Jam Preserves

Craig Woodson thinks kids should toot--and make--their own horns.

At the Launch Pad science center in Costa Mesa on Saturday and Sunday, Woodson will demonstrate how to build 12 instruments. Then he’ll stage a jam session in which audience members toot, blast and rum-pum-pum to their hearts’ content.

Those not on stage can carry the tune with body percussion and mouth noises, says Woodson, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology.

While the beat’s still hot, the group will transform paper cups and dried beans into shakers.

Woodson--whose work as a musician, instrument maker and educator has taken him from African villages to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.--conducts workshops in which children use their imaginations and castoff bits of Styrofoam, plastic and cardboard to create one of 130 kinds of instruments.

He says youngsters who dabble in music at an early age are more self-confident, more mentally adept and more likely to possess a fine aesthetic sense.

But, as his one-hour interactive program, “A World Orchestra You Can Build,” will demonstrate, you don’t need a baby grand to set this course in motion. Hand a child cardboard and dental floss and listen to the sounds.

“Appropriate technology” is the technical term for using whatever is lying around to make something worthwhile, but Woodson prefers to call the process “mess and guess.”

“You give the kids ideas and some materials, and you let them mess around [with] it,” Woodson said from his home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

“I don’t tell them, ‘OK, this is how to build it.’ I give them information, but ideally I want them to come to me and say, ‘Can I try it this way or that way?’ My answer is always going to be, ‘Yes!’

“When a child makes an instrument, it has his imprint on it . . . but he’s also connecting with the past,” says Woodson, who visits schools through the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s educational outreach division. He has produced a video, “Make Your Own Horn and Toot It!” and says he’s working on a PBS special.

He makes a violin bow out of dental floss and a coat hanger, and he’s going back in time thousands of years.

“In Africa, the term is sanofka, which means, don’t forget to go back and bring forward what you left behind. . . . It gives you something to build on.”

World music has been popularized in recent years, but in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s it was relatively unknown, says Woodson, who learned how to play and repair ethnic instruments at UCLA’s Institute for Ethnomusicology in the 1960s.

While working on his master’s degree, he traveled to North Africa in 1970 and immersed himself in its music and musicology for a year. As EthnoMusic, he built African-style instruments from 1973-77, then was invited to work with the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, to develop a program to produce instruments for use in schools.

Since then he has orchestrated concerts in which professionals from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kronos Quartet and the National Symphony Orchestra perform alongside children playing their own creations.

The handmade instruments are surprisingly sturdy, and Woodson says that he often meets former workshop students who use instruments they made with him five or more years ago.

When a child can make a durable musical instrument out of materials bound for the trash heap, he’s making his mind, as well as the Earth, a healthier place, Woodson notes.

“I think it was Einstein who said that genius is looking at something and seeing its potential as something else,” he explained. “Here, they’re doing that in a very positive way . . . that will last many years.”

BE THERE

Craig Woodson presents “A World Orchestra You Can Build” Saturday and Sunday at Launch Pad science center in Crystal Court, 3333 Bear Street, Costa Mesa. 11 a.m., 1 and 3 p.m. $5.75 ($3.25 for Launch Pad members); includes admission to interactive exhibits. Reservations recommended. (714) 546-2061.