Pan Player, Arranger
Call him a playing captain, for this Junior Pouchet certainly was. He could play every instrument, and while he captained the original Silver Stars, used this remarkable versatility to demonstrate to his players exactly how he wanted a passage played. The fact that pan-players often cannot read music was no hindrance to Junior Pouchet.
Junior Pouchet was never one to allow any hindrance where his passion, steelband music, was concerned. He was one of a group of mainly St Marys and Queens Royal college students who formed the panside called Silver Stars back in the mid-1950s; meeting the same parental resistance, Curtis Pierre and his Dixielanders had met five or six years earlier. Nothing daunted, the young people persevered. Silvers Stars grew; in numbers and musicianship. Another steelband of the light-skinned middle class had come to stay. And Junior Pouchet - almost put out of college once for his involvement with the band - stayed on too, becoming both pan virtuoso and arranger of note; and eventually the band's captain.
To Junior Pouchet, steelband players are a very special breed. He would often say "You can replace a tenor pan but not a tenor man". It was his answer to the violence that plagued the steelband movement up until the early 1960's; his way of saying that violence was really a "waste".
Today, Pouchet and his panside are fulfilling what is probably the longest-running steelband contract, at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Meanwhile, back home in Trinidad, Silver Stars has re-emerged at his prompting. It was in 1987 that Junior Pouchet called on Michael Figaro, Lloyd Payne, Sonny Ottley and his brother Edwin Pouchet, to revitalise the old Silver Stars. Under its present-day captain, Edwin Pouchet, and with logistic and other support from a pair of its staunchest allies - erstwhile player and captain Niky Inniss and former 1960's tenor pannist, Randolph Lee Pack - Silver Stars, with a complement of about twenty-five players, is living up to its old tradition of playing sweet music all year round.
Like Curtis Pierre before him, Junior Pouchet's bourgeois status would have classed him a virtual infiltrator of the steelband movement, were it not for something else they shared: the kind of unwavering dedication to pan and panmen that not only brought them a measure of personal gratification, and even success, but enabled them to make a solid and positive contribution to the steelband movement over many years. There isn't a steelband enthusiast who would deny that both these outstanding leaders - Curtis Pierre and Junior Pouchet - have paid their dues.
© 1995 Dr Felix Blake: Pg 212 & 213; THE TRINIDAD & TOBAGO STEEL PAN: History and Evolution[Presented without permission; permission being sought.]
[This reference is a matter of research for these pages]
