Last spring, it became obvious that the fading (at least as far as the field of music instruments is concerned) Musikmesse fair would have a competitor in the Musicpark. The first edition of the latter event took place between the 1st and the 3rd of November this year at the fairgrounds in Leipzig, Germany.
It is heartwarming that brands such as Yamaha, Sonor, Pearl, Meinl, Zildjian, Sabian, Istanbul Agop, or Schlagwerk not only decided to invest their time and money in supporting the new platform, but also brought in some of their artists, who gave great performances. Those included the likes of Jost Nickel, Gary Wallis (Tom Jones, Mike & The Mechanics), Karl Brazil, Michael Schack, Max Gösswein i Simon Gattringer (the Dreschheads duo), Dirk Brand, or Cherisse Osei (Brian Ferry, Simple Minds).
One of the companies that did not fail was Meinl Percussion. Take a look at what they had to show at the event…
“Hey guys! We’re at the Meinl Percussion booth, Hall 2 at Musicpark Leipzig. We have a lot of beautiful instruments here.
To my left, you can see congas and cajons from the Artisan line, which is the high-end line of Meinl cajons. To my right, you have percussion for children, e. g. the Classroom Cajon. About 8 children can play it at the same time and have a kind of drum circle together. To the right, there is a lot of percussion instruments for children. The frog. Maybe you know it. Of course, all the percussion instruments for kids are smaller.
Then, there are Latin percussion instruments like: bongos, the Meinl patented Slap Top Cajon, which is for more upright playing. You put it between your legs – the bass is in the middle and the slap is outside. You sit on a chair, sit in an upright position, not slouching like with other cajons. These tambourines are also from the Artisan line, which is the high-end line of Meinl Percussion.
To my left, we have djembes, darbukas and doumbeks. These are instruments from the Middle East, djembes are from Africa. The special thing here is that we have some instruments made from fibre, which produces a much higher pitch than a classic djembe. The traditional djembe made from wood and with a natural head sounds like this…
We have instruments for every percussion player from children all the way up to professional artists. Here is the king of our cajons. It’s about 1200 euros and it’s manufactured completely by hand in Spain by Pepote Percussion. José “Pepote” Hernández Diaz is a cajon master builder.“