Watch one of the performance below.
[rumble video_id=v5h4c3 domain_id=u7nb2]
Video credit: Rumble
If you’re looking for an expert when it comes to DIY musical instruments, you need to look no farther than Leonard Solomon. As a musician, his credentials are solid. He’s been playing for 30 years and has played Harvard Square and traveled to Japan. And he even wrote his own memoirs about his life as a street performer. But perhaps what Solomon is most known for is his ability to craft some truly bizarre homemade instruments.
One of his works, the Bellowphone, has even been called “like something out of a Dr. Seuss story.” And then there’s the Oomphalapompatronium (not the Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonka) that Solomon made out of a wheel, tin cans, pottery, and water bottles, a project that has been going on for the past 15 years.
Several museums have even featured some of his instruments and this guy has shown no signs of slowing down.
There were stories that Solomon started out in cabinet making but he explained: “Well, I never really fell into cabinetmaking; it was more of a slow swan dive.
I have been studying the mechanical arts, including woodworking and metalworking, since the age of four. I would rummage the basement for old wood, nails, and wire, which I would saw, hammer, and twist into ‘useful’ items. I never stopped doing that, and I like to think that my skills have improved since I was four.
At age 14, I also started practicing guitar for many hours a day. I learned ragtime fingerpicking styles from books of tablature.
“After three years of rock-and-rolling with the band, I quit and spent 10 years as a cabinet-maker in a furniture shop.
But of course, I began itching to perform again, so in 1983, at 33-years-old, I built my first honking one-man-band, the Majestic Bellowphone. I took to playing on the street, combining the musical numbers with a five-ball juggling routine.
During my first weekend performing out in Harvard Square, I made more money than I was making in a week working at the cabinet shop, so the transition back to performing was easy.”
Asked how he sources his materials, Solomon said: “The Bellowphone is made of 93% materials I found or salvaged: metal pipes, cardboard tubes, springs, coat-hanger wire, sheet-metal from a toaster, vacuum-cleaner pieces, tin cans, plumbing parts.
Seven percent is stuff I bought: playground balls, funnels, screws, kazoo, and nose-flute. The other instruments have a higher percentage of bought materials, but all the parts, including the organ pipes, are scratch-built from commonly available things from the hardware store.
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His contraptions are more akin to the workings of a mad scientist than a musician, but Solomon makes it all work, somehow.