To­day, we pay trib­ute to pan­man Joshua Re­grel­lo on his at­tempt at set­ting a Guin­ness World Record for the con­tin­u­ous play­ing of the steel­pan - at 31 hours un­in­terupt­ed.

Re­grel­lo’s marathon achive­ment was yet an­oth­er in­di­vid­ual ef­fort by a cit­i­zen to place our great­est cre­ation on the cen­tre stage of world cul­ture.

How­ev­er, per­mit us a mi­nor de­vi­a­tion from the due recog­ni­tion giv­en by Tourism, Cul­ture and the Arts Min­is­ter, Ran­dall Mitchell, in say­ing that in cel­e­brat­ing the steel­pan and the pan­man, that the in­stru­ment is “be­yond our nat­ur­al re­sources, our cul­ture is our great­est at­tribute.”

We beg your tol­er­ance Min­is­ter, for a slight but very sig­nif­i­cant de­vi­a­tion from your un­der­stand­ing of the im­por­tance of the steel­pan.

“Yuh think them could go in the States and say we have oil, yuh mad oh meh lard, Texas have more oil more than Trinidad, oh lard, why ne­glect yuh cul­ture, yuh mak­ing me feel sad, ca­lyp­so and steel­band is de cul­ture of Trinidad.” This was the Mighty Pow­er’s civil­i­sa­tion­al state­ment of the 1960s. This is not an at­tempt to con­test with and con­tra­dict the min­is­ter, but rather to agree with and up­grade his ob­ser­va­tion to de­fin­i­tive­ly ven­ture that cul­ture, in all its forms, is the ba­sis for the recog­ni­tion and ad­vance of a peo­ple.

What ca­lyp­son­ian Son­ny Fran­cois was in­tent on stat­ing for the record back then, is that oil was found be­neath the ground and we had noth­ing to do with it; but that cul­ture is what we have cre­at­ed as a peo­ple.

Young Re­grel­lo, in play­ing the steel­pan for 31 straight hours for an as­sured place in the Guin­ness World Records, ex­pand­ed the pres­ence of the na­tion­al in­stru­ment on the world stage. More­over, what he did was to again high­light the fact that the steel­pan and the steel­band were cre­at­ed out of the most ad­verse con­di­tions imag­in­able and by those at the bot­tom of the so­ci­ety.

Re­grel­lo’s his­toric sus­tained and qual­i­ty play­ing, al­so told of the na­ture of the par­ent­ing he re­ceived from the for­mer may­or of San Fer­nan­do, Ju­nia Re­grel­lo and his moth­er Kam­la, who must have sure­ly giv­en him the width, sup­port and en­cour­age­ment to de­vel­op his pan­man­ship to the point of this achieve­ment.

What the feat of play­ing for 31 hours al­so did was to re­veal the ex­tra­or­di­nary tal­ent and ca­pac­i­ty of our young peo­ple, Young Rev­el­lo hav­ing played mu­sic for the mul­ti­tude of hours and com­po­si­tions straight from his head with­out a mu­sic sheet in front of him.

To be ful­ly un­der­stood though, this is not a rec­om­men­da­tion for young pan­nists to pass up on for­mal mu­sic train­ing, but rather to recog­nise the ex­tra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty of pan­men and women of yes­ter­year, and even to­day, who have trained them­selves to use their ear when there was no ready ac­cess to learn the prac­tice and the­o­ry of mu­sic.   

Trib­ute must al­so be giv­en to the sev­er­al thou­sands who turned out to give in­spi­ra­tion and sup­port to the young man and his in­stru­ment. So too, the own­ers/man­agers of WACK Ra­dio FM, which host­ed the record-set­ting event, must be recog­nised for their un­der­stand­ing that there is al­ways space for cor­po­rate Trinidad and To­ba­go to be in­volved in na­tion­al ac­com­plish­ments.