 Winston “Spree” Simon (1930-1976) Born at Rose Hill, East Dry River in 1930. Spree executed the best-remembered pan performance of the 1946 Carnival. In 1970, Spree's health began a rapid deterioration. A stroke reduced his involvement in pan to a minimum and he eventually succumbed on April 18, 1976. To the delight of the Broadway Carnival competition audience, which included then Governor Sir Bede Clifford and Lady Clifford, socialite Audrey Jeffers and calypsonian Lord Kitchener, Spree played Schubert's "Ave Maria", the hymn "God Save the King" and Kitchener's "Lai Fook Lee"; the 1946 Road March. Living in John John, Spree was virtually ringed by factories producing biscuits and other products that used drums. Discards from those industries gave him his first "kettle-drum" and it was an accident with this prototype that prodded him to create the 14-note pan.His kettle-drum was a rudimentary one-note instrument, used largely for percussive highlighting in what was essentially an elaborate rhythm section, euphemistically called a band. One night when the band was taking a jam through the district, he loaned his instrument to a fellow member. Upon retrieving the pan, Spree discovered it had been brutalised, much of its original convex playing surface had been beaten inward. It was in trying to repatriate the original shape to the pan (by beating it from inside with a big stone), he discovered different sounds coming from the various areas of the playing surface. By alternately using a piece of wood, he was able to vary tone. Spree produced a four-note pan from this experiment. The ban on Carnival occasioned by World War II (1939-1945) gave Spree ample opportunity to develop his work. By 1943, he improved his pan's capacity to nine clear notes on the convex surface and three years later astonished listeners with the 14-note version. Spree was therefore an automatic selection for the ground-breaking Trinidad All Stars Percussion Orchestra (TASPO), which took a full band on a tour of London and Paris in 1951, introducing the instrument to Europe. Spree led three steelbands in the area—Tropical Harmony, Fascinators and one named after a war-propaganda movie Destination Tokyo, now known as Carib Tokyo. In 1970, Spree's health began a rapid deterioration. A stroke reduced his involvement in pan to a minimum and he eventually succumbed on April 18, 1976.
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