Composer, arranger and steel PAN virtuoso Len “Boogsie” Sharpe is one of the headliners in an all-star band that will pay tribute in jazz to great music from the Caribbean in the CIBC FirstCaribbean Sugar Isle Jazz Festival.
It comes off at The Plantation Theatre on June 2 at 8 p.m.
Boogsie started playing the steel pan at age four. By the time he was a teenager, he had mastered all the instruments and different styles of the pan family, and by the early 1970s he had become renowned as a composer and arranger in both the classical and calypso genres.
From then to the present he has composed and arranged music for Phase II Pan Groove Steel Orchestra, the band that he co-founded in 1972. Boogsie has worked with numerous other pan orchestras in Trinidad, the Caribbean, the United States and England.
His arrangements and compositions span a variety of musical genres, including jazz.
Boogsie created history in 1987 when his band Phase II Pan Groove became the first steel band to win Trinidad’s Panorama title playing its own composition, This Feeling Nice.
That year the composition earned victories in all the pan categories.
The following year, Boogsie created a record that may never be broken as he captured seven titles with the composition Woman is Boss. Sharpe has led Phase II Pan Groove to five Trinidad national titles in the Panorama competition. Additionally, Boogsie worked with Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra to win the first World Steel Band Festival in 2000, creating history by becoming the first composer with an “original” composition to capture a classical steel band festival title.
His versatility has taken him to workshops and recording studios with jazz greats Wynton Marsalis, Randy Weston, Gary Burton, Monty Alexander and virtually all the calypso icons in the Caribbean. (PR)
