Drummers perform during Carnival in Trinidad. Thundering. Clangoring. The air around me throbs and shatters with the sound of steel pans. I'm in Queen's Park Savannah, a big patch of green in the ...

Despite Trinidad’s musical fame, the campus here only began offering music courses in 1992. Now about 100 students study the musical arts, the majority of them emphasizing the steel pan.

During last month’s funeral service for Trinidad and Tobago-born steelpan musician Reynold Juan “Caldera” Caraballo at Brooklyn’s St. Francis of Assisi-St. Blaise Parish, lo… ...

Working-class youths invented the steel drum in the 1930s by banging dents in the tops of discarded oil drums to create notes. Today, steelpan is Trinidad's de facto national instrument.

Rather, it is a sly reference to the history of the steel pan, also known as the steel drum, the instrument invented on the island of Trinidad, and the subject of a 2014 film produced by Gilbert ...

Steel pan virtuoso and Birch Creek faculty member Liam Teague talks about the many different types of music he plays on it before a Sept. 1 concert.

The steel pan’s history began thousands of miles away from Austin. The instrument originated in Trinidad, where French plantation owners landed in the 18th century, bringing African slaves with ...

But in 1963, when Kernahan was just 14 years old, his mother, like most parents at the time in Trinidad, strictly forbade his playing the pan. He wasn't even allowed to listen to pan music.

To my left, 129 more play just as furiously. In front of me, yet another steel-pan orchestra makes its own riot of sound as it competes with its rivals.

Working-class youths invented the steel drum in the 1930s by banging dents in the tops of discarded oil drums to create notes. Today, steelpan is Trinidad's de facto national instrument.

"We have—if you count just large steel bands—we have about 15." Pan's history began in the late 1930s, when American military bases in Trinidad needed oil and empty oil drums littered the streets.