Digital Interviews: When did you develop an interest in the violin?

Darol Anger: I was born in the Pacific Northwest in 1953, and actually didn’t get involved in music until my family moved to New Jersey in about 1964. I heard the Beatles on the radio -- they had just come out -- and it kind of changed my life. My folks got me a guitar. I thought I was going to be a guitar player, but it was one of those guitars that you can’t press the strings down. [laughs] We were in a restaurant, my whole family, and some guy was strolling tables playing the violin. I said, “That looks a lot easier than the guitar. I’ll play that.” [laughs]

DI: The strings are lighter.

DA: Right. The guy looked like he was having a great time -- no effort. That started me on a life of rubbing the instrument. [laughs] There were school programs, and I just got into the orchestra, and took some private lessons. I really didn’t know that there was any other kind of music, besides what I heard on the radio and what I was playing - classical violin. I couldn’t really connect the two kinds of music, but I just figured music was cool anyway. So I did that until about the middle of high school, when I realized that maybe I should start playing guitar -- maybe I could meet some girls if I played guitar. Well, obviously, it’s just the opposite that happens. You end up hanging out with your guy friends in the garage, and you never meet any girls. I went back to violin when I heard Richard Greene playing with a group called Seatrain that had Peter Rowan in it. I’d gone to see a group called the Youngbloods, which was a great band. By then I was living in Marin County, California, and I heard Richard Greene playing this loud, amplified violin - like, “Orange Blossom Special” and all these amazing tunes really loud. It was just great for a 13 year-old guy. Richard blew my mind, and the guy in the Youngbloods, which is why I went to see the show in the first place. I think I might have been slightly aware of Sugarcane Harris, but Richard blew it all out. I was just discovering bluegrass music. Somebody gave me a Scott Stoneman record, Richard Greene’s “mentor” as far as bluegrass went. They both had that crazy, demented, psychotic style. I thought, “Well, this is how you play fiddle. This is the way to play.” So I learned all that wild, crazy rhythmic stuff, and then started realizing that there was more to it. I discovered the Southern California bluegrass scene, then finally picked up a John Hartford record, the one called Aereo-Plain. It had Vassar Clements on it, and that sealed my fate. I became a Vassar “worshipper.” So many fiddle players go through that period.

DI: You had learned the violin in a classical setting, but saw these other players and wanted to play like them?

DA: It was a process of discovery, through particular players. To a certain extent, guitar got added in there. When I tried to play electric guitar, I was studying Eric Clapton records, and that’s when I really started learning playing by ear, constructing guitar solos, and figuring out stuff. I already knew a little bit about music, because I’d been taking violin lessons. I was moving forward faster than some of the other people were.

DI: You do a lot of improvising on the violin, yet it’s not really an instrument that’s conducive to improvisation.

DA: It’s funny, because it could be. The way the instrument is tuned -- very simple, no tuning glitches. There are only four strings. So many things that do make the instrument lend itself to improvising. Of course, the greatest bluegrass players -- most of the fiddle-tune players, the old-time players -- are improvising at some level. Even though they might be playing a tune over and over again, they’re improvising rhythms and making note choices that are subtle. Still you could call it improvising. Jazz is really built on horn music and horn keys -- flat, odd keys that don’t really work immediately for a violin. There are some hurdles to overcome that a lot of people never do. But that’s changing. It’s hardly even an issue anymore.

DI: What happened after you saw these fiddle players?

DA: I went off to college -- UC Santa Cruz. That was very exciting, because Santa Cruz was just a crazy, wide-open hippie town. A beautiful place to be an older teenager. That was really fun. I actually built some mandolins. I played bluegrass music in a pizza parlor. That was my big career move. I was a real fan of Vassar, and through Vassar I discovered the music of David Grisman -- the Old And In The Way band, I was a big fan. David had this crazy thing going on the side.

DI: One minute you’re listening to him, and then you’re playing with him. How did you get the courage to pursue that?

DA: It was serendipity. I didn’t know enough to be scared. I was just so into the music. I had gotten a couple of bootleg tapes of the Great American Music Band that had Richard in it, and they were playing all this wild stuff that was just like the music that I wanted to play. It wasn’t bluegrass, it wasn’t jazz, but it had all that stuff in there, and classical music. It would go off into these rhapsodic, dramatic things. It was fantastic, just what I wanted to do. I learned all the songs, all of Richard’s solos. Todd Phillips, a wonderful bass player who I’ve been playing with since the early '70s off-and-on, was taking mandolin lessons with David and building experimental mandolin bridges out of fiberglass and plastic and goldfish bowls, you know, bones and sticks and car parts.

DI: Just the kind of things you’d expect him to use. All the normal household parts. [laughs]

DA: Yeah, right. [laughs] Exactly. It was great. Todd and I were in rival bluegrass bands but we were buddies. He knew that I was really interested in this kind of music. One day, he was going up to jam with David, and I went with him. We played some of David’s tunes, and I knew all the parts and solos, and David says, “Hey, man, come on back next week. Let’s play some more.” I played with him for nine years, from ’75 to ’84.

DI: Wasn’t it recently that the original rhythm group got back together for some reunion shows?

DA: We’ve had some reunions here and there. We did a thing at Telluride a couple years back, a partial reunion. Usually when everybody’s at the same festival, we try to get together. Todd, Mike Marshall, Tony Rice and I did a concert in North Carolina together as the rhythm section, which was really fun. That was a great thing. Tony and David, of course, were the sound of that band. We called them the “Gasoline Brothers,” because they made an incredible, incredible sound -- certainly the most exciting acoustic string band sound since Bill Monroe got that band together.

DI: You’ve played with Mike Marshall a lot.

