Steel drummer Othello Molineaux has helped his instrument go global since the Trinidad native moved to Miami in 1971. The 72-year-old introduced the tuned drums — often referred to as “steel pans,” and played with mallets that strike different areas to produce specific musical notes — to much of the world through international touring with the late jazz bass giant Jaco Pastorius.
Molineaux worked closely with Pastorius from the bassist’s self-titled, Grammy-nominated 1976 debut solo album up until his 1987 death at the hands of a Wilton Manors nightclub bouncer, and vividly remembers his first impression.
“I went to see Ira Sullivan at a club called the Lion’s Share in North Miami in the early ‘70s,” he says. “Jaco was with him, and it was just incredible! But being new to the United States, I actually figured that most bass players here could play like that, which certainly proved not to be the case. And when he heard me play, the admiration was mutual.”
Pastorius also employed Molineaux on his sophomore 1981 studio release Word of Mouth and the 1983 live-in-Japan disc Invitation. The bassist even offered up the tracks from the steel drummer’s Holiday for Pans album, which Pastorius played on and produced, as the second recording on his own Warner Bros. label contract.
“We started working on ‘Holiday for Pans’ around 1978,” Molineaux says. “Jaco brought the Warner Bros. people out to see me play with my band, and got permission to produce an album for me. But when he tried to talk them into making it the second album on his contract, they refused, because it was my record even though he was playing on it. After he died, a friend of Jaco’s sold the unfinished tapes to a Japanese producer, and a lot of the parts got re-recorded by other musicians. Even some of his bass lines, and it got released over there under his name, which was a horrible thing to do to his legacy.”
And to Molineaux’s, although it didn’t appear to stunt his influence. Walk through a downtown South Florida area from Lake Worth to Miami Beach on a seasonal weekend and try not to hear a steel drummer now. Just don’t expect those musicians to sound like the godfather of his country’s national instrument.
“There are a lot of very good players around here now,” Molineaux says, “but most of them are doing the tourist thing.”
You’ll get no campy renditions of Yellow Bird by Molineaux, who got inducted with the Sunshine Jazz Organization of Florida’s inaugural Jazz Hall of Fame class in 2010. He grew up in a musical household where his sister sang, his mother was a piano teacher and his father a violinist.
“I don’t think he was very good, though,” Molineaux says, “because I grew to hate the sound of that instrument.”
A pianist from an early age, Molineaux started playing steel pans at 11. He continued his piano studies at Fatima College and Queen’s Royal College, and actually moved to the island of St. Thomas in 1967 to work as a pianist at the Virgin Islands Hilton. The studies, and experience, helped to shape his steel drum style.
“Oh, I’d say so,” he says. “It’s a chromatic instrument, and the piano training helped me introduce melody to what was considered a rhythmic percussion instrument.”
Molineaux started reinforcing that theory upon his arrival in the U.S. by teaching master forums at the University of Miami, and he now teaches a handful of private students. In 1993, he released both his debut educational book Beginning Steel Drum (Warner Bros.) and a stellar debut CD, It’s About Time, on his Big World label. He’s now working on sequels to both.
“The first book was for playing the lead pan,” he says, “and the second book will focus on playing two pans. I’m also in pre-production on my second CD, which will be called ‘Wish You Were Here.’ Toots Thielemans plays harmonica on it, and I’ve orchestrated and multi-tracked six different sets of steel pans. It was the vision Jaco had for Holiday for Pans, and I’m hoping for a November release.”
Pop acts that include the group Chicago and former New York Dolls vocalist David Johansen have also employed Molineaux’s pans on their recordings. Yet many of his steel drum credits have been on releases by celebrated jazz pianists like Eliane Elias, Ahmad Jamal and Monty Alexander, and he’s also a member of the quartet led by another gifted bassist, Clearwater-based Jeff Berlin.
“I just did a run at the Blue Note in New York with Monty,” Molineaux says, “which was wonderful. And I toured Europe earlier this year with Jeff, who’s a terrific bass player and has a great band with Richard Drexler on piano and acoustic bass and Danny Gottlieb on drums.”
Molineaux has also worked extensively with another South Florida-based Pastorius pal, guitarist Randy Bernsen. The two are now part of the reverent Jaco Pastorius Big Band. Led by conductor Peter Graves, the ensemble has recruited guest stars on bass (including Victor Bailey, Jimmy Haslip, Richard Bona, Oteil Burbridge, Victor Wooten, Christian McBride and Will Lee) for the CDs Word of Mouth Revisited (2003) and The Word Is Out! (2006). A forthcoming third release will include both studio tracks and live cuts from a Japanese tour.
The steel drummer’s own quartet (with pianist Silvano Monasterios, bassist Jonathan Dadurka and drummer Rodolfo Zuniga) plays once a month at Blue Jean Blues in Fort Lauderdale (with ace house drummer Danny Burger subbing for Zuniga), and it has a July 20 Jazz On the Palm date at Centennial Square in West Palm Beach.
For his debut performance at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach this Saturday, Molineaux promises some standards, some It’s About Time material, and a couple of premieres.
“We’ll do one tune from ‘Wish You Were Here,’” he say. “Maybe even two.”
Somewhere, Jaco will be smiling.
See Othello Molineaux at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 14, at the Arts Garage, 180 NE First St., Delray Beach ($20-$35, 561-450-6357).