Elephunk

Thai Elephant Orchestra - Thung Kwian Sunrise
From Thai Elephant Orchestra : Mulatta MUL004 [Buy Here]

Tangerine Awkestra - all of the humans blow up
From Aliens Took My Mom : Mulatta MUL001 [Buy Here]

The world is bound to end soon. All the signs are there. So occasionally, just occasionally, musicians and listeners need to stumble across something that restores their faith in choosing to live on this noisy, extraordinary planet. Two such experiences are provided by Mulatta Records, in the form of an elephant orchestra, and a bunch of supremely confident Brooklyn kids whose musical reference points are Roscoe Mitchell and Ornette Coleman.

The band, in between recording sessions

Thai Elephant Orchestra are a group of twelve elephants based at the Lampang Elephant Conservation Centre near Bangkok. Are their self-titled debut, and the group's sophomore effort Elephonic Rhapsodies, just novelty albums? The answer is probably yes, and yet the internal logic and beauty of these improvisations is difficult to deny.

Tangerine Awkestra - Intergalactic Sound Adventurers

While I was at university, I earned some extra cash by teaching trumpet to kids. One of the warm-up games I would play with the group classes was "Traffic Jam" - where each player would have to choose a different kind of vehicle to be (fire engine, Ferrari, milk truck...). "Zoo Visit" would work along the same lines, with kids taking the part of animals. The success of these activities convinced me that the instinct for free improvisation is something that is innate, but often bred out of us through excessive emphasis on notation, theory and playing "correctly".

Tangerine Awkestra are a bunch of 2-9 years olds from Brooklyn who demonstrate that free improv is not a pretentious construction of bored intellectual adult musos. The same imaginative strategies and interactive methods that these children employ in performing on unfamiliar instruments are the same as those they would use in their non-musical play.

On their album Aliens Took My Mom, the Awkestra recounts the story of an invasion of planet Earth by aliens from Jupiter, who destroy Antarctica and all human life before succumbing to nuclear bugs. Sun Ra would have been proud.

R.I.P. Paul Hester, 1959 - 2005 drummer in Split Enz and Crowded House