I have one of these childhood memories that I am not quite so sure about these days. It could be a figment of my imagination.
As a kid, for some reason on the other, I had a fascination with music played by bands. I must have been in either elementary school or middle school when I recruited my brother and sister for a session of playacting where we pretended to be members of a band. We had no instruments and had to make the sound of the instruments through other means. In the case of the guitar, it mean pretending to be strumming a guitar while making guitar-like sound with the mouth. I think we had a fake trumpet also. But the centerpiece of this fake performance was a piece of borrowed furniture that played the part of a piece in the fake drum-set. I think it is called a pouf, or maybe an ottoman, in the western world. It looked like a beanbag but was better designed to keep its shape. It was covered with stronger material than on a beanbag, perhaps leather based, and stuffed with material that allowed it to better maintain its shape when sat on. It was quite tightly packed, and one could bang on it with a stick and produce a deep sound.
The siblings were assigned their roles in the faux band, and off we went. I think this “tribute to music of the west” only happened a couple of times, and it only lasted a couple of minutes or so when it happened.
But I was reminded of this when I listened to some big band music recently. Perhaps it was music like this that was my inspiration as a kid, but I cannot be sure.
