STEELPAN ALLEY

Even before the soloist reaches centre stage, the audience erupts as if some movie star or international sex symbol inexplicably has appeared here in the cornfields of DeKalb. At the very least, the screams, whistles and shouts of "bravo" would seem more appropriate for a Luciano Pavarotti or a Mick Jagger than for a fellow who's about to reach into his right pants pocket, pull out a couple of slender metal mallets and begin striking, of all things, a tin pan that looks as though it has been pulled off the top of a trash bin.

Yet the music that the young man draws from his unlikely instrument - a haunting, ethereal, sweetly ringing tone that sounds like nothing of this Earth - inspires added waves of applause. And the blur of his hands, which seem to fly over and above his instrument at supernatural speed, causes many folks in the front rows to shake their heads in disbelief.

Clearly, Liam Teague - a 25-year-old Trinidadian whom some consider the greatest steelpan virtuoso in the world - has the crowd at Northern Illinois University in the palms of his astonishingly fleet hands. That Teague is playing his farewell concert before heading back to a murky future in Trinidad surely adds to the poignancy of the moment and the intensity or the audience response.

But seducing the locals, who virtually have adopted the pannist during his six years at NIU, is one thing. Conquering the rest of the world with an instrument most people couldn't name is another.

And trying to win for the lowly steelpan (popularly known as the steel drum) a measure of respect more typically accorded the violin or piano - which is the very reason that Teague eats, breathes and (rarely) sleeps - is a task that no one has yet attempted, let alone achieved.

If he were a whit less gutsy, driven and gifted, Teague probably would be on a beach somewhere in Trinidad, playing lovely, lilting Caribbean folk tunes in hopes that tourists in garish shirts might toss a buck or two his way. He would spend all his years this way, maybe getting a gig on a cruise ship now and then (if he got lucky), just like hundreds of steelpan players before him and hundreds yet to come.

But Teague is different. From the moment he placed his small and nimble hands on this instrument at age 12 in his hometown of San Fernando, Trinidad, Teague has been more hungry and focused than any young pannist within earshot. National champion a year after he took up the instrument and a saloon player long before he was old enough to order a drink, Teague was not going to wither away on the island where he was born, not if he could help it.

And that's precisely why a fellow who grew up surrounded by water eventually found himself surrounded by cornfields.

"I wrote a letter to NIU literally begging them to accept me here," says Teague, a day before the big farewell concert. "I said that if I stayed in Trinidad too long, I didn't know what would become of me, that I probably would be a vagrant on the streets after a while."

Teague does not exaggerate. The one-room wooden shack that he, his younger sister and their parents shared - four in one bed - "could fall down if the breeze blew too strong," acknowledges Teague, who only reluctantly speaks of it. Though drug-ridden, his neighbourhood in the industrial city of San Fernando posed no problems to him, he says, even if "the guy next door who was on drugs and slept a lot during the day - pounded the wall whenever I practised."

Little wonder a talented teen with so few prospects would become desperate.

"What Liam said to me in his letter was that he was afraid that if he stayed in Trinidad, he would rot on the streets," remembers Professor Al O'Connor, associate dean at NIU's School of Music and founder of the school's revered steelpan programme. "Liam would never take me to his house when I was in Trinidad, though someone I know there told me I wouldn't believe it if I saw it."

At the time Teague contacted NIU, in 1990, it was the only university in the world to offer a music degree with a major in steelpan, and even today it's one of only a few, including Florida State University and the University f the West Indies. Were it not for NIU and its improbable steelpan-on-the-prairie curriculum - which Teague heard about when NIU faculty visited Trinidad - Teague simply would have had nowhere to go.

For the instrument he was born to play is but an infant on the world's musical stage, having emerged in Trinidad just 60-odd years ago. Considering that the violin, piano, organ and flute are hundreds of years old, that even the up-and-coming saxophone is pushing two centuries the steelpan barely has made a dent in the world's musical consciousness, let alone the notoriously stodgy halls of academia.

But that's not the only reason that even in Trinidad anyone who plays the instrument - no matter how brilliantly - can be assured a life of near-poverty, musical illiteracy and social derision. Though the pan "is a national symbol of Trinidad the way the American eagle is a symbol of the US," says O'Connor, its brief history is so thoroughly drenched in blood, racism and class warfare that a stigma lingers there around those who play it.

