| July 2000 SoundStage! Talks with Andy Narell
After publishing a review of Narell's latest collection, Fire in the Engine Room, SoundStage! had the opportunity to interview him via e-mail. We’ve left his replies intact except for minor editing here and there for the sake of brevity. SoundStage!: For those who can’t clearly envision your chosen instrument, Andy, how is a pan made and how would somebody interested go about learning how to play one? Andy Narell: Briefly, steel pans are made from oil barrels. The tops are beaten down until they are concave; the pattern is marked out on top, then grooved with a hammer and punch, thus separating the notes. The side is cut, the pan is heated and cooled, and then the notes are shaped and tuned with a hammer. The tuning is the really difficult part. Each note has a fundamental pitch and harmonics tuned around the edges. An electronic strobe is used to get perfect equal temperament. The best place to learn is to call Ellie Mannette's workshop in Morgantown, West Virginia, and sign up for a workshop. The phone number is (304) 293-3786. He makes all of my instruments. SS!: "Now, the steel drum wasn't really widely known as a solo instrument, and definitely not within the jazz genre, until you changed that. Can you give us a brief overview of your evolution, from learning the technical aspects of your craft and the musical vernacular of Caribbean pan styles to integrating your instrument into a more jazz-influenced milieu? We assume your abilities on the piano were an influence here, as well as serving as foundation for composition. AN: I started playing pan when I was seven years old. We played steel band music like everybody else, and listened to records from Trinidad and the other islands. Growing up in New York, I was exposed to a very different mix of music than steel band players in Trinidad had grown up with. I also studied classical and jazz piano as a kid. In my teens I got interested in jazz and started to try to develop an improvising style. I didn't really get a sense of how to go about it until I started going down to jam sessions in the village when I was 15, listening to jazz on the radio and going to clubs. Then I started thinking seriously about playing pan with "conventional" instruments and trying to develop as a soloist. It all went from there—playing in bands, studying jazz and Caribbean music, getting a classical music education at UC Berkeley. Actually, I've never stopped studying. SS!: One pet peeve is the current level of mediocrity perpetuated in the music industry and on the airwaves. Sonic wallpaper gets stamped out by the mile. Radio stations regurgitate this slosh, endlessly. The reviewers of the major publications seem ill prepared to call a spade a spade or to go through any serious efforts to discover real talent that isn't easily shoe-horned into a conveniently labeled box. AN: I guess there has always been a preponderance of mediocrity around. The 'sonic wall paper' you refer to is just another incarnation. I think it's unfortunate that so much of the jazz field has been co-opted by music that is so formulaic and repetitively numbing. I've heard it described as music for people who like the idea of jazz, but don't really want to listen to it. I don’t know how to address this situation except to try to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Try to put good, honest music out there for people and hope that they'll raise their standards and demand more. It's like food; you can't just lecture people and tell them that junk food is bad for them, you've got to offer them something that tastes better than junk food, is better for their health, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Also, I think music and arts education is really important. In this country, we are cutting back funds for music and arts education left and right, and it shows. SS!: Your discovery of the South African listeners' clubs where folks pool their funds to buy recordings is very inspiring. Ditto for the Andy Narell Jazz Club, to whom you dedicated Fire in the Engine Room. AN: "The listening clubs
in South Africa are a unique phenomenon as far as I know. They took the idea from the
burial funds that people have in poor communities all over the world -- where people pool
their money together so that when someone in the community dies, they can afford a funeral
-- and parlayed it into a way of gaining access to music. People in the townships have had
to be creative in these ways just to survive the apartheid regime. I asked someone
recently - what's a spaza? The answer shocked me. Spazas were tiny illegal stores run out
of the backs of people's houses in the townships. The reason they were illegal was that
the white owned businesses wanted to usurp all the business in the townships, but they
didn't want to have to go into the townships to do it. So they made it illegal to
operate SS!: If a well-to-do music lover or a group wanted to sponsor an Andy Narell recording and commission compositions, possibly even requesting participants (say Gary Burton on vibes and Eddie Daniels on clarinet), what kind of expenses is one talking about? What does it cost to put together a recording like Fire? Is it a similar process to the movie industry where producers raise funds, sometimes even via venture capital? AN: It's really not like movies. I've worked on a lot of movie scores. I’m always awed at the amount of financial risk involved. Apart from a few legendary first films, most movies run into millions. Pop records typically run into hundreds of thousands, jazz records in the tens of thousands. Mine have been pretty much in the 30 to 50 thousand range, not counting the months of time I work on them. That’s fairly high compared to many more traditional live style recordings, which are often done in the teens. However, if you know someone that wants to help me tackle something larger, I have some ideas that would need some backing, because the commercial viability is very uncertain. I've been wanting to commission music for steel pan and conventional orchestra and record it, among other things. Have your people call my people and we'll do it. SS!: "Thank you very much, Andy, and happy travels, both musically and literally." ...Srajan Ebaen GO BACK TO: |
Forget the
X-Men and Superman, Andy Narell is the original man of steel. Call him the global,
unilateral ambassador of the steel drum, that most Caribbean of instruments with the happy
sound. He has a discography of 12 albums to his own name (essentially one album every two
years since 1979), and a plethora of other credits -- John Patitucci, Chucho Valdes,
Aretha Franklin, Manhattan Transfer, Patti LaBelle -- and the list goes on. And
that’s not to mention his performances in several major film scores from How
Stella Got Her Groove Back to 48 Hrs, and from Commando to Gorillas
in the Mist, Distant Thunder and Ghostbusters. An observant listener would
instantly recognize the telltale tongue-tip taste of tipsiness that’s the signature
sound of Andy’s pans. Apple computer’s slogan "Think differently," led
the computer firm to ask Andy for a commercial theme. Ditto for Sony, Porsche, Southwest
Bell and Jelly Belly. Even dance companies like the National Dance Company of Jamaica, the
Oberlin Dance Collective and Halifu Osumare have used Narell's compositions in
performances. If you add to these accomplishments a tightly packed performance and concert
schedule, you may begin to wonder whether this artist doesn’t really belong with the
superhuman X-Men after all.