A master’s jazzy spin on steel pan
SOMETIMES, when he’s on the bandstand, his body jerking and his face locked in a grimace as he tucks into a solo that sails from one key change to the next, the jazz steel pan player Victor Provost likes to play a mind game with himself.
“I completely separate the pan sound, because I want just the content of what I play to stand out,” he explains. “I’m never comfortable when people say, ‘Man, that’s crazy for a steel pan.’ For me, the sound is just another colour.”
Serious jazz on the steel pan - jazz imbued with the historical vocabulary of swing, bebop and the blues, and not, as Provost puts it , simply “improvised music” - may not be crazy. But it is admittedly unusual. There are a handful of older jazz steel pan improvisers: Othello Molineaux, who played with bassist Jaco Pastorius; Rudy Smith, now 73; and the American Andy Narell, but almost no one on the instrument has tried to make it the basis of a career.
Provost, whose first album on an actual record label, Paquito Records, is scheduled for
I completely separate the pan sound, because I want just the content of what I play to stand out. I’m never comfortable when people say, ‘Man, that’s crazy for a steel pan.’ For me, the sound is just another colour. Victor Provost, jazz steel pan player
release on Jan 20, the day he turns 36, could well succeed. With almost three decades of playing the steel pan under his belt, Provost has reached that combination of sensibility and chops that turn his bop- driven jazz solos into mesmerizing rides that at times swing the listener off into an abyss and then pull him back with a triumphant return home, the root chord suddenly appearing, equilibrium regained.
“I love the beauty of the tension and the release, and the idea that you are making art extemporaneously, that you and the audience are experiencing this for the first time together,” Provost says.
The rhythmic nuance of bebop, the melodically complex jazz form that came of age during World War II and is best personified by alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, also has its appeal. “That time feel, in between a triplet and an eighth note, you can’t really notate it and you can’t really teach it,” he says. “It’s like an accent,” adds Provost, who was born and raised in the US Virgin Islands and has a slight Caribbean lilt to his speech.
Provost’s career path is as unconventional as his decision to play jazz on the steel pan. His parents moved to St. John, one of three main islands in the US Virgin Islands, from Philadelphia in the mid-1960s after first visiting on their honeymoon. His mother ran a travel agency, and his father became a science teacher in the Virgin Islands’ public school system.
Provost went to one of the two public schools on St. John, which had about 450 children in grades one through nine. “There were three or four other white kids in the school, max,” recalls Provost, “and that includes me and my brother.” His father taught the eighth- grade science class; the year Provost was in his father’s class, he recalls, “all the students ended up calling him ‘Pops.’ “
When he was about 10, Provost was in the basement of the St. John School of the Arts practising piano when he heard the school’s steel drum band upstairs playing the theme song from “Chariots of Fire” - with a calypso beat. “That was so much more fun than practicing this stuffy European classical music in this tiny room. I wanted to be playing calypso upstairs with my friends.”
In fact, the school’s steel band was legendary, making two European tours while Provost was in the group. Steel bands, now found in countries around the world and becoming increasingly popular in the United States, include at least a half- dozen types of steel drums with different tonal ranges. But in a steel pan orchestra, much of the playing is straightforward, and there’s almost no room for improvisation.
Provost picked that up with the type of high school gig most budding musicians would kill for: playing solo, with just his pan and a sequencer (which produced a karaoke-like soundtrack) for two years every night - twice on Mondays - at the Caneel Bay Hotel. Best of all, he says: “nobody was really paying attention, so I got to experiment. It was paid practice.”
Provost left St. John for the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 1999, where he planned to major in computer science. But music won out. He spent two years playing nights with a seven-piece band run by a fellow Virgin Islander, Arnold Stagger. One night, while helping Stagger unload equipment at 2 in the morning, Stagger turned to Provost. “‘Man, you don’t have to play all the time,’ “Provost remembers him saying. “‘You need to listen and to figure where you fit in sonically.’ I learned on the bandstand,” Provost notes.
He eventually quit college and got a job selling washers and dryers at Sears on straight commission - “not for the faint of heart,” he says. He met his wife, Rachelle, in Pittsburgh, and the two moved to the Tidewater area of Virginia, where Provost got a job running the local steel band as part of an after- school intervention program.
Provost continued to work on his jazz chops, spending more than a year taking a correspondence course with Charlie Banacos, a legendary jazz pianist who ultimately provided Provost some 35,000 lines of music to learn, each of which was a different way to approach a different note in one of six chord types - major, minor, dominant seventh, etc. - in each of the 12 keys. Provost says that while he studied with Banacos, he had to practice from 6 pm to 11.30 pm every day.
“That is the thing that moved my playing to the beginnings of actually being able to sound like a jazzman.”