Jabba Jabba Jembe! :)

On Thursday, March 31st, we had an absolutely brilliant percussion workshop for the whole day. A man called David came in to give us the percussion workshop. He has his own company called "Jabba Jabba Jembe".. yes, it is African!

David told us a lot about his trip to Africa and how he brought his music teachers back with him to Ireland to live with him for a while. He brought back numerous African percussion instruments. The dominant one is the jembe. It's like a bongo.. but it is not a bongo and he made that very clear to us!

When he arrived at the school, we saw that he had brought his dog with him! His dog looked like what he described as, "a stretched jack russell"!!! The dog was so cute and is named "Challey". It is an African name. Challey was running outside for a while before we started the workshop. We all had to help David to bring in the jembes and other instruments. Challey was put in back in the van for a while so he wouldn't run off on David.

When all the covers had been taking off the jembes and everyone had some kind of instrument in front of them, we got stuck into the percussion workshop. We were only into it about five minutes and I already knew it was going to one hell of a fun day! We got to learn lots of different African beats and rhythms. It almost felt like we were actually in Africa!

After a while, he showed us a few videos on youtube of how the different instruments are made and used over in Africa. When we were finished watching the videos, we swapped around instruments and we learned a different percussion routine just before lunch.

After lunch, we did some more work on our routine, before we had it all learned and Ms L recorded a video of us playing away!

This workshop was such a good experience and it has made me want to go to Africa for a musical point of view. We had great feedback from David and he told our music teacher, Ms G, that we all great rhythm!

Niamh! :D









Challey!