Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band on Vinyl: Where to Start with the Hamburg Steel Pan Crew

Steel pan arrived in Hamburg by way of a backpacking trip. Bjorn Wagner was travelling up through South America to Trinidad and Tobago when he heard a full pan orchestra playing in the open air, and by his own account he was hooked on that groove for good. He stayed a few months, learned the instrument from local players, and had a pan built for him out of an oil barrel by the Trinidadian maker Louis C. Smith.

The band has been running since 2007, founded out of the Hamburg funk outfit The Mighty Mocambos, with Wagner as bandleader. The formula has never needed to change: take a tune everybody knows, hand the melody to the steel pans, and put a hard funk rhythm section underneath it. The first release was a self-pressed 45 covering two tunes by The Meters. Then came a steel pan reading of 50 Cent's P.I.M.P. that went around DJ and collector circles so widely that plenty of listeners assumed they were hearing the sample rather than the cover. That single is how Wagner met Danny Akalepse of Big Crown Records, and every full-length since has come out on the label.

The records are made the hard way, at Mocambo Studios in Hamburg, cut to analog 8 track tape with the rhythm section playing live in one room and the pans and horns laid over the top. Wagner has described the method as a mix of chaos and control, which is about right: the pans ring and bend in a way no sampler reproduces. If you have heard the band without knowing it, blame the screen. Their PIMP cover is a plot device in the 2023 film Anatomy of a Fall, and Laventille Road March turns up in the fifth season of Better Call Saul. GOOD TASTE Records carries all four studio albums plus the vault collection, the complete album run, and a deep stack of the 45s besides.

Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band - 55

The debut landed on Big Crown on 18 March 2016 and is still the best argument for the project. 55 gathers the early singles and the sessions around them: P.I.M.P. in both the vocal-free original and a dubbed out version, Dennis Coffey's Scorpio, John Holt's Police In Helicopter rolled out into smoky reggae, Faith Evans's Love Like This, and Cat Stevens's Was Dog A Doughnut. The originals hold their own against the covers, with Beetham Highway Ride, Port Of Spain Hustle and Laventille Road March naming the places the instrument came from.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 2016 Big Crown debut, recorded to analog 8 track tape at Mocambo Studios
• Seventeen tracks, including both the P.I.M.P. reading and its dub version
• The record that put steel pan back into DJ crates, and still the right entry point

Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band - The Serpent's Mouth

Big Crown put out the second album on 14 September 2018, and the title is geography: the Serpent's Mouth is the eight mile strait between Trinidad and the Venezuelan coast. The Serpent's Mouth reaches wider than the debut did. Amerie's 1 Thing, the Jackson 5's Great To Be Here, Gang Starr's All For The Cash and Mary J. Blige's I Love You sit next to the Crockett Theme from Miami Vice, while Xxplosive and Burn pay respects to Dr. Dre and Mobb Deep. Wagner wrote the closing title track with Bernhard Hummer as what he called an instrumental fantasy about pirates and smugglers.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 2018 Big Crown follow-up, fourteen tracks deep
• Covers that run from Amerie and Mary J. Blige to the Miami Vice theme
• Originals named for the straits and bays around Trinidad, including the title track

Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band - Expansions

The third album came out on Big Crown in 2021, and the title is a fair description of the brief. Expansions widens the source material again, pulling in Jay-Z, Grace Jones and Erykah Badu's The Healer, and it fills out the arrangements behind the pans with more horn and more keys. Reviewers at the time kept reaching for El Michels Affair as the comparison, which gets at the important thing about this band: nobody involved is playing it for laughs. This is the Indie Exclusive emerald pressing.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 2021 Big Crown album, on Indie Exclusive emerald vinyl
• Source material stretching from Jay-Z and Grace Jones to Erykah Badu
• The fullest band arrangements in the catalog, with horns and keys behind the pans

Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band - BRSB

The fourth album arrived on Big Crown on 8 March 2024 and it is the one that leans hardest on the West Coast. BRSB works through How We Do, Nuthin' But A G Thang and 2Pac's Got My Mind Made Up, then swerves into Drake's Hotline Bling with a melodica on the lead, Mura Masa and A$AP Rocky's Love$ick with the trumpets carrying it, and a slow hypnotic reading of the Stranger Things theme. Four originals hold the middle, and Hazy Memories layers pan against Moog, mini piano and glockenspiel.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• The 2024 Big Crown album, on yellow vinyl
• West Coast hip-hop reworked on pan, plus Drake, Claudja Barry and Stranger Things
• Four band originals, including the Moog and glockenspiel of Hazy Memories

Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band - Big Crown Vaults Vol. 4

Big Crown handed the band the fourth volume of its vaults series on 24 April 2025, and the sessions it empties span 2008 to 2023. Big Crown Vaults Vol. 4 is the odds and ends record, which in this catalog means Bob James's Nautilus, Khruangbin's Maria Tambien and the Jackson 5's Great To Be Here, a dub version of PIMP, and Let's Grow, the B side of the very first PIMP pressing. Kaiso Noir is the one original. For anyone who came in through the singles, this collects the loose ends in one place.

Why it's worth purchasing:

• Thirteen vault tracks recorded between 2008 and 2023, out April 2025
• Steel pan readings of Bob James, Khruangbin and the Jackson 5
• On Ocean Blue Smoke colored vinyl, and the easiest way to hear the rarities

Where else to look

This band has always lived on 45s, and we carry a long run of them: PIMP b/w Police In Helicopter, Love Like This b/w Was Dog A Doughnut and Great To Be Here b/w All For Tha Cash, plus How We Do b/w Nuthin But a G Thang, Hotline Bling b/w Murkit Gem, and My Jamaican Dub b/w The Healer. For label context, the BCR10: Ten Years of Big Crown Records double LP maps the whole roster, and our El Michels Affair guide covers the labelmate building the same idea out of horns and tape.

If You Like Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band

• El Michels Affair: the Big Crown labelmate doing the same trick with horns and tape instead of pans, starting with the Wu-Tang rebuilds.
• The Budos Band: heavier, hornier and more Afro-funk, from the same corner of the New York soul world.
• Cymande: the 1970s London group whose grooves have been sampled raw for fifty years, and the ancestor of this whole approach.
• The Meters: the New Orleans band Bacao covered on their very first 45, and the tightest rhythm section in funk.
• The Pro-Teens: an Australian crew turning rap catalogs into live instrumentals, closest cousins to what Bacao does.

Dig through the Funk / Soul / Disco bin or the Records For DJs shelf, where this band has earned permanent residence. Our essential funk guide covers the older records these grooves are built on. To see every pressing in one place, browse the Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band collection.