Caribbean Courtship

His hands blur as he beats the rhythm on the food court table in front of him: right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left. The drummer, 66-year-old Michael ‘Toby’ Tobas, who once toured with Calypso icon Harry Belafonte’s band, looks up and smiles, ignoring the glances he draws from other diners.

‘Where I grew up it was very percussive,’ he said in his Caribbean-accented English. ‘Poor people couldn’t buy a guitar or a piano, so we made our music by playing anything we could find.’

Tobas never imagined having a career playing steel pan music. The ping-pong-like sound made from concave oil drums was considered shameful when he was growing up in Trinidad’s capital city, Port-of-Spain in the 1940s.

Steel pan bands evolved from a rhythmic musical style called tamboo bamboo played on bamboo shoots cut to different lengths that African slaves used to communicate during Trinidad’s colonial era. The pains that Trinidad endured under years of British colonial rule were channeled into musical creativity and innovation, beginning the evolution of Calypso music and the steel pan in the 1930s.

However, the early steel pan bands often formed gang-like rivalries, giving the music a bad reputation. Tobas remembers sneaking out of his house at night to listen to steel bands practice. ‘But then my father caught me there, and he said, ‘I don’t want any of my children playing pan. I want them to play a musical instrument,” Tobas said.

It would be more than 40 years before Tobas would learn the steel pan because of his father’s warning. Today, Tobas lives in Chelsea with his wife of 40 years, and although he was never formally trained in music and was forbidden from the steel pan at an early age, he makes his living as a steel pan drummer, playing solo covers of Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffet, and Harry Belafonte.

Tobas learned to play the steel pan when he was 55 after an impressive drumming career that reached its peak from 1974 to 1977 when he toured with Harry Belafonte’s band.

Belafonte, a New Yorker, united international music styles and popularized Calypso music in the United States when his album ‘Calypso’ sold more than one million copies in 1956. He also became the first black man to win an Emmy for his TV show ‘Tonight With Harry Belafonte’ in 1959.

Tobas met Belafonte when Tobas was touring as a drummer with Desperadoes, a steel pan orchestra that is world famous for its international presence with shows at Carnegie Hall in New York and Royal Albert Hall in London.

‘That alone is an education ‘-‘- working with all the great musicians that [Toby] has,’ Mervyn Jackman, Tobas’s friend and southern Florida music teacher, said.

When Tobas left Belafonte’s band in 1977, he and his wife moved to Boston where Tobas set out to learn the once-taboo instrument that had become part of his country’s national identity after Trinidad gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1961.

‘I knew that my pursuits could be continued here [in the United States],’ Tobas said.

In Trinidad, he would have been just another old man. In the United States, however, he was treated with dignity in pursuit of the steel pan.

To play steel pan, Tobas had to learn to read music, something he had never been able to do, despite his venerable career. He worked doggedly, making little progress. After meeting with a psychologist, Tobas said he discovered he had dyslexia.

‘Because I’ve had to teach myself and learn these things with dyslexia, I’ve had to use lots of different methods to understand things,’ Tobas said.

Tobas used unconventional methods to teach himself since childhood, he said. Trinidad had no formal music education when he was growing up, so he learned drumming by listening and reading.

‘I would lie in the house at night wide awake, parents asleep, and I listened to all the radios. We lived in a valley ‘-‘- there was a house up the hill playing a song that I loved so I listened, then I would listen to another house,’ Tobas said.

Jazz, Latin, and East Indian music played on the radio because Trinidad was an ethnic melting pot. Tobas memorized the songs, then learned to play them on his harmonica.

‘Others thought it was just a hobby for on the side. But [Toby] was always 100 percent music,’ Jackman said.

When Tobas was 18, a friend brought him two books from the U.S. that changed his life, he said. The books had pictures of drumming techniques with detailed explanations for how the drum should sound. With a mirror he could make sure his hands looked like the pictures, and because he couldn’t read music, the descriptions of the sounds instructed him.

‘Toby was more gifted than most of us, and he addressed his craft with an intense disposition. And that coupled with his talent, he was able to grow much faster than us,’ Errol Thorne, one Tobas’s childhood music companions, said.

‘I began banging all over the place,’ Tobas said. He demonstrates the first rhythms he learned on the table in front of him. He hits quavers, or eighth notes with his left hand, and semiquavers, sixteenth notes, with his right, keeping time with his foot and singing; rat-ta-ta cat-cat.

The techniques and passion he brought to learning percussion when he was growing up helped him learn the steel pan when he was older. Through repetition, hours of practicing in the Boston subway, Tobas said he was able to master the steel pan.

Tobas still finds rhythm everywhere, and is banging on anything he can find, just like when he was growing up in Trinidad. He picks up a plastic fork and tosses it into an empty bowl in front of him. The fork makes a few short clicks bouncing from one side of the bowl to the other then landing in the bottom. ‘You see?’ he said, ‘Dat-da-da,’ singing the rhythm of the plastic fork. He counts in, ‘. . . two, three, four,’ and beats his hands on the table to the plastic-fork rhythm while singing along, ‘Dat-da-da. . . Dat-da-da.’ Want to know more about the Caribbean? You can try this site and visit the islands.