Lagniappes from Longfellow School

I’m continually amazed by the fortuitous wonders even the most purposeless Google searches can yield. A slapdash search for hubcap percussionists the other day brought me to the virtual doorstep of the Longfellow School & by proxy the larger umbrella site Musical Inventions which tabulates sound-producing gizmos cooked up by enterprising students across the nation. It’s immensely inspiring stuff like this that helps assuage my outrage fatigue at the Bush Administration’s continued hack & slash attitude towards education (through trickle down economics 300+ more teachers are slated to hit the bricks this fall in the Twin Cities). Dig the romantic notion of resourceful educators cleverly out-witting budget constraints and piquing their pupils’ interest in both musical performance and shoe-string instrument-smithing. Dig further their consensual resolve in posting the results in an online forum for the global net community to peruse. How fucking cool is that? Harry Partch would be proud!

Music Inventions has an impressively large list of participating schools, but the pick of the talented litter by my lights is Longfellow Elementary in suburban Oak Park, Illinois. The site features a good three dozen hand-crafted instruments right along with their creators. Lend an ear to Alec H. knocking out a clamorous cadence on the Drum Kabob. Thrill to Andrei J. tearing it up on the pipseiphone (John Butcher better watch his back) and Brian C. (a budding Roscoe Mitchell?) blowing corpulent tones on the saxabone. Further down the page can be found Katherine R. and her charmingly rinky-dink Chimer. Sadly, half of the audio/video links on the pages are either missing or broken (among them the Bang-Blow, Chris G.’s colorful contraption pictured above- damn!), but there’s still enough here to glean a healthy gist. Spurred by the creative industry on display, I’ve been working on my own variant of the Bang-Blow. With dust-collecting Maker’s Mark, Dickel, & Woodford Reserve empties serving as resonating chambers, completion and christening of the Bourbono-Boom-Bam® --a device whose discovery is sure to turn the world-wide wind percussion community on its collective drum rim-- is drawing nigh.