Music From Oil Drums

"Melodic and Haunting, it is sweeping the West Indies ...Today, it is the steel bands that set the tempo of Trinidad's gaudy, pre-Lenten Carnival, said to be the gayest in the world. For two days, every steel band on the island leads everyone else on the island in a great dizzy whirl of dancing through the streets of Port of Spain. On Fat Tuesday night, as the hands of the clock brush twelve, there is a cry of "Last lap!" and you hear the thunder of a thousand pans being struck at once. That sound tells you to what heights of exuberance the musically irrepresible people of the East Caribbean have brought the stolid oil barrel."