Bongo Fury and The Calypso Cowboy
March 8 @ 8:00 pm - 8:45 pm
$10A brief musical history of my 50 years performing music on the steel drum(pan). Veteran Fresno musicians Jeffrey Bowman (Wild Blue Yonder Band, Randy Sharp Band, Karen Brooks, and The Fellow Travelers) and Raymond Gonzales (Los Hooligans and Danielle Rondero & The Nitty Gritty) perform an eclectic musical hybrid informed by traditional Latin and Caribbean rhythms as well as modern jazz, Calypso, and Afro-beat. The first steel pans (often dubiously called steel drums) made their appearance in Trinidad in the 1940s, fashioned from discarded biscuit tins and paint cans, beaten with wooden sticks. The steel bands were mostly gangs of youth from poor neighborhoods, but the discovery that different notes could be tuned on the top of a drum gave birth to an island-wide movement and the creation of a new family of instruments and a whole new genre of music. A teenage Ellie Mannette was among the first to experiment with hammering distinct tones into the top of an oil barrel, and he was the first person to tune a pan that could play melodies. The rest, as they say, is musical revolutionary history.