At one of the schools that I was teaching at one year, there was a unique musical group in the school by the name of Umoja - One Heart, One Voice. The group wasmade up of Grade 7 and 8 students that auditioned for the group. The 25 or so were lead by Mrs. Marlene Hinz who is and amazing arts education teacher in the city. I had taken an Orff class with the Marlene when I was still an education studentat the university.

The idea for this piece came about as the school year was ending and I got to hearthe group perform. The students loved what they were doing and the audience knew that. I was teaching Grade 6 - 8 band in the school and Marlene and I ended up collaborating on a Music Monday Assmebly. With the limited time that I was actually in the school, we each had our own parts of the assmebly. I started to thinkabout how much fun it would be if we could have combined our two groups of students for a piece in the future. The piece relies very heavily on the African Percussion instruments that Marlene uses in her teaching.