Whither the scholarly music monograph? It faces pressure to be all things to all people: proof of its author’s academic bona fides; a reflection of nearly obsessive factual and editing details; an “accessible” introduction to a general topic; a miracle of modularity that should work as well in the whole as in individual chapters; a largely nonprofit venture reliant on subventions, generous peer reviewers, publishers’ stretched resources, and contracted copyeditors, typesetters, designers, indexers, and printers; a resource that asks readers for many hours of investment, while recognizing that most just want the big point; and a reference for future study.
These kinds of thoughts occurred to me while reading Steelpan Ambassadors, Andrew R. Martin’s thorough and able history of the US Navy Steel Band (1957-99). Although Martin clearly knows the existing literature on pan, his project points primarily to documenting an interesting mid-twentieth-century ensemble at the meeting point of US military goodwill efforts and the international popularization of steel pan music. And it is a story told well, if idiosyncratically. Some books seek to contribute to larger scholarly discourses about music in America, rethinking scholarly views in the process. Martin’s book, in contrast, adds rather than reframes—beginning with “Did you know?” and filling in from there.
In an introduction and eight detailed chapters, Martin recounts the US Navy Steel Band’s history: its founding (ch. 1), Pete Seeger’s early role as a consultant (ch. 2), the band’s appearances on television (ch. 3), recordings and film (ch. 4), its October 1960 tour of South America (ch. 5), its 1973 move from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New Orleans (ch. 6), its subsequent musical developments (ch. 7), and its final years and broader impact (ch. 8).
Although the band’s entire “life” receives coverage, Martin devotes more than half of the book to the ensemble’s first three years (1957-60). This active time overlapped with the military’s anticommunist efforts in Europe and South America, the development of steel pan music beyond Trinidad, and larger liberation movements blooming across the Caribbean and beyond. Yet the greatest force behind this choice appears to be the band’s founder, Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, a gregarious, Barnum-like character whose colorful enthusiasm and interest in steel pan at his San Juan post unambiguously earns him the hero’s role. Martin’s generous use of Gallery’s archive (at the US Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library) not only places the Admiral at the center of the action, but also leavens his account substantially: turning “Admiral Gallery” into a larger-than-life impresario who plays baseball with his sailors at one moment, and pitches a screenplay about the steel band to a Hollywood agent in another.
Beyond Gallery, Steel Pan Ambassadors can present the feel of a military history, with Martin piecing together and smoothing out every detail of the US Navy Steel Band’s story, seemingly for the very sake of detail. At times the wide-ranging discussions appears to link implicitly into a number of scholarly lacunae, including the rise of steel pan music into the middle class; its relationship with the popularization of calypso (which typically used at most only one steel pan); efforts to improve the technologies behind instrument making, tuning, and full band recording; and the spread of steel band ensembles across the United States. Martin also offers interesting insights into both steel band and American diplomatic history. But the detail can also lead to a number of distracting “side quests.” Readers will find pages chronicling minutiae of steel pan recording techniques and acoustics; a history of the “exotica” musical genre; and two-pages of intimate detail on the planes that carried the group in the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, Martin’s account of the US Navy Steel Band’s 1960 South America tour discusses every available concert’s setup, production, and reception. These side quests include lively anecdotes—who knew that the cargo bay of the Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft could be a good site for playing frisbee?—keeping the account readable for a general audience. Yet Martin’s drive to present as complete a story as possible sometimes seems to divert from the main point.
The immense detail also stifles the book’s ability to connect with broader scholarly conversations. Comparing the US Navy Steel Band’s 1960 tour to previous efforts at musical diplomacy in Latin America (as Carol Hess describes in her 2013 book Representing the Good Neighbor), or contemporaneous goodwill jazz tours through Africa, as Ingrid Monson describes in Freedom Sounds (2010), would have expanded the book’s reach. Similarly, a comparison with the earlier career of US Navy bandleader Alton Augustus Adams, Sr., across the way in St. Thomas, could have provided a greater context for Gallery’s work. While there are only so many angles a book-length study can take on, such engagement could have increased scholarly interest beyond the topic itself and offered greater nuance and breadth to the complex themes of musical diplomacy and appropriation that he weaves through his text. Ultimately, Steelpan Ambassadors works best as a largely self-contained “forgotten history,” and a worthy tribute to the dozens of former band members that Martin interviewed for the project. Martin makes a few compulsory scholarly connections, including a nod to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s discussions of heritage. But he largely lets his material do the talking. More problematic are the editorial lapses. For me as a through-reader, the book could have been better organized, introduced its people and topics with greater care for sequence and continuity, repeated itself less, had a better apparatus for citing interviews, contained fewer typos, included more illustrations (especially in Martin’s discussion of LP album covers), and appended a better index (which, surprisingly, omits Admiral Gallery among many other terms). Martin, in other words, could have polished his text further and made his account more efficient. But perhaps “good enough” is acceptable here, since the repetitions actually appear to enhance the experience for those who read only isolated chapters, and the painstaking work of recalibrating the book must be measured against what potential readers would get out of it. Martin provides all of the information an enthusiast would want. The reader only need follow this fascinating steel band like a character in a novel, forgiving the stylistic bumps in the road and learning a unique and interesting story in the process.
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[Review length: 1035 words • Review posted on November 7, 2019]