Vegetable Instruments and Unusual Jamming

How to Make a Carrot Ocarina.

I don’t know where this guy picked up this hobby, but it’s fascinatingly strange. He makes musical instruments from vegetables. The carrot ocarina is only the beginning. You can watch a whole host of videos of him playing the cabbage slide whistle, the egg ocarina, the carrot pan flute, the broccoli ocarina, the cucumber trumpet, and much much more.

My friend Travis was showing me and Austin these videos yesterday after our nearly nightly Dominos pizza dinner. He’s been practicing his recorder skills lately and thought of these vegetable instruments.

For those of you who are not avid recorder fans or don’t teach elementary music, a recorder is that plastic instrument you might have played in grade school- remember? Travis has a wooden one, it sounds a bit nicer than my plastic one. But I digress. As we watched these intriguing and occasionally ear-splitting videos we hit upon a wonderful idea– to have our own ear-splitting jam session with our soprano recorders. We went to our rooms and found our recorders, Austin picked up my guitar, and we all met up to play.

The repertoire for the evening included “Oh Shenandoah,” “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (I just played the weemboweps), “The Colorado Trail,” and best of all our own transcription of two themes from The Lord of the Rings films. Austin backed up our recorders with guitar, which was a blessing; Two soprano recorders, inexpertly played without supporting harmony, would have been really frightful.

It was really fun, especially when a stranger walked into the lounge and found us playing Lord of the Rings themes on recorders. I’m sure he thought we were really cool cats.

The Electric Light Orchestra is a cool band name.

Anyone else heard of Electric Light Orchestra? I thought I hadn’t until I listened to one of their more popular songs, “Strange Magic.”

ELO’s “Strange Magic” and “Livin’ Thing.”

Someone in the Phoenix area is putting together an ELO tribute band, and I’m hoping to audition for the harmony singer’s part. She’s the one with the long, curly blonde hair. How cool would that be?? I’m considering curling my own hair for the audition, just to make an impression. Sometimes I’m not a huge seventies pop music fan, but I like ELO so far. They have a decent amount of percussion, and I love the strings. The melodies, vocal and instrumental, are interesting; fun to listen to, fun to sing. So the good news is that even if I don’t get the job, I discovered a historically successful, musically interesting band that is new to me. Hooray!

 

Puirt a Beul

This is Scottish mouth music, sung in Gaelic. It is traditionally sung without instruments, although this performance includes a Bodhran drum.  The rhythm of the words is much more important than the meaning– this is dancing music. Basically these songs are tongue twisters, and so much fun to sing! I’m learning a different mouth music song with my friend Laura for her performance at the Musical Instrument Museum, but after working on it I’m becoming more interested in the genre. Who knows, maybe I can learn more of these songs!

I’ll post a video of our performance when Laura and I sing on June 23 at the Musical Instrument Museum.