Date posted: 3-23-01

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NIU Steel Band creates unique sound

By Jeff Goluszka

DeKalb News Service

DEKALB -- Finishing second in the United States is a great accomplishment, but it's just one of the many for NIU's Steel Band.

The band, made up of 34 NIU students and led by two faculty members, finished behind only a Brooklyn band at October's World Steel Band Festival, held in Trinidad and Tobago.

It will give its annual NIU performance at 3 p.m. April 29 in the Music Building's Concert Hall. The band also will give a number of performances at area schools in the coming months.

Steel band music was developed in Trinidad hundreds of years ago, and currently includes 55-gallon barrels that are hand-made into drums.

The group is co-directed by Cliff Alexis, named one of 12 worldwide "Legends of Pan" (another name for the steel drum practice) by the Trinidad and Tobago Folk Arts Institute of New York.

"He is amazing," said G. Allan O'Connor, co-director of the band and former associate dean of the School of Music. "He builds the instruments and maintains them, he keeps them in tune and he writes music."

O'Connor began the NIU Steel Band in 1973 after six years of working toward it. After developing a love for experimental music while a graduate student at the University of Illinois in 1967, he began to put his idea into motion.

"In 1968 I became the head of the percussion program. I wanted to start a steel band, but it took me five years to find the instruments," O'Connor said. "We got it started in 1973 and it became a part of the percussion program."

The Steel Band produces a variety of music, given that all of the instruments are steel drums.

"There are many types of music," Alexis said. "… it more or less deals with calypso stuff, R&B, reggae and Allan works with a lot of the classical stuff. The Steel Band sounds as any other band in Trinidad."

The band is put together in a similar manner of traditional group bands. Basically, it's an array of different steel drums.

"There's a drum set for rhythm accompaniment, conga drums, they have different names," O'Connor said. "We score music the same way as anyone else would score other music."

For more information on the band, call O'Connor at 753-8049.

Source list:
* (G. Allan O'Connor, co-director of steel band, 753-8049)
* (Cliff Alexis, co-director of steel band, 753-8030)