Ray Holman

RAY HOLMAN
Ray Holman, Take a look at his work below:
Composer, arranger and steel drum performer from Trinidad, Ray Holman is perhaps the most talented proponent of his art form internationally.
He has arranged and recorded with steel bands and artists in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Japan and Europe, including televised performances with the German National Orchestra which showcased his compositions. He composed the highly acclaimed score for Black Orpheus, staged by Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey in 1991, and has been a featured performer in film, television and at venues such as Madison Square Garden, the Super Bowl and the St. Lucia Jazz Festival.
A University of the West Indies graduate and former high school teacher, he has conducted workshops at West Virginia University and was a Commissioned Composer in the California State University Summer Arts Program. He regularly attends the bi-annual steelband tuning and arranging workshop at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California and has done presentations at meetings of the Percussive Arts Society. During 1998-2000 he was a distinguished Visiting Artist in the Ethnomusicology Program at the University of Washington, Seattle.
. He was recognized for his musical contribution by the Republic Pan Fiesta 2003, A Tribute to Ray Holman.
IN 1957, Ray began playing pan at 13 with Invaders Steelband, led by legendary pan tuner Ellie Mannette. Later, he became its arranger, doing classical interpretations such as "Dream of Olwen" and "Etude in A b."
In 1963, Holman and others revived the band Starlift, and his arrangements made it the then most popular band in Trinidad. He had instant success with "I Feel Pretty" from the musical "West Side Story."
At 20, he became the youngest player to win the solo Ping Pong (an early version of the tenor pan)competition in the 1964 Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival. He began experimenting with the jazz idiom as a soloist, while touring and performing on television with the Queen’s Royal College Jazz Group led by his teacher Scofield Pilgrim.
Ray emerged as the most musically progressive steelband arranger, and his innovative arrangements won two Panorama championships for Starlift in 1969, with Lord Kitchener’s “The Bull” and in 1970 with the Mighty Sparrow’s "Queen of The Bands". In 1972, he became the first arranger to compose and play his own music for the National Steelband Panorama competition. Appropriately titled “Pan On the Move,” the composition won the National Preliminaries and is now a musical landmark. Since then, he has arranged for many top steelbands, including Pandemonium, Carib Tokyo, Exodus, Phase II Pan Groove, and Hummingbirds Pan Groove.
His first CD, A Tribute to Ray Holman, featured eight of his Panorama compositions. With his jazz sensibility and unique improvisational style, Ray continues to delight audiences worldwide with the timeless quality of his music.
During its 60-something years of existence, pan has produced many unsung heroes — every iron-kudjoe and scratcherman is important to the music, every player matters — but the composers and arrangers stand out. They are few, they are great, and they are, usually, humble men who approach the music with love and respect
Ray Holman, one of Trinidad’s foremost steel pan arrangers and composers, has been involved with the instrument since he was a child. After four decades as a musical trailblazer, he is one of pan’s many contradictions: a gentle revolutionary.


Merchant — his real name was Dennis Williams who wrote the lyrics to many of Ray’s compositions, had an elegant turn of phrase, a genuine concern for his fellow man, and endless energy. Even in the last few days of his life, almost too weak to write, he was calling on Holman to bring more music. And there was plenty to bring — Ray Holman has a house full of music. Cupboards and chests spill over with scores, just waiting for some lyrics and a play. He estimates that he has composed and arranged around 300 songs, but the total number, if you include the work that hasn’t yet been arranged, is far greater.
He has also achieved a distinguished career as a pan teacher. Since 1998 Holman has been a visiting musician at the University of Washington in Seattle, designing and teaching pan programmes, and he conducts annual workshops and courses in playing and arranging for the instrument in several other colleges in the US. But, as he has no formal music education, he cannot do the same in Trinidad. The legacy of the British education system, still influential in the Caribbean, puts accreditation before talent, skill, and experience.

Most recently, Holman has founded a pan-jazz group — taking him back to his roots at QRC — combining pan, saxophone, bass-guitar, keyboard, and flute. The Ray Holman Quintet has already recorded an album of all-new Holman compositions, of Caribbean-Latin-jazz genesis. Somehow, in between recording with the quintet, teaching in Seattle, and returning to Trinidad for the Carnival season, he has also in the last year or two directed a massive gathering of 275 players in the Pan Jamboree Finale in Sanka Falls, California, and composed and arranged the entire score for a Bruce Weil musical about the history of pan, which opened earlier this year in Cincinnati.
Pan has become a world instrument and Ray Holman has been part of that process for nearly 40 years. But his great hopes for the future of pan are tempered by his knowledge of the many possible pitfalls and limitations. Pan has no limit he says, but the politics surrounding the music are limiting. He laments the lack of apprentices to the old pan tuners of Trinidad, while newer and more scientific methods for making and tuning pans are being developed elsewhere.

The musical trend in Panorama arrangements is also a source of concern for Holman. Too much emphasis on pleasing the judges is detrimental to the music, he feels. Technical excellence and tricks of the trade are thriving; what’s often lacking is true heart.

There is more to pan than the instrument itself: it is a culture, a history, a philosophy, a love. No one can ever take these away from the people of Trinidad and Tobago. It is part of their birthright, their heritage.
And Ray Holman is one of its chief custodians.