Soaring scales of the silver basin.

• Author: Sankar, Celia
• Position: The surge in international popularity of Trinidad's music of the poor made on the steel drums

A warm and friendly sun smiles down on a white sand beach. Gentle, aquamarine waves roll in. Coconut trees softly sway. And an infectious, melodious beat--a high-pitched ping-pa-ting played on a silver basin--fills the air. You could only be in the Caribbean.

Hollywood directors have so often depended on this image to portray the Caribbean in their films that the scene has become cliche. Still, it is easy to understand why this picture conjures the region for so many people. That silver basin, called the steelpan, has come to symbolize an area from the Bahamas to Trinidad. Adopted throughout the Caribbean, where it is often found at ports of call to welcome visitors, the instrument was born some five decades ago on the island of Trinidad.

The exact date of its origin is uncertain, and no single inventor can be identified. The steelpan emerged out of the slums of Port of Spain, Trinidad's capital, around World War II and is acknowledged to be the only acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century.

The steelpan, or steeldrum as it is sometimes called, is exactly what its name suggests--a large metal container turned into an instrument. Clearly, even before the first save-the-earth campaign, the steelpan presented an impressive example of recycling--from the first biscuit tins, cement barrels, cooking oil tins, old buckets, and dustbins to today's oil drums.

On hearing the steelpan in Puerto Rico in the mid-1960s, Spanish cellist Pablo Casals remarked: "The steelpan music has definite possibilities for enhancing the symphony orchestra." Steelpan musicians have done more than that. They've put together hundreds of instruments to form steel orchestras, which have won over audiences from London's Royal Albert Celia Sankar is a journalist based in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and a previous contributor to Americas. Hall to New York's Carnegie Hall.

Musicians as diverse as jazz drummer Buddy Rich and rock guitarist Carlos Santana have used the steelpan in recordings. A steel band toured France with high-tech French musician Jean Michel Jarre; a Trinidad pannist toured the U.S. with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. And last April, Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti performed to the accompaniment of the Port of Spain-based Desperadoes steel orchestra at a concert in Barbados.

Apparently pleased, the opera star is arranging for the group to join him on a short tour in the future. Anthony McQuilken, the Desperadoes' manager, says that Pavarotti's management had been skeptical until they heard the group play. "They had no idea that pan could sound like a full orchestra."

Such pairings seemed inconceivable in the instrument's rough early days, when it was reviled by authorities and associated with bloody, and sometimes fatal, street fights. The steelpan emerged as part of the rebellion of the underclass against oppression. In colonial Trinidad, British authorities outlawed the use of African drums, fearing they would be used to rally slaves to revolt. The slaves' descendants, therefore, developed alternative instruments to accompany their ancient religious ceremonies and their festivities in the pre-Lenten Carnival.

The first was the tamboo bamboo. This was a length of bamboo that was played by beating it with a stick in one hand and pounding it on the ground with the other. For Carnival, bands of tamboo bamboo players roamed the streets providing a rhythmic clatter for revelers to dance to.

By 1937 authorities banned these instruments too. One of their complaints was that the pounding damaged roads. However, it was not only asphalt that got bruised when the heavy lengths of bamboo came crashing down on the ground. Many a tamboo bamboo player limped home with smashed toes. These difficulties led musicians to innovate even further.

They salvaged the large tins used to...