Entertainment

Sizzla on pan

Sizzla - file

I went to the final concert of the UWI Panoridim Steel Orchestra's Panfest 2005 season on Sunday night and was exposed to Sizzla in a new way.

Four songs from his 'Da Real Ting' album were done in medley fashion, to the delight of the full house at the Phillip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts on the Mona Campus.

The steelpans, associated mostly with Trinidad and carnival, but adaptable to any kind of music, carried the melody and the bass, with a drum set holding the time.

Among the Sizzla songs that were performed were Just One Of Those Days and Solid as a Rock. In Solid As a Rock, a flagman burst out when the bass dropped on the chorus, imitating the flag wavers for various Rasta entertainers, although I have not seen any flagmen with Sizzla in a little while.

Melodic material

But then, I don't go everywhere.

Hearing some of Sizzla's more melodic material on steelpan was, if not a revelation, then certainly a refreshing interpretation. The melody of his songs really came through on the tapping of the steelpan and it occured to me that Sizzla is one of the few deejays who is heading towards an appeal beyond the dancehall.

Buju Banton is another who readily comes to mind as another deejay who can rip up a hardcore 'Champions In Action', as he did last Saturday night, and still be interpreted by other performers outside the dancehall genre. For example, his Untold Stories is on Sinead O'Connor's latest album, on which she covers a double handful of reggae classics - Rasta classics, actually.

We must never forget that people like Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley, whose material is celebrated in dance and theatre, were not born icons. They were once looked on with some disdain by those who would position themselves as judges of what is 'cultural' and what is not.

Defining culture

Often it is the students at tertiary institutions who come into contact with the songs at the various parties and fêtes who make the translation from party music and rebellious rockers to cultural standard. And it was very interesting that the Sizzla medley was put in a segment about defining culture, the evening's narrator Rosie Murray saying before the section began that these were songs that were immediately identified with a particular country.

And so it is with Sizzla. The steelpan interpretation of his music on Sunday night is part of an inevitable process of some of his music going from dancehall to near iconic status, I believe.