Friday 7 September 2012

Manchester Grammar School meets steel pans

Now then Debs,
It is my turn to go to Manchester. Robert and the crew have been over here and checked out  all the Leeds pan schools they need, have ordered a set of pans from Grafton, and will hire a few from us in Leeds while they wait. Which won’t be too long. 
We are also selling them a set of our surplus basses and cellos, relics from the days before the new builds' builders misunderstood the information: “and we have to house a set of steel pans in the new school building.” 

Two sets of basses came from when the college of Music bought a 20 piece set in about 1990, expecting, but not getting great things. Ten years later they were sold to the Music Service. I found a primary school to use one set, but when Melvin and I went to pick up said pans, we found they had been abandoned, and had spent summer outside a portastore cabin in the carpark, and were now full of water and gently rusting on top. They must have been mistaken for old oildrums! How could that have happened?


So over the Pennines again on Tuesday with the gently rusting basses and the rest. And I put Robert, Ruth, Gary, Otto, Jonathon and David through their paces. Forgot to photograph them in action so here's Ruth and Robert posing after they'd all left. 

No comments:

Post a Comment