Ray Holman

Ray Holman began taking part in metal drums professionally in 13, with Ellie Mannette’s Invaders. He created skill beneath the casual tutelage from the famous skillet tuner, though that they had small trained in theory. As an adolescent, he became referred to as a virtuoso single player, getting the youngest person ever to earn the single division from the “table tennis” (an early on name for the tenor skillet) competition in 1960 (Liam Teague offers just recently damaged this record). He traveled from group to group for a while, becoming a member of Starlift, Destination Tokyo, Pandemonium, Exodus, the Hummingbirds, and Phase II Skillet Groove. During this time period, he obtained a reputation among the five main steel music group arrangers (with Len “Boogsie” Clear, amongst others), as he frequently led organizations to triumph in the Trinidadian nationwide Panorama contests, with plans for rings numbering in a nearby of 120 performers. He also obtained a status for challenging the machine to some extent by departing from the original Calypso music for the contests and composing his own unique music. He also sometimes made agreements from European traditional music, much towards the shock of steel music group traditionalists. Because of this, he is becoming perhaps one of the most reputed and popular music artists in the metal band type, both being a single player so that as an arranger. In 1993, he was honored the Hummingbird Metallic Medal of Merit by the federal government of Trinidad and Tobago for his efforts to the tradition of the country.