There’s island music in the air in Blue Hill this summer, the kind of island music that seems more at home among palm trees than spruces.

Since 1974, the Blue Hill peninsula has been Maine’s center for steel pan music. There are at least five active steel pan groups on the Downeast coast, and more springing up each year. This pine-state pan revolution can be traced to one man, pan maker and seafarer Carl Chase of Brooksville.

Chase said his lifelong steel pan love affair started with a chance encounter with the music in high school.

“I just sort of…stumbled across a record,” Chase said.

While he loved what he heard, pan didn’t become Chase’s calling until he saw it performed live in the Virgin Islands. The energy both performers and crowd brought to pan concerts made quite an impression on him. As soon as he went home, he began to experiment with making his own pans.

“I just floundered along and made some very crude instruments, but it was good enough to start a band,” he said.

Chase and friends formed a group called Atlantic Clarion and began to jam at his boathouse in Brooksville. Over time, they began to get invited to a party here, a wedding there. Thirty-two years later, the band is still playing a full schedule of gigs.

But the peninsula pan explosion didn’t really take off until Chase traveled to pan’s birthplace, Trinidad, in the late 1980s. Chase arrived in the island country in time for the high point of pan music worldwide, the annual carnival competition. “The annual carnival competition is like the World Series,” he said.

But Chase was more taken by the informal street jam sessions than the professional competitions. Once back in the states, he put an ad in the paper asking if anyone would like to form a community steel drum band Downeast.

“A whole bunch of people showed up,” he said.

That whole bunch of people became Flash in the Pans, a pan band that still performs free community concerts up and down the peninsula all summer long.

“There is something infectious and irresistible to the happy calypso beat of pan music, Chase said. “Even pan players can’t help but dance when they play — you can’t play without getting your whole body involved.”

Flash concerts are something to see. First, a few children begin to dance out in front of the band. Then, as the sun begins to set, a mob of teenagers descends to shake their limbs to the music. Soon, the dance area is packed, and by the time Flash’s inevitable encore number is played, everyone in the crowd raises their hands to the beat.

Margery Zweizig, who splits time between California and Maine, has been coming to Flash pan concerts for ten years. She said her two children wouldn’t let her miss a concert.

“My kids adore them,” she said.

Sue Walsh, executive director of the Blue Hill Chamber of Commerce, says the pan craze is a big tourist draw.

“It certainly helps make the Blue Hill peninsula a little more special,” Walsh said. “Their schedule is one of the more popular pieces of literature in our office.”

Since Flash’s formation, Chase, his son Nigel, and Flash member Kate Morse have expanded pan’s reach into the local school systems. There are now pan groups for both high schoolers and grade schoolers in Blue Hill and Bucksport through Nigel’s organization, the Pan Institute.

Flash and high school pan members have also gone to an international pan festival in Boston and Montreal for the last six years. For the first time this year, they took first prize and won three thousand dollars.

Not bad for one man with an itch to play pan music. But Chase said in the coming years, he plans to step away from a leadership role in the Downeast pan movement. While he still loves pan music, he says he just doesn’t have the energy for it all anymore.

“It just takes a lot of creative juice and a lot of energy,” Chase said.

But that doesn’t mean the Chase name won’t be synonymous with great pan music in the Downeast.

“I want to turn it over to Nigel,” Chase said. “He’s better at it than I am, anyway.”

If you want to catch Chase and Flash in the Pans in action this summer, you can see them at the Tidal Falls Reserve in Hancock Aug. 7; the Blue Hill Town Park Aug. 14 and 21, and the Island Community Center in Stonington, Aug. 28th. Concerts generally start around 7:30. If you go, you might want to bring your dancing shoes.