Like jazz in the United States, the intensely rhythmic music of the steelpan emerged from a black musical culture stripped of its most eloquent means of communication - the drum. The British who ruled Trinidad in the 19^th century banned hand drums in 1886 and later the long sticks of bamboo that replaced them. In both instances, claimed the authorities, the messages tapped out by the players incited gang warfare.

Undeterred, the street musicians of Trinidad - heirs to the same African musical culture that slaves brought to the United States - simply began to pound on brake drums from abandoned autos, discarded oil barrels from British and US naval bases, buckets, garbage cans, chunks of metal and anything else resonant enough to be heard at a distance yet light enough to be carried in the streets.

Inevitably, the musicians discovered that trashcan lids and their ilk could be tuned to play particular pitches (by pounding certain indentations into them), and the steelpan was born, in the late 1930s. The Iron Bands - marching groups of early pan players - would compete in the streets, their battles often erupting into bloody rumbles.

"We pannists were outcasts in Trinidad from the beginning," remembers Rudy Johnson, a Chicago pannist who witnessed the battles. "One band would be coming down the street, another band would come from the other direction, and soon a fight would explode. The bands would have names like Destination Tokyo or Casablanca or the Desperadoes - we took our names from the American movies, because we liked the way they sounded. My band was the Johannesburg Fascinators. Even though we were in Trinidad, we used the name Johannesburg because we are black.

"So in Trinidad they said the steelpan man was a criminal, a gangster, a sub-human."

Indeed, "If your parents found out you played steelpan, they would beat you up so badly you were lucky if you lived afterwards," recalls Russell Teague, Liam's father, who still lives on the island with Liam's mother, Pearl. Both retired, they no longer live in the shack of Liam's youth, but in a modern apartment.

"I was born in that era and I know. It was considered a certain class of people that played the pan. If you were upper crust, you played piano and violin and flute. It isn't as bad today, but the pan is still considered very low, and so are the people who play it."

Yet it was Liam Teague's father who introduced him to the instrument by bringing a pannist to Liam's Boy Scout troop (which Russell Teague led). Not long after, 12-year-old Liam - who had begun studying recorder in school - asked to visit the panyards where master musicians teach the art through time-honoured, African-inspired oral tradition.

Located under bridges and viaducts and anyplace else that offers a bit of shelter, the panyards are the de facto conservatories of the streets. They are orgies of rhythm and pitch, with thousands of notes rattling joyously in the night air, and they are the proving ground where the young instrument's most promising virtuoso first embraced his life's passion.

"When I took Liam t the panyards, the people there actually never though he would make a very good pannist," remembers Russell Teague, whose partial Irish ancestry explains his son's distinctly Gaelic name.

"They though not only that he was too small, but they felt he didn’t' have the stuff pan players are made of. He was too quiet too shy.

"But I knew he would (eventually) play, because he never left the pan. When others would take a five-minute break, he wouldn't rest."

Furthermore, the young Teague practised tirelessly at home, applying his school lessons in musical notation to the pan, an instrument that most Trinidadian players to this day learn by rote, never addressing musical notation. By the time he was a teenager, Teague had won more Panorama competitions - the islands' national pan tournaments - than anyone his age and was acquiring a global reputation in the small, cultish society of pan.

"When I was still touring as a performer, I kept on hearing everywhere about this Liam Teague - he's number one this, number one that," remembers Clifford Alexis, a Trinidadian who is one of the most respected pan-makers in the world, as well as one of Teague's instructors at NIU.

"But when Liam came here, we found that the champion pan man from Trinidad, in our view, was not a champ. He was not ready."

The notoriety Teague had won in Trinidad, he concedes, "made me somewhat arrogant when I came here. I came from the mecca of the steelband to this institution (on a scholarship) thinking, 'I'm going t just blow them away'."

But that's not how it worked out.

"Liam's first night in town, I asked him if he'd like to see a tape of the NIU steelband," remembers O'Connor, who first had been smitten with the instrument in the late '60s and immediately began transplanting it to DeKalb.

"Liam said, 'Sure,' so I put it on, and we watched the band playing a calypso piece, and his eyes opened wide. The second piece the band played on the tape was a transcription of the 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor' (by J.S. Bach), and after Liam heard that, he started to cry.

"I think that's when he realized he was now in a university."

The shocks kept on coming.

Though no one - student or teacher - could compete with Teague's lightning-swift technique, his utter lack of formal education in harmony, theory, history, ear training and other essentials of the modern musician's art did not bode well for him.

