Monday

Indigenous Musical Instruments

Being a very eclectic radio producer, I encounter all sorts of people and situations that I never would have thought about before. The theme to Shockwave is Baka, by the English group Outback, and I've reviewed didjeridoo music in this column. A few days ago I got this e-mail:

Dear Baron David E Romm,

 

As Australia's Didgeridoo Cultural Hub, we would like to introduce ourselves to you and to welcome you to browse our website at www.ididj.com.au

 

We noticed in the link below that you have a didgeridoo shop recommended [in your review archive]

 

iDIDJ Australia and our collaborators in the arts field agree that the shop recommended in your site is selling mostly low quality non-Indigenous made product. We would much prefer to see the link replaced with one that points to Australia, as it is here that the instrument has its origins. If our website finds your consonance, we would be overjoyed to be linked from your site as this would help the Aboriginal craftsmen that we support and promote. If you do decide that our website is worthy of inclusion in your recommended sites, we would be grateful if you could use the following html code: iDIDJ Australia: Australian Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

 

The iDIDJ Australia website, as you will see, is an important repository of information on the didgeridoo and the web's most comprehensive resource on the Indigenous source culture of this fascinating instrument.

 

Thank you in advance and looking forward to hearing from you!

Maybe this is didgeridoo spam (!) or maybe someone really cares what I say about musical instruments made by indigenous people. Either way, I feel I owe my loyal readers (and some of the fly-by-nighters) a further examination into the topic.

I have no connection to and do not implicitly endorse the web sites mentioned here, including the iDIDJ site above. I present here some --and only some-- research into native Australian music and culture. Many indigenous musical performers/shops/festivals are probably not on the web, and this too is a limiting factor. Caveat Didgeridoo. And yes, the instrument is spelled differently in different places.

Note: My examination of didgeridoo music would be helped by some of these places sending me their CDs, or even a didgeridoo or two. Thanks in advance.

• Sydney Music Web
• Review by the Aboriginal and Torres Islander Online site of Emera, a collection of indigenous music from around Ballarat, VIC. Overview of some Australian history. Message Stick also has its own collection of indigenous links.
• Site for Lewis Burns, Australian Aboriginal didjeridoo maker/performer, artist, muralist, consultant. (Worth a click on the link to see the picture of him playing a didjeridoo in full native costume.)
• Wandoo Didgeridoo is so complete that they list 45 spellings for the instrument. They also list a bunch of didgeridoo festivals, including the 5th Annual Joshua Tree Festival October 11-17, 2004 in Joshua Tree California.
• I don't think any of these are particularly indigenous to Australia, but The Didgeridoo Page has a lot of artists from all over the world using the instrument in various New Age orchestrations.
• The Didj Shop, The Didgeridoo Specialists, is unique in that the instrument is spelled with a 'j' and a 'g' in the name of the store. They offer quite a few products and services. You can listen to streaming mp3s before you buy. The include a guarantee that "Every didgeridoo on this site is a genuine termite-hollowed didj". "All artwork on our didjes is done by Australian Aboriginal artists." There's a whole slew of Interactive Features (which I didn't interact with), including "Worldwide Didj Meditation". You can sign the guestbook, make $ by becoming an Didjshop Affiliate Web site, and explore the different kind of didjes available. You can spend the day paging through this site.
• The Indigenous Australia site is built entirely on Macromedia Flash technology, which didn't open on my system. Fortunately, the Didgeridoo animation worked. After a long intro, you get to an interactive display, using didj background music. I didn't play with it much. Don't bother if you don't have a fast connection and recent updates of Flash and other plugins.
• Adrian Ross Management allows you to enter using Flash or Standard. You can listen to his music and find out more about the didgeridoo.
• Google's Music Directory for the Didgeridoo has a lot of links.
• The European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights has the transcript of a report on Didgeridoo craftsmen under threat and Didgeridoo popularity cuts both ways. The site explores aboriginal history, cultural identity and the stolen generations.
• The Mything Links site on aboriginal people of Australia is stubbornly anti-western, "Christopher Columbus, James Cook, Hernando Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Francisco Coronado, and so many others -- fine Christian gentlemen all -- followed a religion that deified two bachelors and a ghost." It's mostly links, but also has some good examples of aboriginal artwork.

Someday, perhaps, we'll see a marching band of didgeridoo, bagpipe and sitar. Yeah, that would be cool.

Kiddofspeed

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