There is a consistent banging noise coming from inside the old house at the end of the lane.

It is an unexpected scene the old-fashioned wooden house, the mango trees, the fig trees, the bois canoe, a few good plants and weeds tangling wildly together and over the walls glimpses into bedrooms, kitchens and a line from Claude Mackay comes to mind "ah sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams/there time and life move lazily along."

There is no idyllic scene inside the old house at 107 Belmont Circular Road where Glendon Morris is patiently shaping the metal for the backpack of a costume commissioned by Geraldo Vieira for the opening of the World Beat Festival last Wednesday night. Glendon Morris is the son of he late Ken Morris whose signature was the copper work in mas and sculpture for which he became famous.

Now there is the Ken Morris Project, the brainchild of a group of concerned art lovers who want to see the proper tribute paid to the late masman whose art at Carnival and brass and copper plaques and murals have not been given the recognition they deserve.

And if incredibly you are searching your brain for an example of Ken Morris's work, just think of the famous mural in the Trinidad Hilton Ballroom depicting individual Carnival characters, so real they could walk off the wall breathing.

One of the aims of the Project is to restore the Belmont studio now occupied by his son Glendon.

It is in this studio that Glendon, 53, a tall, cheerful man with a ready impish grin is carrying on his work.

Ken Morris's distinctive copper work and the bands he brought at Carnival put him among the successful bandleaders in the Seventies and Glendon has inherited his father's love for the medium.

When Glendon was a child, the family lived in Barataria at No. 15 Tenth Avenue. Morris Sr. had a full-time job at Witco and Glendon remembers his father would use his spare time to make small figurines depicting steelbands under coconut trees. This work was done in aluminum.

Glendon followed suit by doing small wood carvings but his grandmother would complain, saying: "Ken, the boy is chipping up wood again."

Morris Sr., however, never scolded him. In fact, sensing the boy's interest when Glendon was around ten years, he started taking him to the Belmont workshop, originally the Morris family home.

Morris senior was self-taught in the art of copper and brass work but he had an incredible talent. He experimented by first copying costumes from the movies and this is how it started.

The first work in copper Glendon remembers him doing was the mace used by Princess Margaret to declare open the short-lived West Indies Federation. That mace has now disappeared, no one even knows where it is and no one has admitted to having it. The people behind the project are hoping whoever has it will come forward with it for the exhibition.

However, Glendon remembers "This was like a training programme for me. He showed me how to do the curvatures, how to beat the balls, how to turn metal; he showed me how to turn it to make the round staff as in those days there was no copper tubing."

Years later, Glendon, who trained both abroad and locally in metallurgy at Metal Industries Company, was able to return the favour and help his father with a difficult sculpture. It was a conscious decision to follow in his father’s footsteps. He’d attended Osmond High School in San Juan but was "more interested in art and craft than academics."

On leaving school he was further exposed to the arts when he went with Morris Sr. to the Expo ’67. He stayed in Canada for six months working as the lighting assistant at the Trinidad and Tobago Pavilion.

He eventually lived for several years in Canada during which he studied tool and dye metal mould-making. "It’s a very rare trade,’ he says with pride; "there are very few dye-makers in Trinidad. If you’re wondering what dye-makers do, they make medals and medallions and it’s a very specialized trade."

But even while living abroad, he would return home every year to help his father bring mas.

Ken Morris, he says, was a very dedicated man. "He was dedicated to his work and to Carnival, even more than to his own family. Most of his time was spent working and creating art pieces. He was also an extremely generous person and it is because of this trait he could not get rich," Glendon says.

Glendon adds that his father was also a perfectionist. He had a saying "Good enough is never god enough." But he was also a fun person and he loved Christmas, especially, playing the cuatro and paranging. That stopped when his good friend Bert Innis, who was Glendon’s godfather died.

Even before Ken Morris brought his own mas he used to make mas for the other bandleaders people like Harold Saldenah, Jack Brathwaite, and Bobby Ammon. Glendon remembers helping his father from age ten and then later on from 1966 with the first Morris band Court Jesters.

The last Morris band was in 1979 and Glendon notes that copper as a medium has now become too expensive to use in carnival on a regular basis.

However, several bands include sections in copper as did Young Harts recently. There are also other copper artisans who aware trained by the late ken Morris. Though not a copper artisan, David Rudder once learned under Ken Morris, and Mark Ralston who has become well known in the medium was once apprenticed under Morris Sr. The oldest son, Ken Morris Jr. is an art teacher and sculptor and the youngest son Lendwald is a chemist at UWI.

Glendon, like his father is a masman. He is on the executive of the NCBA and for the past couple years he’s been bringing a sailor band called Boss (Belmont Original Stylish Sailors).

Of course his particular section uses copper. As an artist he’s very much in demand his most recent projects included a replica of the St. John’s Ambulance, Wrightson Road headquarters presented to the Duke of Gloucester on his recent visit and the commemorative plaque to be placed in the Carnival Institute.

There is also a much-praised copper pan with humming bird motifs, which he made for a leaving PowerGen official. As was his father, he has been commissioned to make the exquisitely crafted copper gifts received by visiting dignitaries. He also did a bust of the Roaring lion for NCC headquarters and like his father he assists other masmen on request.

Like his father, Glendon does not document his fine work but he is not concerned with himself.

"I believe this project is due; my cousin Sandra Bell attempted to do this years ago but she did not have the resources and I know it will make the younger people aware of the talent my father had ad the contribution he made to this country" he says.