"I'll never forget the first day Liam went into a jazz improvisation class," says Alexis. "Afterward he came up here, to my studio, and he said: 'I think they're laughing at me'."

For Teague, "It was like suddenly realising, 'I'm not that great after all,' you know what I mean? It was a very humbling experience."

But Teague, whom O'Connor calls "a vacuum cleaner when it comes to picking up knowledge," simply started over. The pan skills he had honed though mere instinct, intuition and sweat he now relearned through intellect and musical comprehension. The idea, says Alexis, was to develop the first steelpan virtuoso whose musicianship was on a par with his technique, to nurture the first thoroughly schooled player from an island where the best pannists never fully learn the underpinnings of their art.

"My contemporary in Trinidad, he cannot come into this university and tell students why he does this or does that," says Alexis. "He cannot say, 'This is why I played a diminished scale here. This is why I altered the pentatonic scale there.'

"My contemporary in Trinidad cannot go into a recording studio in America and read the music that is put in front of him - he has to be taught it by rote, note by note, and that is why he never plays in the big recording studios or in the important concert halls," as Teague did when he performed in Chicago's Orchestra Hall in 1995 with the Chicago Sinfonietta. The occasion was the world premiere of NIU Professor Jan Bach's "Concerto for Steelpan and Orchestra", the first concerto ever written for the instrument.

"The steelpan has never had a great virtuoso musician who can play in symphony halls," continues Alexis. "The best pannists in Trinidad think the notes that they play are their own secrets, and they are afraid you are trying to steal the secrets if you ask them about their music. They don't know that he notes belong to anyone who understands them."

For an instrument to attain a place in the musical pantheon - alongside such titans as the piano and the violin - there must be a virtuoso who can put it there. Just as Andres Segovia made the once-maligned acoustic guitar a solo instrument, the steelpan will need someone who can give it a face and a personality around the world, someone who can life the instrument from its bloody past to a nobler future.

In the world of pan, the nearly universal hope is that this person could be Teague.

"With the information he now has, he could be the one, I'm sure of it," says Alexis, who's famously reticent when it comes to handing out praise but hardly can contain himself on this subject.

"Who else can play the instrument in so many styles? Liam Teague is on fire."

The farewell performance, which features Teague and the university's steelband in a stylistically far-flung concert, underscores the point. In a transcription of a piano concerto by Mozart, Teague unspools lines so elegantly and articulates trills so impeccably that one almost might have thought Mozart conceived the piece for steelpan. In folk-tinged works such as Alexis' "Plenty Pan," Teague tosses off riffs with a rhythmic ebullience that could be produced only by someone who grew up on the island that's synonymous with steelpan and calypso music. And in a jazz version of the ballad "There Will Never Be Another You," Teague swings gently as if born to the style.

"I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say Liam is probably the only musician in the world who is equally fluent in jazz, calypso and classical music," says O'Connor.

"The question is: Which idiom is ready for him?" asks Alexis. "Is jazz ready for him? Is classical ready for him? All of these paths are open to someone with lightning hands who can read music like a symphony man, someone who can excite an audience whenever he tries.

"Until Liam, there was no one like that."

Indeed, Trinidadian steelpan virtuosos who have come the United States seeking their fortunes have never found them. Len "Boogsie" Sharpe, whom connoisseurs liken to jazz giant Charlie Parker in the blinding virtuosity and harmonic complexity of his work, plays there parks in Florida. And Ellie Mannette, who helped develop the instrument, toiled for a cruise company for years until recently, at age 70, receiving a professorship at West Virginia University.

Can Liam Teague triumph where other have not?

"When I first came here, to DeKalb, I was very focused on just becoming wealthy for myself, having a family, a nice house, a great car, whatever," says Teague, whose education has been underwritten mostly by Chicagoan Lester Trilla (his Trilla Steel Drum Corp. produces huge industrial containers for shipping and storage).

"But as the years went by," Teague adds, "I began to think: Wait a minute. I'm in a position where I can actually take this instrument a step forward and promote my entire country. So every time I play this instrument, I don’t' feel as if it's just about Liam Teague or its' just about that moment. The steelpan is a national symbol of Trinidad and Tobago (the proper name of the island nation), and to proclaim it one of the best instruments in the world is a responsibility I must accept."

