Music for a Thinking Public

When was the last time you listened to challenging, thought-provoking music in a public space? On the radio dial, only classical and jazz stations elevate the art form above mesmerizing lyricism. On the street you might meet the occasional virtuoso busker, but that's if you're lucky.

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, we have very few organizations that promote that deeper appreciate for music by providing instrumental jazz for free to the public. One of those is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Of course, it's up to the public to take advantage of the resources that are freely available to us, whether that means tuning into the jazz station on 89.1FM if you're in Portland, or coming to see and listen to Ghosts and Strings next time they play at the Green Show on October 12th if you're in the Rogue Valley.