Street-savvy Beat Boxer pulls no verbal punches

Judith Ritter

A chat with linguistics student Charles Wagg is both exhausting and energizing. The non-stop conversation swerves from Tibetan chanting to heavy metal and back to morphology in linguistics, African “click” languages and hip hop.

Wagg is a budding linguist and a musician, but he doesn’t PLAY an instrument. He IS an instrument…a human beatbox, Wagg also goes by the stage name Abbra. He is off to New York City for the International Human Beatbox Convention where he hopes to make contacts to find a career as a human drum kit.

Human beatbox, he explains, suddenly sounding very scholarly, is a kind of vocal percussion using the throat, lips and lungs to sound exactly like a set of drums. “My body is an instrument.” Wagg continues moving his mouth, but now there are no words, only what sounds like the drum section of a Rose Bowl half-time band.

Wagg produces dozens of sounds, such as snare drum, cymbals and kick drum, to name a few. He’s the congo, bongo beatbox man who has been practicing these sounds and more since he was 14.

You wouldn’t want to have been his seventh grade teacher in Edmonton when Wagg discovered he could make the sounds of the Alberta winter winds along with parrot and animal noises. He demonstrates his delinquency. His mouth stretches and contorts as he fills his little apartment with blasts of Rocky Mountain winds and tropical squawkings of parrots.

It’s clear he deserves a detention, but luckily for him and his teachers, he moved to Montreal, where he discovered the world of hip hop and met other human drums including a beatboxing neighbor named Crazy Noise who inspired him.

Learning to be a beatbox is an arduous process of endless practice. He gives a demonstration. “ Start with K,” he says, “k..k…k ..k and listen, you’re a snare drum!” He jumps to “ts,” repeating the sound over and over with his lips taking different shapes until he is the human cymbal, not exactly what a degree from Concordia promised.

Charles Wagg isn’t worried about finding a job. On April 23, he will give a talk in New York City on African click languages and beatbox at the International Human Beatbox Convention, where he will also perform.

He’s confident in the staying power of vocal percussion. He says beatboxing isn’t a novelty. After all, he points out, humans have been making mouth music since the beginning of time.