Macon warms up its pipes for a really big kazoo blast

<p>Starting out cold, the little musical instrument Steve Scroggins has been promoting can sound like an obnoxious party horn.</p><p>After a little practice, however, he says the tiny plastic kazoo has a richer tone.</p><p>"Once you get warmed up, it sounds kind of reedy like an oboe, if you're playing it right," he said.</p><p>Then again, it can make a ragged blat, suitable for the unruly chorus of a jug band tune.</p><p>Scroggins and other residents of the middle Georgia city of Macon where the whimsical musical instrument is believed to have originated in the 1840s hope to break the Guinness World Record on Thursday for the largest kazoo ensemble.</p><p>To top a Rochester, N.Y., record of 2,679 set on New Year's Eve, they hope to pack the city's minor league baseball stadium with 5,000 kazoo hummers. Organizers have ordered 6,000 kazoos just in case.</p><p>Participants plan to offer up a kazoo rendition of Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" as part of the festivities of the Georgia State Fair, where the instrument made its first appearance in 1852.</p><p>"It was picked for sentimental and promotional reasons," Scroggins said. "I was talking to some musicians who said that's a hard song to play. We may play some warm-up songs."</p><p>A former slave named Alabama Vest is said to have invented the modern kazoo in Macon in collaboration with Thaddeus von Clegg, a German-American clock maker. The kazoo is a type of mirliton, a general category of instruments _ some of them with historic roots in Africa _ using a hollow tube covered at each end by a membrane with a center mouthpiece.</p><p>The modern kazoo is a hollow, cigar-shaped tube with a turret in the center that contains a tiny resonator, which can be made of paper, plastic or in some cases, a piece of animal membrane. When a player hums into one end of the tube, the resonator vibrates, giving the kazoo its quirky sound, said Kathy Rice of the Kazoo Boutique Museum and Factory _ the country's lone maker of metal kazoos _ in Eden, N.Y.</p><p>She said it's also one of the first instruments on which U.S. children learn to make a sound _ often a delightfully rude one _ and its simplicity is the main reason it remains popular in the 21st century.</p><p>"Anyone can play it ... as long as you can hum or toot," Rice said. "If you blow into it, not a darn thing is going to happen."</p><p>Barbara Stewart _ an author and musician who has made the kazoo her personal cause _ is author of the 2006 book "The Complete How to Kazoo." She says the kazoo was important in early blues and country music because musicians could use kazoos to make their voices loud enough to be heard over banjos and other instruments.</p><p>In more recent times, Paul McCartney used the kazoo in the song "You're Sixteen." The 1980s funk and disco group Skyy used kazoos for gentle backup in their 1980 song "Skyyzoo," said Stewart, who will serve as the event authenticator in Macon. Skyy incidentally made a failed attempt to break the kazoo record last month, only gathering more than 2,000 for the record-breaking attempt.</p><p>And even guitar-God Eric Clapton deigned to include a kazoo break on his unplugged recording of "San Francisco Bay Blues."</p><p>"Everybody under the sun uses it in their bands," Stewart said. "But everyone can participate even if they are not professional. It has a way of unifying of all types of varieties, people of different abilities, of different generations."</p><p>Scroggins said he hopes the kazoo event will help unify the city's residents, if only for a song.</p><p>"From the old to the young and in between, there's quite a buzz about it. If we could come together and do it, it would be a feel-good event," he said. "I think people will remember it for a long time."</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2007/9/90051