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Pomegranate Film Studios is releasing the latest in their series Iconography, Jit Samaroo – a full length documentary on the life and music of steelpan great Jit Samaroo (1950-2016), composer, arranger, bandleader and steelpan legend.
The premiere showing of the film, still a work in progress, will be held at Queen’s Hall on August 21 at 7 pm and will feature a performance by Supernovas Steel Orchestra featuring several of Samaroo’s winning Panorama arrangements.
This is the third in Pomegranate Studios’ ongoing Iconography series that celebrate the careers of iconic Trinidad and Tobago musicians. The prior two were on Roy Cape and Mungal Patasar. The Iconography series is a labour of love for the team at Pomegranate, a film studio also involved in photography, music videos, music production, animation and more. For several years, they ran the web series The Lightbox showcasing a wide range of young local artists in many musical genres. Now they are busy with a wide range of projects.
[caption id="attachment_1172733" align="alignnone" width="819"] Members of Pomegranate Film Studios, Aviel Scanterbury, left, Teneka Mohammed and Mikhail Gibbings Photo courtesy Pomegranate Film Studios. -[/caption]
While there are dozens of key figures in the history of steelpan in TT, few accomplished as much as Samaroo but so little has been detailed about his long and complex career. He learned to play pan and then got his family to play it too. The story of the Samaroo kids who were soon be called the Samaroo Jets started with a gig at UWI in August 1967 but soon they were playing everywhere in Trinidad from house parties to cruise boats, in churches, schools, local radio and television, endless live appearances. Starting in January of 1970, they had a regular gig on Sunday afternoons poolside at the Hilton Hotel. In November 1972, they were sponsored by Pan Am Airlines and that led to concerts all over the world.
Samaroo Jets developed a very eclectic repertoire, recording a number of albums including ones for exercise workouts, for meditation and a collection of Bollywood classics. Samaroo soon was sought out also to arrange for other steelbands. He would go on to become the main arranger for Renegades and his arrangements would be so spectacular that Renegades won Panorama nine times with him between 1982-1997, arranging primarily calypso classics by Sparrow and Lord Kitchener.
The director for Iconography: Jit Samaroo, Mikhail Gibbings set forth the core team who work together in various roles for different projects.
[caption id="attachment_1172735" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Mikhail Gibbings, left, and Aviel Scanterbury at work on the Iconography series. Photo courtesy Pomegranate Film Studios.  -[/caption]
"Pomegranate Studios is a collective of the three of us, me, Teneka Mohammed and Aviel Scanterbury We started this company in 2019 and we are a multidisciplinary group of younger people who got together to try to create films and music that has to do with the culture of Trinidad and Tobago very specifically."
Gibbings who is both a musician and filmmaker went to film school at UWI. Doing film documentaries on TT musical luminaries has been a driving force for him even before Pomegranate was formed. While still a student at UWI, he created The Cuatro Man, a documentary which played at both the 2015 TT Film Festival and the 2016 St Lucia Arts Festival and is available for free viewing on Facebook. Making the chapters of Iconography is for him the best thing that Pomegranate does.
Scanterbury who got his master’s in jazz music at George Mason University in Virginia under pan jazz master Victor Provost is the pannist on the team. He has been a member and arranger for a number of steelbands, including Arima Angel Harps Steel Orchestra, Birdsong and Tunapuna Tipica Steel Orchestra. He was the one who pushed the idea for a documentary on Samaroo, who had a key role in the evolution of pan. For Gibbings, it was in this documentary that Scanterbury really stood out showcasing his skills as an interviewer of subject after subject.
Mohammed is both a visual artist and filmmaker but for this project she is the producer and was in the key role of archivist and it was Mohammed's skills as archivist that led to uncover so many things. She was the one going to visit and scan things from various family members – photos, old newspaper clippings and more and to search for other things from many sources. Amrit Samaroo (Jit's son) put them on to his family and his pan collaborators. Mohammed found the family so open to helping on the project.
“His wife Balmatie Samaroo had saved many family photos. Jit’s youngest brother Sonalal Samaroo (AKA “Killer”) had recordings of Samaroo Jets live touring records especially from a trip of Japan. When we were looking into Jit’s work with Renegades and it was exciting to get an interview with Rupert Mader who was in Renegades when Jit Samaroo started arranging," Mohammed said.
[caption id="attachment_1172736" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Samaroo Jets. Photo courtesy Pomegranate Film Studios. -[/caption]
From the start, they knew that this would be a different and a more challenging than their first two Iconography projects. With both of those, the subjects were alive when the films were made though Cape has since passed away and in each the subjects were narrating their own life story. This time, they knew things were going to be very different. Samaroo had been dead for almost a decade and when alive he was a shy person who was rarely interviewed and rarely said very much. The secret to doing this documentary meant the support of the extended Samaroo family.
For Amrit, things came together quickly. “It started with a phone call from Gibbings and then a meeting with Aviel Scanterbury, Aviel and I used to work together at the National Steel Symphony Orchestra.”
That bond, that connection was a basis for the trust and support as the team explained what they proposed to Amrit and his family. Soon family member after family member, was being interviewed, and helping to find treasured family heirlooms, rare photos and documents.
At the Queen’s Hall event, Supernovas will be doing an opening performance before the film is shown. Amrit noted, “We'll be presenting our repertoire. It has some memorable pieces that Jit arranged for Samaroo Jets, like Portrait of Trinidad and some of the old Sparrow and Kitchener hits that he was known for in his time at Renegades. We will be the build-up to the premiere, setting the mood and getting the crowd ready for this wonderful premiere.”
[caption id="attachment_1172737" align="alignnone" width="683"] Amrit Samaroo says the band Supernovas will be performing some memorable pieces that Jit arranged for Samaroo Jets at the opening of the film. -[/caption]
As with all their productions, Pomegranate wants to thank their sponsors for this film, National Gas Company (NGC) and First Citizens. Indeed, NGC has been major sponsors for the entire Iconography series and for The Light Box series. Gibbings notes that though they never had a meeting with the late NGC president Mark Loquan, they have learned that he personally was a force behind the NGC support for their Iconography projects and that he had a special interest in Jit.
Loquan had a long relationship with the Samaroo family from working with Jit Samaroo on his seminal CD set Original Notes (2013), a Hydrofit sponsored project that offered some of Jit’s greatest compositions on one CD and the scores for them on the other so that his complex arrangements could continue to be performed all over the world. Loquan also had a close relationship with Amrit and Supernovas for many years as one of his favourite bands and regularly during the Carnival season he used to take visiting oil and gas industry executives up to Surrey Village to hear the band in their magical home setting.
On August 21 at Queen’s Hall, the story of Jit Samaroo’s life and the music he made will be celebrated in a way it has never been before.
 
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