Editor’s pick: Junk jam

Make your own instruments and your own music, led by a master drummer

Sun., Aug. 7, 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in front of the school at 105 Main Street in Mountaindale, NY. Free.

Of all the Sullivan County towns working to bring their hamlets back to life, none is engaged in a more wildly imaginative and eclectic mix of projects than Mountaindale. There’s a sculpture garden populated by recycled farm implements transformed into art, an outdoors fitness equipment station and a mural of an old-fashioned locomotive standing astride disused railroad tracks that haven’t seen a real train for years. As Mountaindale Community Development Project Executive Director Alex Schafran remarked, it’s as if they were re-using an old main street; they want to “fix it up and recycle it and turn it into something great again.”

Mountaindale was looking for a way to celebrate this ongoing regeneration just as Andy Weil of Sullivan County Peace and Justice was looking for a way to further his interest in conservation and recycling. Then Weil saw something on the internet about a new type of event in which people get together to create and jam on instruments made of discarded items, and it all seemed to come together. The first annual Mountaindale Junk Jam was born.

In part, the festival will celebrate the completion of Mountaindale’s music park, which will stand in front of the school on Main Street near the existing sculpture park. The new park will contain instruments made of recycled objects : a pipe organ, a vibulon (something like a large xylophone) and a log drum, all built to withstand not only the elements but use by the general public.

This Sunday, festival goers are invited to bring their own homemade instruments or to make instruments for themselves during the day under the guidance of Weil and the volunteer crew from the development project. But it’s music making, not just instrument making, that the festival is ultimately all about, and the consummation of the event is a jam led by a man who is literally a master. Maxwell Kofi Donkor first learned the skills essential to a drummer at his grandfather’s knee, in his native village, Otumi, in Ghana, and eventually became a master drummer like his father and grandfather before him. Now a resident of our area, he has enriched our communities with workshops and performances that encompass not only drumming but African culture and sculpture. At the end of the day at Junk Jam, Donkor will lead a jam session in which all the visitors are invited to participate, using the junk-transformed instruments they have made during the day or have brought with them.

Like most summer festivals, Junk Jam will feature food, kids’ activities such as face painting and vendors. And for those curious to see what on earth the Mountaindale Development Project will come up with next, there will be tours of the early stages of their next project: the creation of a river walk behind the school next to Sandburg Creek.