Or, you might go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Green
Show, where Ghosts & Strings are playing a few gigs this season.
"Ghosts & Strings" is the nome
de musique of David Molina, joined for the Green Show by Idris Ackamoor.
Molina is a sound designer whose music is informed by his interdisciplinary
work in theater, film and installation art. Ackamoor is a jazz man. The
complicated interaction of their two musical practices forces the public to
listen, and to think about what we're listening to.
The Green Show happens on a small stage between OSF's three
theaters, and acts play to an audience seated on the lawn, or standing on the
brick walkways to the Elizabethan and Bowmer theaters. At least, they usually
do. Ghosts & Strings use the whole space - entering and exiting through the
middle of the lawn, Ackamoor walking between audience members blowing his sax.
The pair play an eclectic mix of instruments: Molina creates digital beats,
plays a banjo with a bow, strums rock and classical riffs on the guitar, and
picks the bow back up to play the cello. Ackamoor wails on his sax, and on his
Native flute, and plucks a harp, and tap dances with a washboard on his chest
and a harmonica on his lips.
The core of the music, though is the jazz: Molina's digital
beats, and Ackamoor improvising melodies over the top. The rest of Ghosts &
Strings' show distracted from that core. That sounds like a bad thing, but it
isn't necessarily. Jazz is a cerebral music: unlike genres that lull the
audience into a viscerally thoughtless haze with their lyrical narratives,
audiences have to really pay attention to jazz to enjoy it. That goes doubly
for Ghosts & Strings' jazz, where we have to listen to the whole spectrum
of what they're playing, identify the core of their music, and then listen
through everything else to that core. And "we", in this case, means
"we the public." The Green Show is free, easily accessible and open
to everyone.
As a non-narrative art form, instrumental jazz engages us in
a more thought provoking way than the narrative, lyrical music that we are
usually exposed to in public spaces. In Oregon
