After graduating from the University of the West Indies with degrees in Spanish and sociology, Holman taught at Fatima College in Trinidad until he retired in 1998. The music, his real career, was relegated to after-hours and vacations.
But Carnival does not coincide with school holidays, and the panyard task of “putting down the tune” involves scoring, arranging, and relentless practice. The players are drilled to perfection well into the night, every night during the season, which lasts from Christmas until Carnival Tuesday. The original arrangement undergoes many changes along the way. The tune presented at the Panorama preliminaries is usually a simple version; it becomes increasingly complex as the stages of the competition progress.

Preliminaries — “prelims” — used to be held two weeks before the finals, with a zonal competition a week later, and the semi-finals on the Thursday night before the finals on Carnival Saturday. After the semis, positions were revised, the tune pulled apart and put together again.

Excitement built and expectations rose to fever pitch. In that space of no sleep and little food, great music happened. Surprise arrangements were practiced in the dead of night, when only the most trusted players were around. But the dual burdens of full-time teaching and overtime rehearsal took their toll.
“I don’t like to remember those days” says Holman now. “They were too painful to the body.”

Painful or not, Holman continued to compose and arrange for Panorama. He left Starlift in 1974, becoming a freelance arranger for bands including Exodus, Pandemonium Tokyo Phase II Pan Groove, and Hummingbird Pan Groove. Although others have followed Holman’s lead and composed tunes specifically for Panorama, popular calypsos still usually win. Crowd response remains an important factor in the final reckoning. But Holman’s fellow musicians and discerning pan aficionados alike revere the work he has done as a composer.

In 1990, Lord Kitchener — with whose tune Starlift had won its first Panorama crown 21 years earlier — paid tribute to Holman with his calypso Iron Man. In 2001, Holman returned the compliment, composing and arranging Heroes of the Nation for the merged Hummingbird-Odyssey steelband. Kitchener was one of Holman’s three heroes; the other two were Ras Shorty I the father of soca, and Merchant, the brilliant songwriter and calypsonian. All three had died in 2000.

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.

Since Holman made his first recording with Starlift in1970, he has enjoyed a successful international career, with soca and calypso compositions, ballads, opera scores, and blends of Brazilian and jazz rhythms. He has performed as a soloist, musical director, and arranger worldwide. During a live television programme broadcast in Germany in 1997, Holman was delighted to perform his music alongside calypsonian David Rudder, American panman Andy Narrel, an assortment of jazz musicians, and the West German National Symphony Orchestra.
He has recorded consistently over the past 30 years, but many of his early works were lost when a fire at West Indies Records in Barbados damaged the vinyl record stamps. In 1994, Delos Records in California released a CD called Steel Bands of Trinidad and Tobago in Tribute to Ray Holman. It is a nostalgic retrospective of his Panorama tunes, as played by Exodus, Tokyo, Phase II, and Hummingbird Pan Groove, all bands that Holman has composed and arranged for over the years.

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.

Yet — although “pan gone”, although inventions and improvements have been made worldwide, although one pan-tuning process has now been patented in the US — in the end, no one can beat pan like a Trini. 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. [BACK]