Election Section

Lovers of Caribbean sounds, and world music listeners in general, are in for a pre-Valentine’s Day treat when Andy Narell brings the 14-piece steel drum band Calypsociation from Paris to the Chabot College Little Theater in Hayward for two shows Sun. Feb. 13 (at 2 p.m. and 7 p. m.) with local steel drummers The Chabot Panhandlers, under Jim Munzenrider’s direction, opening. 

Narell, a Berkeley resident for 20-some years, has been in Paris the past three, working with Calypsociation (said with a French pronunciation). “They play what Andy’d play if he could play all 14 drums by himself,” says Munzenrider. Narell and his brother Jeff (leader of the popular Berkeley band Rhythm ‘n Steel) learned to play the “pans” while still boys when their father, Brooklyn social worker Murray Narell, encouraged steel drum pioneer Ellie Mannette to come to the United States to help found bands for socially at-risk youth. 

Andy Narell performed with Bay Area groups (like Mel Martin’s Listen!) in the ‘70s, and has recorded a series of about a dozen albums as a leader (Stickman perhaps the most famous), with the participation of internationally-known jazz players. Calypsociation’s first CD, The Passage, on Heads Up label, features saxophonists Michael Brecker and Paquito D’Rivera, as well as trumpeter Hugh Masekela. 

Narell was also the first non-Trinidadian to arrange for competition in 1999 at “Panorama,” the international festival of steel drumming held just before Carnival every year at Port-of-Spain. Besides his credits as composer, arranger, player and bandleader, Narell has pioneered using recording techniques like surround-sound to capture the notoriously elusive sound of pans on disk. 

Founded by Jim Munzenrider in 1987, The Chabot Panhandlers is a 25-plus player community steel drum orchestra, with members from around the Bay Area. Youngest of The Panhandlers—and player of the 6-bass pan—is Berkeley High sophomore Antonio Beroldo, whose mother teaches science at the Berkeley Montessori School. Other Berkeley residents include Anna Talamo (double tenor), a case worker with Alameda County Social Services, and Helen Finkelstein (double second), who teaches English at San Francisco State. 

“That’s what I like about The Panhandlers,” says Gail Morrison (lead), Richmond resident and retired horticulturalist, “It really is a community band, with a smattering of professional musicians, but mostly other people with other jobs who just love the sounds of it.” 

Sticks, the latest Chabot Panhandlers CD (they have four out) from last year, on Oakland’s Ramajay Records, includes tunes by Narell and Ray Holman, one of the most famed composer-arrangers for steel drum bands. Holman has worked directly with The Panhandlers, as has legendary pan player and composer Len “Boogsie” Sharpe. 

Munzenrider maintains musical association and friendship with Calypsonians like David Rudder, and plans to produce a show in the near future with Barbados singer Crazy (Edwin Ayoung)—whose hit recording, Nani Wine, is only second to Arrow’s Hot Hot Hot as an international Calypso hit—performing with The Panhandlers. Crazy, who’s performed around the East Bay (occasionally with Jeff Narell) over the past two decades, is now a San Jose resident and is frequently in the audience at Panhandlers’ shows, where “he’s been known to jump up and sing a song from time to time.” 

Listening to Calypsociation’s The Passage and Chabot Panhandlers’ Sticks, the piquant clangor of the metal reminds the listener that steel bands are both primitive (the instrument was made out of a 55-gallon oil drum from a Naval base—possibly first by Ellie Mannette—in the late 1930s to early ‘40s) and yet harmonically sophisticated, sharing their unique, metallic orchestral sound only distantly with Indonesian gamelans and Filipino kulingtang (and, maybe by analogy, New Orleans Brass bands). 

“It’s a humbling thing for a trained musician like me,” says Jim Munzenrider, “To work with these great players and composers—and I consider Boogsie Sharpe the Charlie Parker of this music—knowing they can come up with all this harmonic complexity, yet mostly can’t read. Ray Holman, when he worked with us, came in with great arrangements, not as charts, but written out like descriptions of what we were to play. When I’ve praised the great things they do in music theory terms, they say, ‘So that’s what you call it!’ In any case, all I do anymore is teach and play the steel drums. Only that.” 

Andy Narell and Calypsociation 

with The Chabot Panhandlers 

2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 13. 

$18 general, $15 seniors & $12 

for children under 12. 

Chabot College Little Theater 

25555 Hesperian Blvd, Hayward. 

843-4342 

www.chabotsteeldrums.com.