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This part performance and part jam session exhibited music in the style of a traditional, rustic Afro-American string group; yet the instruments and technology on display were modern.
The standard line-up was a guitar, a four-string banjo, a fiddle and one or more voices; but these were talented multi-instrumentalists who played instruments such as the five-string banjo, a jug (blown into to create a bass sound), harmonica, kazoo and musical bones (two small strips of hard wood, held between fingers). There was little sense of scripted music: the whole had an air of being the product of aural improvisation.
The show was not only entertaining for its variety of sounds: these musicians chatted, danced, jived, twanged, strummed, and flung around their instruments; all was original, energetic and full of virtuosity. |