NIU Steel Band to celebrate
three decades with special concert

by Mark McGowan

G. Allan O'Connor wanted to form a steel drum band at Northern Illinois University when he arrived as a young professor in 1968, but it would take five more years before he could assemble a set of instruments.

After one of his private students located some during a trip to the Caribbean in 1973, however, the nation's first collegiate steel band sprung to life.

Now 30 years later, the world renowned NIU Steel Band will celebrate its past, present and future during "Thirty Years of Steel," a special concert scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday, April 27, in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall in the Music Building. The concert is free and open to the public.

Guest artist David Rudder, who O'Connor said is "considered by many to be the greatest living Calypso singer," will travel from Trinidad to perform four pieces.

"If anybody had told me when I started messing around with this in 1973 that we'd be at the point we're at right now, I would basically tell them they were out of their minds," said O'Connor, who has retired from NIU but continues to lead the group with co-director Cliff Alexis, a native of Trinidad and Tobago.

Since its humble beginnings, the NIU Steel Band has toured the globe several times and eventually reached an incredible peak when it captured an unprecedented second place in the 2000 World Steel Band Festival held in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. In 1987, O'Connor established a curriculum in music with pan as the primary instrument. Students from across the United States and others from Canada, Jamaica, Japan and Trinidad are now at NIU to focus mainly on the steelpan.

In 1985, O'Connor coaxed Alexis south to DeKalb from Minnesota, where he had taught
steelpan for two decades, to build and tune steel drums and to help in arranging music and teaching the band.

Alexis, honored two years ago as a "Legend of Pan" by the Trinidad and Tobago Folk Arts Institute of New York, handles most of the R&B, pop and calypso arrangements. He also builds steelpans for percussionists around the world and for the majority of collegiate steel bands in the United States and Canada.

"His role is invaluable," said Liam Teague, O'Connor's handpicked successor. "He is one of the best steelpan tuners in the world, and the reason our instruments always sound so wonderful."

The NIU Steel Band's global reputation also lured steel pan virtuoso Teague, a native of Trinidad, to the United States for his bachelor's and master's degrees. Teague now works in the NIU College of Visual and Performing Arts in addition to his busy performing schedule.

In the final segment of the April 27 concert - the look to tomorrow - Teague will conduct the band in some of his arrangements as well as his first-ever transcription of a classical piece, a movement of a Beethoven symphony.

Teague hopes to attract more undergraduate students to the NIU School of Music, O'Connor said, affording them a longer stay in the United States and more time to develop their skills than a graduate student enjoys.

"Liam is amazingly ambitious. He really wants to move this along," O'Connor said. "We may end up with a steel band here that is 50 percent West Indian students."

The retrospective concert will open with the first piece the band ever performed and continues with other selections culled from the 1980s and 1990s.

It also turns the spotlight on Trinidad native Wayne Bruno, known for his mastery on the guitar, bass guitar and pan and his arrangements for Rudder. Bruno and Nadine Gonzales, a singer from Trinidad, will sing background vocals during the concert. Both are NIU students.

The afternoon also will take time to recognize NIU Steel Band alumni who attend along with Lester Trilla, president of the Chicago-based Trilla Steel Drum Corp. A longtime sponsor of the NIU Steel Band, Trilla has given more than $250,000 to the program over the years. Trilla discovered the ensemble when Alexis invited him to a concert, where he heard what kinds of music could come from his company's steel drums, the raw material for steelpans.

"A whole bunch of students were given an opportunity they never would have had because he did this. Now they're back in their home countries, contributing to the development of the arts there," O'Connor said. "Their abilities have enhanced the quality of the group, and the interaction of the students from all these different cultures has been a benefit to everybody."

For more information, call 753-1551.

3-31-2003