"My father," explains Lord Kitchener with a gap-toothed smile, "was a blacksmith and a wheelwright. Stephen Roberts was his name."

He blinks several times, blink, blink, blink, and then continues with unusual fluency: "They used to make music - purposely make it - while slimming down a piece of iron."

The morning is cool, a breeze weaves through the porch of Rainorama, his home in Diego Martin, and Kitchener is relaxed as we search for the roots of his long-standing romance with the steelband, manifest this year in the tune "Symphony on the Street" on his album of the same name.

The calypso is about a Frenchman who arrives in Trinidad and hears some music so sweet he's convinced must be coming from a symphonic orchestra, so Kitchener points out that it's a steelband he's hearing and that pan can sound like any instrument.

But our conversation starts with his childhood in Arima, where he first became enthralled with the music of iron. The notorious stammer, which usually cripples Kitchener's speech, is almost completely absent, perhaps because of his pleasure in recalling those days 60 years ago.

There were three blacksmiths in his hometown: Mr. Horne, Mr. Griffiths and the young Aldwyn's father, who wasn't called Mr. Roberts but rather was known as "Mr. Pamp" for some inexplicable reason. (The young Kitch was known for his tallness as Stringbean, which became Bean Pamp.) And in Mr. Pamp's smithy, as probably in Mr. Horne's and Mr. Griffiths' and other such institutions throughout the island, the rhythms of iron drew a crowd.

"One man was beating the iron with the sledge and my father would hit it with a smaller hammer," explains Kitch. "When the sledge come down 'bup', the smaller hammer would go 'tangalang'. Bup-tangalang, bup-tangalang, bup-tangalang - that was sweet music."

Kitchener's parents weren't Carnival people, but they were in their own way musical. His mother improvised songs for her children, one of which can still get Kitch misty. "Mama will be killin' them for she whoopsin," she'd sing. "Killing them for she thing like a thing."

"She was calling me she 'whoopsin'," explains Kitch. "Nobody could interfere with her child, she was singing."

His father, Mr. Pamp, was a well-known dancer in the district and could also whistle up a storm. Indeed, Kitch's brother Rupert inherited that ability and once placed second in a whistling competition.

It wasn't through his whistling so much as his rhythms that Mr. Pamp influenced the young Aldwyn, however, and Kitch recalls fondly how children from the neighbourhood were drawn to his father's smithy when the time came for Pamp to start pounding on the iron in those days before automobiles drove the horse-drawn carts off the roads and made redundant the blacksmiths who fabricated cartwheels.

Here was the African sensitivity to the rhythms of life and not surprisingly a description exists of this same activity from the same era, in a famous book, Out of Africa. The only difference is that the book isn’t about Trinidadians in Arima but about Africans in Kenya.

Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), in her memoirs of her years living on a coffee plantation in East Africa, described how the Kikuyu tribesmen were attracted by the hammering in the farm's iron forge.

"The Native world was drawn to the forge by its song," observed Dinesen. "The treble, sprightly, monotonous, and surprising rhythm of the blacksmith's work has a mythical force. It is so virile that it appalls and melts the women's hearts, it is straight and unaffected and tells the truth and nothing but the truth. Sometimes it is very outspoken. It has an excess of strength and is gay as well as strong, it is obliging to you and does great things for you, willingly, as in play. The Natives, who love rhythm, collected by (the blacksmith's) hut and felt at their ease. According to an ancient Nordic law a man was not held responsible for what he said in a forge. The tongues were loosened in Africa as well in the blacksmith's shop, and the talk flowed freely; audacious fancies were set forth to the inspiring hammer-song."

Around that time, the late 1920s, back in Trinidad, the steelband had not yet emerged, and the musical instrument which drew the young Kitchener was the double bass. He hung around a bass player named Ralph, from whom he picked up a smattering of technique, and whenever bands came to Arima he'd ask for a "tush" on the bass. He even formed a little band and they'd play in country dances, travelling to Sangre Grande, Blanchisseuse, Cumuto.

(Apart from the drum, the bass is how the African feel for rhythm translates into modern instrumentation - you can hear it in reggae or R&B.)

Kitch was also singing in a bamboo tent in Arima (a penny to enter) and when he eventually move permanently to Port of Spain to hustle in 1944, it was as a calypsonian with the hit "Green Fig". Living in La Cour Harpe in east Port of Spain, he encountered the steelband for the first time. It was the nearby Bar 20 from Bath Street, and Kitchener was immediately inspired to write "The Beat of the Steelband", celebrating pioneers like Zigilee, Bitterman, Barker and Ossie Campbell.

Creativity cannot be explained by cause-and-effect reasoning and genius less so. But Kitchener's long-standing romance with the steelband must have surely been seeded by the rhythms of this father tempering iron. He has sung "A Tribute to Spree Simon", "Pan Harmony", "Pan Explosion", "Sweet pan", "Pan Night and Day", "Pan in A Minor", "Iron Man", "The Mystery Band", "Guitar Pan" - it's a long list. And the steelband movement has returned the compliment by playing at least one Kitch tune in every single panorama finals, including 19 winners.
 
 
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