"What is a kunjabunja?", you might ask. Although the kunjabunja art form has been in existence for nearly 60 years, there are still some people who have never heard of it until recently. A kunjabunja in its most basic form is simply a recorded song or audio piece which is improvised according to a certain set of predetermined rules and random factors. Long-time kunjabunja practictioner Ray P. Charles perhaps put it best when he said, "Man, it's doing it, you know? Like playing the music and having it be there, in the sound. That's where the bottom line is, you dig? Go around it, or go under it, whatever. It's like, you know, a kunjabunja. That's what I'm talking about."

In the late 1980's the kunjabunja art form was brought into the public eye by artists such as Sadiq & David, M-Squared, Mah Jong, Tessa, The Beasts' Slayers, Manchild, The Canoes, and The Funky Fiances.

Although individual kunjabunjas can be quite different from each other, there are a number of common threads and kunjabunja requirements. For example:

1. The title is thought up spontaneously and all participants of the kunjabunja are in on creating the name on the spot. For example, three persons making a kunjabunja would each say a word or two, going clockwise around the circle: "The Largest..." "Chair In..." "The Room." So the title is "The Largest Chair In The Room"

2. Kunjabunjas are recorded and you don't get to have a second take. Generally the first one stays. With kunjabunjas, quantity is more important than quality, so you don't want to take a lot of time. The idea is to do a kunjabunja "session" where, say, 10 or 15 kunjabunjas can be recorded in an hour or two.

3. Generally lyrics are generally all improvised as they are recorded. However, in some instances, a group may be allowed to plan one part of the song (say, the chorus), but only under strict time constraints (say, 3 minutes or less, with a timer or stopwatch to keep track).

4. In the early days, kunjabunjas would be recorded on an old tape player. (In those days, 45 minutes worth of kunjabunjas - approximately 20 songs - would take exactly 45 minutes to make.) Then came the age of the 4-track recorder. In more recent days, programs like GarageBand are used for multi-track digital recording. When doing multi-track recording, generally one is not allowed to listen to previously recorded tracks before playing new ones. (Or one only gets to hear it once before recording the new part, maybe.) Sometimes, every song in a 5 or 10 song session would get its first track recorded before going back and recording the second tracks (without listening to the first), and then the third track for each of them is recorded and so on...

5. Many decisions are made by rolling dice or flipping coins or doing Rock-Scissors-Paper. So for example, suppose Frank, Mary and Bolo are working on "The Largest Chair In The Room." They first make a list of the instruments available to them: 1. Keyboard, 2. Bass, 3. Guitar, 4. Shaker, 5. Kazoo, 6. Chinese Bamboo Flute, 7. Banjo, 8. Vocals, 9. Jug, 10. Zither, 11. Mandolin, 12. Recorder. They roll a 12-sided die three times and determine that on the first track, Frank will play shaker, Mary will play Jug, and Bolo will do vocals. Once they lay down that track, they might move onto the next kunjabunja and come back to that one, or they might continue by rolling dice again to determine who plays what on the next track. There are other various lists and dice-rolling that can be used as well. For example, one might roll dice to determine how to sing: 1. With an English accent. 2. Only falsetto or really really low, 3. Like Brian Johnson of ACDC, 4. Limerick rhyme scheme, 5. Old-school rap, 6. Really fast monotone. Another commonly used type of randomness: abook or magazine is flipped to a random page and the first sentence or phrase that you point to must be included somehwere in your lyrics.