Though Teague considers himself less technically fluid than Sharpe and considerably less seasoned than Mannette and Alexis, he knows that he alone possesses the key ingredients for attaining international stardom as a pannist: He's young, handsome, well-spoken, technically brilliant, educated and palpably charismatic on stage, a combination of virtues that no pannist has yet attained.

Above all, his ravenous appetite for success does not seem to have been dulled a bit by the difficult years at NIU.

"I want to have a major record deal. I want to have a somewhat hectic performance schedule, be that in a classical context, a jazz context or any worthwhile context possible," says Teague, whose three independent-label CDs are available through NIU's School of Music.

"I guess I really want to be the Wynton Marsalis of the steelpan."

When Teague and the NIU Steel Band finish their programme, which closes the school year and represents Teague's last official act to complete his master of music degree, the audience jumps to its feet and applauds for several minutes. Once the stage hands begin clearing away the steelpans, dozens of fans swarm onto the stage, embracing Teague, bidding him goodbye, hugging him, kissing him and pumping his hand.

"I'm concerned about going back to Trinidad - not scared, but concerned that everything I've learned here is going to totally stagnate," he says, contemplating the uncertainty of his future. Because his student visa is good in the US for just one more year, he knows he has to work on acquiring some new immigration status so that he can perform here regularly in coming years, perhaps even move to the States permanently. In the meantime, he plans to take whatever gigs he can find in Trinidad and the US.

"Even as well known as I may be in Trinidad, some people who don't really know me there probably just think I'm an uneducated pannist who is going to rape their daughter or something like that," he says in an uncharacteristically dark moment.

"So I'm not going back to Trinidad hoping that because I now have a master of music degree that people are going to fall at my feet. But it's not going to stop me - I have to make a change.

"It's mind-boggling to me, because the pannists in Trinidad are just so fantastic technically. Imagine what could happen if they were trained, how far they could take the instrument. I'm only one person. Imagine what they could do."

Yet it will take one person first - a Segovia or a Marsalis of the steelpan - to open the floodgates for the rest.

"Before Liam, this instrument was considered a garbage can, even in Trinidad," says Johnson, the veteran Chicago pannist.

"But when you see Liam Teague playing a concerto," he adds, "who will dare say that this is a garbage can, or that people who are garbage invented it?"

Howard Reich's Chicago Tribune article about him has caused Liam Teague some blushes, and not just because Reich praised him so highly.

"Some of what I said was either taken out of context or misquoted," Teague said in Port of Spain last week. "I was also credited with tings that I did not say…The writer got his information through his own research and interview with other people. Much of his information was incorrect and taken out of context.

"For example, Reich wrote that I had won 'more Panorama championships' than any other person my age. He was in fact referring to both the Schools Music Festival and National Pan Festival, in the former of which I won the soloist title twice and in the latter once, in 1991.

"Even what he wrote about Boogsie (Sharpe) caused me much embarrassment. I admire Boogsie and we are really close. When Boogsie saw the article he called up one of my professors to find out what was going on.

"Fortunately, he realized that I would never say such things. I believe that the writer allowed his enthusiasm to get the better of him."

Teague returned home three weeks ago for some rest and home cooking. He's also spent much of that time considering his future.

"I would really like to be able to stay in Trinidad, and not have to set up house somewhere else.

"Unfortunately, the reality of the local music industry does not always allow that, and I may have to pursue my career outside of my homeland.

There are a few options open for me, one of them begin a teaching position at Northern Illinois University."

Teague is also hoping to set up a Liam Teague foundation to help young pannists to develop their technical skills and to learn music theory. He credits his knowledge of music theory for a large part of his success, and believes that there are many young people out there who would blossom if they knew the rudiments of music.

"I want to pass on the knowledge that I've acquired to other young people. People helped me along the way, and its only fair that I do my part to keep the music alive," Teague said.

The foundation will be funded by two CDs that he hopes to release soon. His manager Robert Foster says: "we are asking that just two percent of the population, 20,000 people, purchase the CDs. If the people give us the support we will be able to set up the foundation with proceeds from those sales.

"Some will also go towards securing a home for Liam and his family. He deserves to have a home as a result of his hard work and the music he creates."

For the moment Teague will be kept busy with several engagements. On September 5 at Rockford, Illinois, he will be a featured performer at a popular annual three-day music festival on the waterfront. He then returns home for a performance for Angostura on September 7, Teague then leaves for the Czech Republic, where he will perform with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague on October 6.

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