On Thursday, JAZZ.FM91 loaded up a FedEx van full of musical instruments generously donated by our listeners and brought them to Grenoble Public School in Toronto’s Flemingdon Park neighbourhood, where they’ll be enjoyed by a new generation of young musicians.
The seventh year of JAZZ.FM91’s award-winning Holiday Heroes instrument drive brought dozens of guitars, drum kits, trumpets, trombones, violins, flutes, saxophones and more to the children in Janet Chan’s music class at one of the largest schools in the Toronto District School Board.
In partnership with Long & McQuade Musical Instruments and FedEx Canada, we ask listeners each holiday season to donate their gently used musical instruments to aspiring young musicians.
“We’re so thrilled. I can’t tell you how excited we are, because we honestly and truly, sincerely and deeply honour the arts at our school,” Grenoble Public School principal Mikki Hymus told Danny Marks in an on-air interview at the JAZZ.FM91 studios last week.
“We truly believe that the arts are essential to our children’s development and in stimulating their creative thinking … In addition to having doctors and dentists and educators, we’ll have dancers and opera singers and musicians who will have these careers and professions in the future, and so we want to nurture all those,” Hymus said.
“Music is a language that is understood by everybody. One of the things I feel that music education prepares our students for is something that’s not taught in a traditional classroom, and that’s change. Music is constantly evolving, and so students, when we expose them to music, are expected to keep up with new material and adapt quickly, and those are life skills that they’re going to need to transfer into the workplace when they grow up.”
Thank you to everyone who donated an instrument in this year’s drive — you’ve earned the right to call yourselves Holiday Heroes.
Scroll down to see some photos from the day’s special delivery.
