The Illustrated Story of Pan - Kim Johnson

​Hundreds of photos and pioneers’ verbatim accounts never before published, stories of adventure and discovery, of love and danger, have been threaded along the author’s narrative to produce this monumental epic of musicians and scientists, street fighters and politicians, schoolteachers and their students, promoters and activists, but mostly ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things.

It is the story of Trinidad All Stars and Renegades and Desperadoes and Phase II and Exodus and all the other big steelbands, but also the small bands, Boys Town, Boom Town and Stepyard, the extinct bands, the Tripoli, Bar 20 and Red Army, the “college boy” bands like Dixieland, Dixie Stars, Stromboli and Rogues Regiment, and of course the countless men and women, girls and boys, who created this marvel.

What readers have said:

“The book took me to places and times deeply embedded in my memory. It also carried me to a more complex understanding… It added another level of sophistication in our appreciation of the craft… The ancestors are jumping!”– Kamau, Odinga

“There is something transcendent about this collection… what jumps out is the enormous scale of its component parts.” – Mark Lyndersay, Journalist

“A masterpiece. Deny yourself a copy and remain culturally malnourished and impoverished.” – Monty Guy

“Stunning evidence of how an instrument, a movement, and a whole way of life developed.” – Stephen Stuempfle, Society for Ethnomusicology

“A beautiful and important book.” – Andy Narell, International Pan Virtuoso

“(It) will leave the reader in awe, wonder and deep reflection…vast in its scope and stunning in detail.” – Eugene Novotney, Director of Percussion Studies at Humboldt State University

“A thing of spectacular beauty, the crown jewel in a Carnival music lover’s catalogue.” – Shivanee Ramlochan, Poet and Literary Critic

“A magnificent work… social and cultural history at its best.” – Bridget Brereton, Historian, University of the West Indies