Island rhythms pulsate through his soul

A pioneer steel drum player is eager to teach others the traditions of the melodic pans.

By JON WILSON

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 9, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- Sam Agge loved the steel drums. Something about them made his soul ring. His parents saw the rowdy musicians who played them marching through the streets of Trinidad and called them hooligans. Don't dare join them, they told 14-year-old Sam.

[Times photo: Fred Victorin] Sam Agge is working on new steel drums in his brother-in-law's back yard.

"But God wanted me to be a hooligan," Agge said.

He took up the pleasure, getting a boom out of old used oil drums.

Then he learned the subtleties of the "pan," the top of that same drum methodically pummeled into a finely tuned acoustical instrument.

It became his life.

When the street bands went by his house, "It did something to my mind," Agge said.

"My parents couldn't understand it. When the band passed in the night, I went outside and danced. When my parents came out, I was playing the drum. The hooligans would come inside and say, "Don't whip him. Let him play.' "

The boy who might have become a professor or a preacher became a steel drum musician, traveling the world on the ethereal harmonics he pulled from retooled barrels.

He learned to make and tune the drums, and to teach others. He said he helped organize the Boston Steel Orchestra, "in 1967, the year the Red Sox won the pennant."

How devoted was he to his art?

"One time my wife told me, "You love that steel drum more than me.' I said, of course I do. It represents my people. My nation. Trinidad and Tobago."

Now 64, Agge is single these days, a part of musical history living in Lake Maggiore Shores. He still plays, up and down Florida's west coast. Besides the music, Agge, who goes by the name Sam Brown in the steel drum world, sometimes does electrical work with his friend and manager, Trevor Davis.

But his main ambition is to pass on his craft to the next generation, teaching others to make, tune and play the instrument that became his true love.

"I don't care what race, creed or religion. They can come from the moon. If God sends them, I teach them. That's what I am about.

"If the first person who played the trumpet hid the plan, we'd still be blowing bamboo."

Many people are introduced to the steel drum sound at Caribbean festivals or at beach hotels where entertainers play at tiki bars. The performer uses sticks to produce the characteristic ringing sound.

Its devotees say the steel drum is the only acoustical instrument invented in the 20th century. And its relatively young history is colorful.

According to accounts, Trinidadians once used hand drums to signal each other, sometimes as a prelude to gang warfare. The ruling British banned those drums in the late 19th century.

So the people took up the "Bamboo Tamboo," in which each member of a group would carry a long piece of bamboo and pound it on the ground to create a rhythmic pattern that identified each gang. When gangs met, members would fight with machetes they had hidden inside the stalks.

The British banned the bamboo tamboo as well. The Trinidadians began using any old object they could find to pound out rhythm, including car parts, garbage can lids -- and empty oil barrels. These "iron bands" continued the tradition of rhythmic communication.

In the late 1930s, someone noticed that a barrel head could produce different tones.

"Winston "Spree' Simon was the first man to play one," Agge said.

"Sam grew up with the famous ones," said Joe Braccio, an adjunct music instructor at four schools who plays the steel drum.

St. Petersburg has several solo players and some school bands, Braccio said. He helped organize and does arrangements for steel groups at Perkins Elementary School, John Hopkins Middle School and St. Petersburg Junior College. Another band is about to start at Gibbs High School.

Agge first came to St. Petersburg in 1978. He organized a steel band for youngsters at the Lake Vista recreation center.

"The band was so successful. They played all around," said Ruth Stenger, then a city recreation director who is now retired.

Agge was good at what he did, Stenger said. "I think it was that he was so good with the kids he recruited. It was a real learning experience for them. It attracted the type of individual who was interested in other things, so it proved to be an outlet for them."

Agge makes drums in his brother-in-law Leroy Lewis' back yard. The old, 55-gallon oil drums cost $30, Agge said, and take about two weeks to turn into an instrument.

"You get a resonance sweeter than that of a piano," Agge said.

His right forearm pops with muscle. He has used a 10-pound, short-handled hammer, its business end padded, to deliver thousands of careful, even caressing blows to beat a drum head into musical shape.

Tuning the "pan" is a complicated process that involves softening and stretching the metal to produce variation in the notes.

After hammering the barrel head into a convex shape, the tuner uses small hammers, iron tools and sometimes a rubber tuning stick.

After the stretching process, Agge uses a felt-tipped marker to draw in the note sections, some several inches wide, others no bigger around than a marble. Then he uses a punch to make indentations along the lines. He heats the drum over a fire to burn out the metal alloy, then takes a smaller hammer to tap each section into the pitch of the note he seeks. There are about 30 notes in all.

The process can be noisy, what with all the pounding. Agge doesn't want to bother neighbors constantly.

He'd like to get a warehouse, a large room, any space where he could build, play and teach without disturbing the peace.

He believes the Lake Vista project of two decades ago produced St. Petersburg's first steel band. Now, he said, he wants "to complete my assignment. My spiritual assignment is to put more steel drums in St. Petersburg.

"They are mostly on the south side. What happened to the east and the west and the north?"

For information

For Sam Agge's playing schedule, call Trevor Davis at 865-1060.

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