About the Notting Hill Carnival

Steel Bands: also known as ‘Pan’ will be filling the streets of Notting Hill with their wonderful melodic sounds throughout the Bank Holiday weekend.  Steelband came from the ‘Tambu Bamboo’ band from Trinidad in the early 1030s. Trinidadians used to beat the bamboo and sing and by using some creative means, began to create different tones. This led to the use of oil drums and in a short space of time the Steelband was born.

The steel pan evolved out of earlier musical practices of Trinidad's enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants. Drumming was used as a form of communication among the enslaved Africans and was subsequently outlawed. Through their innovativeness and determination, they went through a series of musical alternatives from slavery to emancipation, using whatever materials they could find to construct musical instruments. It was therefore a specific cultural response to the specific demographic conditions present on the islands.
Early bands were essentially rhythm bands. However, during the 1940s discarded 55-gallon steel oil drums became the preferred type of pan and, perhaps noticing that constant drumming changed the tone of the pans, techniques were developed to tune them to enable melodies to be played
Pans are constructed by pounding the top of the oil drum into a bowl-like shape, known as "sinking" the drum. The drum is tempered over a fire until it is "white hot" and allowed to cool. Then the notes are laid out, shaped, grooved, and tuned with a variety of hammers and other tools. The note's size corresponds to the pitch - the larger the oval, the lower the tone.

• Calypso
• Steel Bands
• Soca
• Static Sound Systems
• Samba