in
concert."
The result of that collaboration is
the recent release of The Passage
(Heads Up). "We put in two years of rehearsal and several hundred hours
of studio
time to create this record," Narell says with a grin. "I
tried to capture the sound that you hear when you're standing in
the
middle of a steel band." In addition to Narell and the nearly three
dozen steel pan players, special guests include Michael
Brecker,
Paquito D'Rivera, and Hugh Masekela.
What brought Narell to
Paris in the first place? "While playing
in the French Caribbean, I met
three incredible musicians'mario Canonge on piano, Michel Alibo on
bass, and Jean
Philippe Fanfant on drums." The four men formed a jazz
quartet called Sak'sho (pronounced sah-kay-show), which
draws
inspiration from the syncopated, polyrhythmic music of Martinique and
Guadeloupe.
"It's a leaderless
band, and we're all writing music for the group,"
Narell says. "We're playing a lot of gigs, and we're hoping to
do
another record later this year." The group's first album, Sak'sho, was released in 2002.
Lauren Vogel Weiss
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