It had been a hectic day for me, and I had a headache when I walked into SSU’s Charter Hall on April 30th for the Todd Green concert. By the time I walked out, I had a CD in my hand, my headache was gone, and I felt as relaxed as I had all week. Todd Green, I found out, is a performer of at least fifty instruments, a kind of modern-day one man band.
Green’s instrumental music is probably best described with the word diverse. Not only did his performance include a huge array of instruments, but his music was influenced by the enormous variety of places from which those instruments came, including Africa, the Middle East, Japan, and elsewhere. Green had so many instruments, in fact, it would be impossible to name them all, but they included such familiar instruments as guitars, a cello, and a flute, as well as such foreign instruments as the Japanese shakuhatchi flute, the tabla drums of India, and the Lebanese doumbek drum.
Green’s massive assortment of instruments reflects his eclectic playing style. Often Green would begin a song with a simple classical guitar pattern. After a minute or two, he would then shift from playing the guitar’s strings to tapping the sides of the guitar with his hands, in sync with the same song. Then reaching over to his nearby tabla drums, he’d expand on the percussion he’d started. In one song, in fact, he went so far as to turn his guitar upside down for use as a percussion instrument. In Green’s longest song, he started with a classical Celtic guitar melody, then shifted to a ten-minute medley of foreign percussion--going after an African "tribal feel," he said--and finally concluded with a reprise of the original Celtic tune.
One reason Green was able to do this so easily was that he used a pedal-operated sampling machine on stage. Before the eyes of the audience, he would record, for instance, a sixteen-beat riff on his Moroccan bongo drums. The sampling machine would then repeatedly play the riff back, even while Green put the drums away. After that, he would add other instruments to the recording, finally builing up to a guitar or flute solo. In this way, Green was able to give a very sophisticated performance all by himself, without the use of prerecorded materials. Thus he was able to engineer something much like the old-fashioned notion of the "one man band," except, as Green himself noted, without the akward cymbals between his knees.
Green was also a very talented performer. He used a custom-made double-neck guitar, unique in that one neck was a regular acoustic guitar, while the other neck was a six-string acoustic bass. On this instrument, he showed special ability. Though even a single-necked guitar is usually a two-handed instrument, Green would one-handedly tap out a melody against the frets on the guitar-neck of his special guitar, while with his other hand he would accompany that melody on the bass-neck of the guitar.
Throughout such performances, the audience was spellbound. Green’s many instruments, his on-stage recording techniques, and his amazing technical ability attracted universal attention. Not only that, but his music’s classical style and diversity of ethnic origin were eyeopening. Angie Dirksen and the rest of the Student Activities Committee surely deserve a round of applause for bringing Todd Green to SSU.
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