http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/0,167924.htmlTT mourns the loss of pan pioneer Bertie Marshall
By JOAN RAMPERSAD and LEISELLE MARAJ Friday, October 19 2012
His musical innovations and legacy will leave many of his steelpan contemporaries with “Dus in Dey Face”. However pan icon and recipient of the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (ORTT), Bertram “Bertie” Marshall has passed away. He was 76.Marshall, who had been ailing for some time, died on Wednesday night.
His son, Claude, told Newsday yesterday his father died on the way to the Port-of-Spain General Hospital. He said he left his father’s apartment home at Harpe Place, Port-of-Spain, to give his aunt, Marjorie a drop home, when his father’s care-giver called to say Marshall was breathing erratically.
“I got back when they were taking him from his apartment into the ambulance, but by the time we got to the hospital, he had already died,” Claude explained.
President of the Pan Tuners Association, Fitzroy Henry, was one of the last persons to visit Marshall on Wednesday. “The condition Bertie was in when I visited him, I knew he was not going to last much longer. He was not speaking at all; he was already travelling,” he added.
Claude said his father was unable to walk for the last three months, after he fell on the way to the bathroom at his home one day. Since that fall he became incapacitated.
Despite this, he said, his father’s mind and wits remained sharp until the day of his death. Claude recently returned to Trinidad to care for his father. His sisters, Claudine and Gillian, live in the United States.
Marshall is known in the pan fraternity and through Trinidad and Tobago as a steelpan pioneer, tuner, arranger, musician and a steelpan inventor. He is credited with having introduced harmonic tuning of steelpan notes in 1956, as well as inventing the Double Tenor instrument. He was also the first person to amplify the sound of the steelpan. He developed the Quadrophonics, Six Pan and 12-note Bass together with Rudolph Charles of Desperadoes Steel Orchestra. Marshall has been building and tuning instruments for Desperadoes, since 1970.
Marshall was part of a project of the Caribbean Industrial Research Institute (CARIRI) in 1982 which investigated the possibilities of machine production of steelpans.
Among the many awards, Marshall received are the Chaconia Medal (Gold) in 1992, and the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (ORTT), presented by president George Maxwell Richards in 2008. He was one of the pannists immortalised by calypsonians, including David Rudder who mentioned him in his 1992 song, “Dus in Dey Face”.
Claude said however, Keith Smith’s description of his father, sums up his personality in one word. “Keith Smith was right when he said Bertie Marshall was Laventille’s first eccentric. I believe that is what he said in an article. My father loved his music though. The radio was on 24 hours a day. He was very welcoming, and you could sit and talk to him about anything,” he explained. Music was one of the bonding elements of his relationship with his father as he has a love for the art form, especially the genre of Jazz. Marshall and the late Keith Smith were close friends in pan and music.
Former Multiculturalism Minister Winston “Gypsy” Peters, Minister of the People Dr Glenn Ramadharsingh and former Minister in the Community Development Ministry and current Multiculturalism Minister Dr Lincoln Douglas, visited Marshall last June at his home and promised to assist the ailing panman. Marshall was not receiving several financial benefits owed to him, including old age pension. National Insurance grants and salaries were owed to him as a pan tuner in the Fine Tuning Programme at the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT). Claude said since then, nothing was done to assist his father. “We were trying to get his pension, but he did not get it. NIS had to sign off on a document before he received his pension from working at CARIRI. To do this, they needed to verify that he worked there, or CARIRI needed to say that they could not find a record of him working there, but they did not do this,” he said.
Claude added that he was contacted last week by a Government official who said they had a cheque for his father, worth $30,000 for being an icon of Trinidad and Tobago. “I told the person that we did not want media, like the last time, since it was embarrassing. They made my father out to be destitute. This is a misconception which needs to be cleared up. “We were taking care of him. He should have gotten what he was entitled to. Since that call, no one else contacted us about that cheque,” he said.
Claude said the funeral service for his father is tentatively carded for next Tuesday at the Trinity Cathedral, Port-of-Spain where his father was baptised and confirmed, and where he brought steelpan into a church to be played for the first time. Calls to Douglas and Peters remained unanswered yesterday.
