ANAHEIM : Steel Drums Beat All for Being Happy

To misquote comedian Steve Martin, you can’t play a sad song on the steel drums.

Martin was actually talking about banjos when he observed that some musical instruments always sound happy, but he could have been talking about “the pans,” as the converted 55-gallon oil drums are called in their native Trinidad.

“Steel drum music immediately brings a smile to everyone’s face,” said Michael Carney, director of Cal State Long Beach’s steel drum orchestra. “There is something universal about the sound of a steel drum that is very uplifting.”

Carney’s group will perform at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the Anaheim Children’s Festival at Koll Anaheim Center in the 200 block of South Anaheim Boulevard, along with the Cal State Humboldt steel band.

The combined 50-member steel drum band will be the largest ever to perform on the West Coast, Carney said. After the performance, children will be allowed to play some drums.

The free festival, to run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., will also feature two performances by a symphony orchestra, sidewalk chalk artists, mural painting, jewelry making and storytelling.

It is sponsored by the Leo Freedman Foundation, the Anaheim Arts Council and the Anaheim Museum.

Carney, a Fountain Valley resident and professor of music at Cal State Long Beach, said that steel drums came into being as musical instruments just 55 years ago.

That’s when Trinidadian street musicians were forced to improvise a replacement for the islanders’ traditional bamboo rhythm sticks, which the government banned because of a bamboo shortage and because some rival musicians were using them to beat each other.

The steel drums were popularized throughout the Caribbean when Ellie Mannette won a musical competition in the mid-1940s.

That led to his performance of “Ava Maria” on a Trinidadian radio broadcast that was heard throughout the region.

“The first time people heard (steel drum music), it became very popular,” Carney said.

By the 1950s and 1960s, steel drums had swept the Caribbean, and by the late 1960s, performers were on the streets of New York City, which is where Carney first heard a man playing the pans in Greenwich Village.

He began the steel drum band, which performs about six times a year, in 1986.

He said that despite the drums’ rugged appearance, they are the most delicate of instruments.

They are manufactured by craftsmen who use tiny mallets to hone the drums’ concave bottoms so that each produces a range of notes.

A player who strikes a drum too hard will knock it out of tune, Carney said, and a drum cannot be placed in direct sunlight because the heat will cause the metal to expand and ruin the sound.

The drums come in various sizes, giving a steel orchestra a range from bass through soprano.

“Playing the steel drums requires good rhythm and a soft sense of touch,” Carney said.