Sites and Sounds

Last Monday saw the launch of the Sites and Sounds project in Norfolk. This will see musical practitioners including singers, instrumentalists and beat-boxers going onto traveller sites in order to share their skills with the young people who live there. The launch took place at County Hall, the seat of regional government, a 1960's Brutalist edifice, outside which had been placed a vardo, or traditional gypsy wagon. I wish, now, I had taken a long shot to show the incongruity.

The keyboard club of a local primary school bashed out 'Wagon Wheel' with the assistance of some of the team of tutors, yours truly contributing an alto sax solo towards the end. We must have played this three times for various visitors and dignitaries. The band included a handful of traveller kids but most travellers are away at this time of year. Travelling of course.

Other tunes, with the children accompanying on various percussion, included 'Dark Eyes' the theme to the movie 'Chocolat' in which Johnny Depp plays a gypsy. You can probably tell by now that neither diaries nor the budget had allowed the members of our impromptu band the luxury of a rehearsal and we fell back on common repertoire.

Being the parent of daughters, dolls houses are not unfamiliar to me. I even had the misfortune to assemble the Barbie caravan as a kit (nothing fitted and I spent Christmas Day cursing under my breath while my friend built his son the immaculately engineered Lego castle). But I had never before seen a proper doll's caravan. These are used in schools with a traveller intake in order to make the environment feel less alien to very young children.

The project proper kicks off in the autumn and I shall post my impressions then.

Descant recorders - health scare

It's not often my friend Hugh and I meet young girls who tell us we're gorgeous. And if you saw us you would instantly know why. So when I went with Hugh and a couple of others to demonstrate musical instruments on a travellers' site last week I had a pleasant surprise. The boost to my self esteem was short lived, however, as the word used was actually 'gadjos' (pronounced gorgeous). Gadjo means non-gypsy, literally 'outsider'. I found the outsider tag mildly amusing as I live inside a house whereas travellers...

Anyway, when we arrived at a small Portakabin on the site we found a box of percussion had been provided by a school teacher. This contained no fewer than three descant recorders. Some twenty years ago I had the misfortune to teach recorder to a six-year-old boy who took great pleasure in pointing the thing in my face and blowing as loudly as he could for half an hour. This only lasted for two lessons. A third lesson and I'm sure I would have done something I would still be regretting at Her Majesty's pleasure.

My ears are less sensitive after two decades of teaching woodwind but a recorder in the wrong hands still feels like someone drawing on my eardrums with a marker pen. Following this workshop my ears rang the way they used to after a Hawkwind gig. You should know, if you don't already, that if you subject your ears to noise that leaves them ringing you have caused them permanent damage. So the moral is, never give a recorder to a child unless you really know what you expect him or her to do with it. Never casually include one, never mind three, in a box of percussion instruments. In fact, if I ruled the world I would place recorders in the same category as alcohol and cigarettes with hefty fines for anyone supplying them to minors.