Musician Abrey Sixto and filmmaker Kirko Moses, organizers of Vancouver’s first steel-pan community band.

Musician Aubrey Sixto and filmmaker Kirk Moses, both of Trinidadian descent, are organizing Vancouver’s first steel-pan community band.

Sixto, 64, and Moses, 45, have already secured a location as well as grant money to make the steel drums. Their vision is to deliver workshops and form a band of about 20–30 youth and adults, particularly from the Strathcona neighborhood where they’re based.

“No one else is doing this here. We’d be bringing a new art form to Vancouver,” says Sixto. They already have about 10 committed people ranging from novice players to musicians who are interested in joining.

The duo feels Vancouver lacks access to lessons and available steel pans to make the drum relevant to the city’s music scene. There are few steel-pan players in Vancouver, partly because it’s so expensive to import the drums.

The steel pan has the unique distinction of being the only instrument invented in the 20th century.

According to Moses, who is helping Sixto organize this project, it can cost upwards of $2000–$3000 to ship a drum from Trinidad to Vancouver, making it hard for people to learn how to play.

“The bottom line is [the city doesn’t] have the instruments,” he says.

Moses feels the steel-pan drum would appeal to Vancouver’s diverse cultural make-up much like it does in Trinidad, which is also made up of many ethnicities.

The two friends devised a plan to start a community band open to anyone interested. In April, they applied for and received $500 from the Carnegie, Ray Cam and Strathcona Neighborhood Small Grants Program to buy tools to make the drums.

The coordinator for this region, Roberta Robertson, explains that the grant is unique because it’s “very grass roots” compared to other government funding.

“East Vancouver residents vote on applications each year,” she says, and therefore directly decide on which local programs the neighborhood will support.

Robertson says grants range from $50 to $500 in value and that Sixto and Moses received the maximum amount of money because the potential for a -pan community band really appealed to people.

Although Sixto and Moses are aiming to offer workshops this fall on the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument, making the pans is an arduous and
precise process that Sixto is doing mostly by hand.

Building a drum can include pounding down or “sinking” steel barrels with sledge hammers, sawing, burning the drums and delicately fine-tuning notes. It would cost thousands more dollars to buy modern tools that would make this process easier and quicker for Sixto. They have around eight drums in various stages of completion and fear they need more resources and manpower from the community at large in order to finish building the rest of the drums and form their band.

Sixto acknowledged that he knew it wouldn’t be easy to build the drums.

“It’s a lot of work to do this,” he says. What keeps him going are the successful community steel-pan bands that have formed around the world in places like New York, Japan, Brazil and Finland. Community bands in these places include children and adults playing and painting the drums, and fusing their local music with the unique sound of the steel pan.
On most days, Sixto arrives at the artist studio he has secured for future workshops and spends hours working on the drums.

Steel band tools used to make steel pan drums. Photos by Nicole Lawson

“It’s a challenge. I come here and hammer away at the drums and fine-tune my pans,” he says. “I do it because I want more exposure of my culture, and we want people in Vancouver to know they can give this a try.”

The West Coast is an interesting mosh pit of music according to Moses.

“The steel pan doesn’t have a lot of traction on the West coast,” he says. “But if we can add it to the music scene here, we can come up with a really nice form of music that would distinguish Vancouver from a lot of places.”

To learn more about how to get involved with the band or building the pans, email Aubrey Sixto: abanjimp@yahoo.ca.