Your "commercial jingles" story reminded me of this:
I was in a village, Molepolole, in south eastern Botswana, and saw one of the most wonderful performances I've ever seen. For some occasion, there was a festival featuring various groups of dancers. One of the groups was a Boy Scout troop's band; it was the very definition of rag tag. A very few of the twenty or twenty five boys, boys of all sizes, some of them men, had full uniforms. Some wore shoes. Most had one item or another of Boy Scout clothing-- a scarf, a torn shirt, a pair of shorts.
The thing that was amazing was the musical and dance performance.
The "dance" was really a sort of very complex march, with synchronized foot-stomping in the hard, red dirt.
For the music, there were a couple of thumb-harps, and two stringed guitars fashioned out of square cooking-oil cans, two-foot lengths of wood, and pieces of ordinary wire. All the rest of the musicians had identical instruments-- each carried two empty Coca Cola cans. They clashed them together, high and low in front of them, over their heads, behind their backs, to create this quite dense, staccato, syncopated rhythm that was amazing, and to which the jumping, stomping, marching dance was performed. This performance was extremely moving; I watched the whole thing with tears in my eyes, pretending to be affected by the dust raised by the stomping feet. |
