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While I was at university, I earned some extra cash by teaching trumpet to kids. One of the warm-up games I would play with the group classes was “Traffic Jam” – where each player would have to choose a different kind of vehicle to be (fire engine, Ferrari, milk truck…). “Zoo Visit” would work along the same lines, with kids taking the part of animals. The success of these activities convinced me that the instinct for free improvisation is something that is innate, but often bred out of us through excessive emphasis on notation, theory and playing “correctly”.

Tangerine Awkestra are a bunch of 2-9 years olds from Brooklyn who demonstrate that free improv is not a pretentious construction of bored intellectual adult musos. The same imaginative strategies and interactive methods that these children employ in performing on unfamiliar instruments are the same as those they would use in their non-musical play.

On their album Aliens Took My Mom, the Awkestra recounts the story of an invasion of planet Earth by aliens from Jupiter, who destroy Antarctica and all human life before succumbing to nuclear bugs. Sun Ra would have been proud.

R.I.P. Paul Hester, 1959 – 2005 drummer in Split Enz and Crowded House