After one time, so they say, comes deja vodou. Anyone who was passing through Derek Walcott Square, Castries, St Lucia, on an early May lunchtime in 1996, will recall a frenzied crowd of school kids, office workers and visitors driven to delirium by a small steelband ensemble. They ripped up a repertoire of jazz standards like Take Five, Misty and I’ll Remember April, swiftly followed by such Trini classics as Kitchener’s Iron Man, Rudder’s Bahia Girl and Tanker’s Pull de Bull. The schoolboys in the crowd were particularly impressed by the diminutive figure of the bass player, their peer, whose head barely crested the rims of his pans.

A few days later, as the St Lucia Jazz Festival hit crescendo mode at Pigeon Island, the same Panazz, whose name was by now on everyone’s lips, effortlessly upstaged celebrity act Dr John, the New Orleans Night Tripper. When Panazz played at the 1997 inaugural Midem Latin American and Caribbean Music Fair in Miami, they came away with a booking for Disney World’s Epcot Centre, where they sold more CDs than any other act and became a regular fixture of the repertory season, showcasing indigenous music. Twelve years after Midem and four years after Panazz disbanded, co-founder Yohan Popwell has risen, phoenix-like, on the wings of Pantastic Players. The launch of their debut album, Livin De Music, on Saturday night at the UWI Learning Resource Centre elicited the same kind of rapturous response which customarily greeted their famous predecessor.

Pan is notoriously difficult to record and indoor live performances also present acoustic challenges. The LRC auditorium was not ideal acoustically, with some of the tenor notes dropping short and brittle when resonance was required, but Pantastic have both the professional grit and musical hardware to overcome any obstacles. Their two-set performance reprised the tracks on the album, recorded by doyen of pan recording, the inimitable Simeon Sanch, another indication that Popwell, in his latest incarnation, is a local musician who is serious about world, rather than regional marketing.

Along with such Latin numbers as Fidencio Luna’s Las Lolitas, Mi Gualupta and a climactic medley featuring samba, there were a couple of Stevie Wonder compositions and a cameo from D Fosto, singing Kitch’s Bees Melody (surely the Grandmaster’s apogee for pan) and The Carnival Is Over. Another local composition, Portrait of Trinidad, breathed new life with ‘pantastic’ arrangement by Popwell and Deryck Nurse, a regiment man, who led its steelband to joint victory in the World Steelband Music Festival in 1998. Popwell’s daughter Denysha joined her deservedly proud father onstage to solo on Portrait, conclusively proving the truth of the local adage about fruit not falling far from the tree.  Joseph Bishop, also a regiment veteran and alumnus of Wayne Bruno’s Rapid Response, lent passionate sax support to several numbers, including Alicia Key’s If I Aint Got You.

New vocal discovery Llettesha Sylvester shrugged off her late arrival with a breath-arresting, Etta James-style, smoky rendition of jazz hopper Fever, demonstrating Popwell’s commitment to nurturing and developing young talent.
Surely, its no coincidence that five of Pantastic’s full-time line-up is composed of young women who have risen through the ranks. Even if, at this early stage, they do not have the fully developed Latin phrasing and jazz style of Panazz, Pantastic have the potential to carry pan onto the rapidly expanding stage of World Music. Sanch’s superb album will make an excellent addition to any serious muso’s collection and would be a welcome discovery in many Christmas stockings.