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A Very Brief History of Steel pan Tuition in Leeds, and My Part in
it
Victoria Jaquiss FRSA
Steelpan Development Officer, Leeds
Steel pan tuition started in the early eighties in Leeds’ schools,
when the Music Service bought a van and set of steel pans. Our first
peripatetic teacher was StClair Morris, who would drive from one
school to the next, unloading, teaching, then loading back up again.
So, right from the start, the concept of practices between lessons
was off the agenda.
Steel pans were placed in schools where they were
a lot of children of West Indian descent, but not for very clear
reasons. Ultimately, for me now, this was a very happy accident
because these tended to be schools in the more disadvantaged areas.
I am became involved in 1983, when my school
decided to buy its own set of pans in order to promote a positive
image of black culture to a 99.5% white school in a very deprived
area. This would later become an issue, not really a problem: ie a
90% white steel band.
By now schools had pans permanently placed with
them. And I had realised what pans had to offer. I started up the
Foxwood Steel Band, became Head of Music, started GCSEs with pan as
the main instrument, taught any other teacher pan who came within
five metres of the Music Room, and invented the Foxwood Songsheets.
When the school closed in 1996 we decided to keep
the band going. I became Steel Pan Development Officer for Leeds,
and brought pans to life all round the city. But, naively, I
imagined that all schools with pans would welcome my experience, my
knowledge and dedication.
No. I now met the colour of pan. Not everybody
wanted a white woman to represent this “black” instrument. Some
people, mostly white, thought there were too many white children in
the bands, wanting them to be a place for black children to shine
–whether they were black Trinidadian, Jamaican or even African!
For some pupils, pan is now old-fashioned.
Rapping, singing, poetry-slamming, dancing are more popular. Adults,
who might know better, are providing opportunities for black and
mixed race children to engage in these activities. Our steel bands
take all-comers; they no longer have Caribbean associations for
today’s teenagers, so it can be where the white children, and those
from the other ethnic minorities find themselves.
The Leeds Silver Steel Sparrows is
disproportionately white, black African and Asian. But is this a
fact or a problem? Somewhere on the web, Garth Frankland, a local
community activist, describes me as having “reinvented steel pan in
Leeds” – for being a Carnival bandleader, for the regularly gigging
bands, for wide-ranging repertoire of songs and styles and for the
composition of those bands. And Arthur France and Ian Charles from
Leeds West Indian Carnival Committee have given their strong support
[in the form of a float and a stage] at Leeds Carnival for the last
six years. Playing Leeds Carnival is the highlight of our year, and
for weeks afterwards the players are stopped in school and in town,
and asked, “Was that you in that steel band?”
The happy accident, alluded to in an earlier
paragraph, is that steel pans are still mostly located in the
relatively poorer inner-city schools. So that the children who
benefit from being able to play in the bands, which this amazing
instrument provides, are the poorest, the most deserving and the
most needy, and their ethnic origin may have become irrelevant.
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