This time in the Great City Park of Budapest. Kids were heroes of a classic folk tale, going through the story in real, trapping witches and rescueing their big Love :)
In the spirit of Emir Kusturica, Tim Burton, Michel Gondry and Jan Švankmajer we were playing with recycled puppets, muppetts and trumpets in the land of Bohumil Hrabal. The day was crowned with a levitating concert of Traband's Jarda Svoboda who I also joined, ending up in singing all together in Jack Skellington's octogon-shaped living room.
SEE HERE THE ENTIRE ALBUM >>> I just finished writing music for a new Hungarian game package, SZÓKIMONDÓKA (=SAY IT & PLAY IT), which brings a playful, fun and interactive way for small kids to start reading and singing. The box includes 12 word cards, a book, a DVD & a CD. NOW HERE IS MY FAVOURITE SONG : TUMM TUKOTÉ is the "wildest" example of what SAY IT & PLAY IT desires to reach with these songs: to inspire small kids (and hey, everyone!) to sing and dance for not only songs that are done already but SONGS WHICH WE MAKE UP! May it be with proper, semi-proper or perfectly improper lyrics. For example, TUMM TUKOTÉ has no meaning. At least not in any dictionary. But I just loved how it sounds! Then we had proper Hungarian words : KINT - out BENT - in FEJ - head NYAK - neck HAS - belly KÉZ - hand LÁB - foot TAPS - clap After all this is what we made up, GO SING WITH US! AT LAST, here's a short snippet from the DVD : YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE SONGS HERE
AND GET HAPPY YOU CAN ALSO BUY THE SONGS HERE AND MAKE ME HAPPY CAUSE THIS WAY I CAN KEEP ON DOING THIS :)
* WATCH BOTH VIDEOS ON FULLSCREEN *
To find something like this before falling asleep ... ... is THE PERFEKT KIT for crossing to dreamland ! the first part of this melody appeared in me when my carpenter soulmate, zsolt, turned back into light at the age of 31, and as i couldn't be with him physically to say goodbye, i was singing for him at the side of a small river somewhere near toulouse, south of france, for 3 hours... after all, this melody appeared and stayed with me, so later i could even record it. then, a few weeks after, i met my other half, and then, bursting in love, this melody was the first which we really sang together... while singing, we added the second part, and so the song became one full circle, celebrating life and death at once. We tested some good old fibre-board walls in Serbia during a one-week theatre workshop in order to find new ways of connecting different ethnic groups who otherwise tend to separate from each other - in this case, Romas and non-Romas. I was praying for this for soooooo long :) Thank you all for your freedom, thank you Jelena at REACH for organizing this and thank you Ricardo and Emanuelle at INKA for leading us! I wish this to happen more and more - not only at workshops!! Trimpirim, my new mini-banjo-ukulele-balajka from the Canary Islands had his debut on stage this week! The story how we met is crazy, I will tell you one day, enough is that he was born in the same year when Jimi Hendrix, Joan Osborne and Jim Morrison hacked the matrix. Did you know that Harry Belafonte plays the drums?! Obviously not as much as his buddy from Muppet Show. And if it comes to Harry, do you remember the epic tune going "DAYLIGHT COME AND ME WAN' GO HOME..." ? :) Hahaaaa, and here you can learn it on ukulele or guitar!
As always, I say, let this be an inspiration for you to let yourself free and make up your own first 2-chords-tune with your own deeeee-yooo lyrics ,) Anyway we are not slaves working on a banana plantation in Jamaica :D To prove this, I'll post my own version of the song soon, but first I have to finish another song about taking a hot bath. NOW! It was exactly 1 year ago when we did a one week circus camp for gypsy kids in Hungary. Big thanks for Veronika at Cirkuszínház Productions for organizing all this! If you also would like to take part in such fun, get in touch with her! |