Cherisse Moe

Mu­sic tran­scends bound­aries and time. It has the pow­er to touch the hu­man soul. Steel­pan mu­sic is in­deed no ex­cep­tion. Japan­ese Yoichi Watan­abe and Kat­sunari Imai know this all too well and have teamed up with some of this coun­try's most es­teemed pan­nists, or­ches­tras and pan soloists to pro­duce a mu­sic trib­ute to Japan ti­tled-What The World Needs Now Is Love. The pur­pose of the project, they ex­plained, was two-fold.

"It's a mu­sic CD and it's in­tend­ed to send a mes­sage of love and hope from T&T to the peo­ple of Japan and al­so to raise funds to as­sist the vic­tims of the earth­quake and tsuna­mi." The CD com­pi­la­tion, card­ed to be com­plet­ed at the end of April, fea­tures orig­i­nal and cov­er tracks from the likes of Len Sharpe (Boogsie), Ken Philmore (Pro­fes­sor), Fon­clare, Pat Bish­op and the Ly­di­an Singers, Ray Hol­man and Earl Brooks.

Emo­tion­al sup­port

Watan­abe and Kat­sunari's fam­i­ly and close friends have sur­vived the dev­as­tat­ing March 11, 9.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake, which has killed more than 10,000 peo­ple. Japan's re­cov­ery is on­go­ing but has been ham­pered by yet an­oth­er quake, which rocked the is­land on April 7, mea­sur­ing 7.1 on the richter scale. That quake struck off Japan's north-east coast, close to the epi­cen­tre of the pre­vi­ous earth­quake. Mean­while, the is­land con­tin­ues to grap­ple with af­ter­shocks, nu­clear cri­sis, and di­min­ish­ing food sup­ply. "The sit­u­a­tion in Japan is re­al­ly bad and I felt it's time for less talk­ing and more ac­tion," said Watan­abe, a mu­sic tech­nol­o­gy/au­dio en­gi­neer at the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) and the Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts.

Imai, a UTT me­dia archive pro­duc­er not­ed that the na­tion's na­tion­al in­stru­ment was gain­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty in Japan, which now has about 50 steel­bands through­out the is­land, and said the CD was "a good way" to pro­vide the Japan­ese with "emo­tion­al sup­port." Both Watan­abe and Imai have ex­pe­ri­enced the hor­rors of the 911 at­tack in New York and said it was steel­pan mu­sic via Caribbean com­mu­ni­ty ra­dio sta­tion, WLIC, that helped them "keep our san­i­ty." "So, I know this CD will help take their minds off of the bad news. All they are see­ing are pic­tures of what hap­pened on TV and hear­ing about it on ra­dio. Lis­ten­ing to steel­pan mu­sic will hope­ful­ly up­lift their spir­its, stat­ed Watan­abe, who's been work­ing with T&T's steel­band move­ment for the past nine years. "I know this mes­sage is go­ing to reach and touch our peo­ple...Pan mu­sic is acoustic mu­sic so you don't need elec­tric­i­ty or nu­clear plants to play it."

Big ap­pre­ci­a­tion

Not­ing that the sup­port re­ceived from the pan fra­ter­ni­ty in putting to­geth­er the CD was "over­whelm­ing," Imai said, "I'm get­ting even more of­fers from peo­ple to help. Big ap­pre­ci­a­tion and thanks to the pan com­mu­ni­ty dur­ing this process of record­ings. We felt like we're part of a fam­i­ly. They know us for many years and they are all com­ing for­ward to as­sist." Imai, orig­i­nal­ly from Ni­iga­ta, Japan, added that plans are to com­pile videos and au­dio tap­ings of the record­ings to air on Japan­ese tele­vi­sion and ra­dio sta­tions in the near fu­ture. "I would love to go home but we are not there, so we have to do what we can here to help. There are on­ly about 30 Japan­ese in Trinidad, but we are a fam­i­ly and we are al­so part of the mu­si­cal fam­i­ly of Trinidad. We just want to send this mu­sic mes­sage from our Trinida­di­an fam­i­ly to our fam­i­ly in Japan."