Caribbean Beat — March/April 2019 (#156)

The arranger
When Renegades won the 2018 National Panorama
Competition, it signalled a return to victorious form for the
legendary steelband — and a career highlight for Duvonne
Stewart, one of the most talented and ambitious of the new
generation of pan arrangers
“
I
take a song about a minute and ten seconds in
duration, and turn forty-eight bars into three
hundred bars of music, with sheer creativity of
self-spontaneous arrangement with nine different
voices applied through the steelband,” says
Duvonne Stewart, summarising the all-important role of musical
arranger.
“I have etched my name in a space where it cannot be erased
anymore,” declares the forty-two-yearold,
whose sixteen years as an arranger
have earned him twenty-one competition
victories — but none as meaningful as
bringing the 2018 National Panorama title
home to the BP Renegades, the band that
bred and nurtured him after he left his
home in Tobago and moved to Trinidad at
the age of nineteen.
It was Renegades’ first Panorama victory
in the seven years — an almost Biblical
term — since Stewart was handed the
band’s arranger’s baton, previous carried
by the late and legendary Jit Samaroo,
whom Stewart idolised when he was a player with Renegades in
the 1990s. In the nine years from 1989 to 1997, under Samaroo’s
direction, Renegades won the Panorama title six times.
Stewart’s talent is homegrown, but it was during a three-month
stint at the University of Nantes in France, where he taught a
series of masterclasses, that he truly blossomed. “I was thinking, I
am the best, until I landed in Paris in 2002 and threw my ego into
the River Seine and started from scratch,” he says.
On returning to T&T, Stewart’s ambitions were translated
into a series of Panorama victories with bands in the east, north,
“I am trying to send
the message clearly,”
says Duvonne Stewart,
“without trying to be
difficult, or two or three
notches above the
average listener”
and south of Trinidad, while he steadily earned respect in the
international steelband diaspora as well, arranging for bands
in Britain and the United States and engaging students at the
University of Liverpool and Howard University in Washington,
DC. “I could see the transition process of a new generation of
arrangers,” he recalls. “Somebody had to open that door.
“In the 80s and 90s the arrangements that came from the
virtuosos were very technical to articulate,” says Stewart. But
now, “A new generation has evolved. Raw.
Uncut. Unplugged. I am trying to send
the message clearly, without trying to be
difficult, or two or three notches above
the average listener, without them being
misled.”
For last year’s Panorama, Stewart created
a phenomenal arrangement of “Year
for Love”, a statement song by Aaron
“Voice” St Louis about gang warfare in
east Port of Spain, which has claimed
several lives close to the Renegades family.
“I want to tell the story real and true,”
Stewart says.
And in 2019, he is once again treating with a fundamental
problem in his community: the male-female relationship. “It’s
the reality for families that reside around the band, and I will
paint that picture with my music,” Stewart promises. At the
Renegades panyard in Port of Spain, he’s assembled a cadre of
international players from bands he has arranged for in the US,
Britain, France, Japan, and St Vincent.
And he’s ready to step into the hallowed halls of T&T’s music
history: this era, he boldly predicts, will come to be called the
Duvonne Dynasty, taking up the mantle of earlier virtuosos. n
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