DA: Mike and I hit it off right away. He came into the band when people were going and coming, David was trying to keep the band together. We’d gone with some major label and there was a movie, and all this stuff. Mike just came in and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. He was this wonderful energy, a great kid who could play everything, and sort of buoyed everybody’s spirits. It was really great. So we just kind of bonded. We knew the same tunes and liked to play together, and just continued playing. We were living over in the East Bay. We were neighbors, and just played every day, just kept working on stuff, tried to figure out stuff to do. It wasn’t that hard, because [laughs] our thoughts were going the same way, so we just wound up playing a lot.

DI: Tell us about the early Windham Hill days.

DA: Bill Ackerman had this little label, this company, and he’d already made a solo piano record with George [Winston], and he wanted a piano/violin record. Barbara [Higbie] and I happened to be around, so we did it, and it worked out great. That was a nice run. We certainly never had to compromise the way we were playing to fit on the label. It worked out really well for us. Compass Records, who I’m currently with, is an artist-run label. They’re great; they do everything right. But to find a label that’s really making a lot of commercial successes…it spoiled a lot of people, actually. [laughs] It was really great while it lasted.

DI: What happened to Windham Hill? Did it just get swallowed up?

DA: Will wanted to be a guitar player, and he wanted to be a carpenter, and have his own life. Will sold his half of the company to BMG. His ex-wife Ann ran the company for quite a few years, and she did a great job. It was a process of corporate creep, really. He tried to resist for years, and then finally goes, “I just can’t do this anymore." You know, this kind of pressure -- "You have to sell as many records as Yanni." "This next record has to sell…" -- it all became corporate calls, you know.

DI: The “adult alternative” radio format you were playing morphed into new age music?

DA: Isn’t that always the case? A bunch of “crazy” people hit on something that’s popular, then everybody else jumps on it and turns it into the secret sauce. [laughs]

DI: Tell us about the Turtle Island String Quartet and the Montreux Band.

DA: Turtle Island happened right at the tail end of Montreux. Montreux was an amazing group of really strong solo artists who agreed to be in a band. That was great. We did some good stuff, really beautiful stuff. Everybody was so involved in their projects that it just flew apart, but we had a few good years. Then, I had been working with David Balakrishnan, just playing and jamming. We actually took lessons from each other, in a way. We both had very complementary strengths, and David would play with the Grisman group. Sometimes we would all play with Stephane Grappelli, and that was great. David and I were both really interested in extending jazz violin. We thought how great it would be to do with a string quartet the same thing that we had done in the Grisman group. It just seemed ripe, the right time to bring together the American string band tradition and the European string quartet tradition. We consciously went in and said, “We are going to do this. We’re going to play jazz and contemporary music convincingly on string quartet. We are going to invent a way to do this.”

DI: And you were with that group for many years.

DA: For 11 years, and it was amazing. We had a brilliant, brilliant cellist, who has invented a whole way of playing the cello. We went through different personnel -- actually, David left the group and came back five or six years later. Sometimes somebody has to step aside. I’d done everything I wanted to do with the group. The ultimate test of anything is if you can leave, and it’s strong enough to go, and it’s still going on great. They just released a new record. It’s still a great group. I really love what they’re doing, and I just feel proud to have helped start the thing.

DI: What was the process behind your solo release Heritage?

DA: I’d bought a couple of tape recorders, and I had my garage set up. My wife said, “We are going to get you going with a studio.” Together we put this little studio together, and I just started recording. I had this idea to do something with all the people I’d worked with, make this record of folk music. I had all these ideas about arrangements, and it took about two and a half years to finish, but it’s sort of a magnum opus. Willie Nelson, Mary-Chapin Carpenter and Tim O’Brien sang on it...

DI: Jerry Douglas, David Lindley...

DA: Right. It was one of those things that kept building and building. Especially with David Lindley. When he’d heard I’d gotten Mavis Staples to sing, he goes, “I am there. Book the studio. I am coming up, man. How about tomorrow?” [laughs] Now, this record company, Six Degrees, they were the guys that had bailed out at Windham Hill toward the end. When the corporate clones were starting to come in, they started their record company. So I knew them, and that was such a great experience, making that record, because they were so supportive. They were hearing everything I was doing. The only problem was, Six Degrees was a little, tiny part of Island Records, and the week it came out, Chris Blackwell left Island Records. It was like when you kick over an ant nest, and all the ants are running in all different directions. The record got lost in the shuffle, but it’s still out there. It’s still a good record, you know. It sounds the same.

DI: You’ve led seminars and workshops, and you’re the String Chair of the International Association of Jazz Educators. What does giving back like that do for you?

DA: When I started doing this, of course, it was the most frightening thing in the world. You never think you know anything, until you start trying to figure out what you know. But the last three or four years, I’ve just gotten to love this so much. It takes a while to get it codified, because you just get in the situation, you just go for it and you make your music. But, in large part -- thanks to both Matt Glaser, the head of the String Department at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Mark O’Connor, who has been running his fiddle camps for the last few years -- you just go out there, and jump in the deep end and try to show people what to do. I’m really starting to feel like I do have something to impart, and it’s really a great feeling. There’s really no better feeling. I’m really getting the great end of it, because I don’t have to go in every day and submit a lesson plan. I’m not in the trenches. The real heroes of the story, of course, are the people at the elementary school level, working for peanuts, trying to get these kids interested in strings enough to where they catch on, and then they want to go the fiddle camp and take the clinic with Darol Anger or Mark O’Connor. I’m just surfing off the efforts of these unsung heroes, people in groups like the International Association of Jazz Educators and American String Teachers Association. I’ve gone to the conventions. It’s just amazing. It’s so inspiring to see these folks who believe in this stuff so much. The kids are great, and there’s this huge surge of interest. There are so many kids who are getting into fiddling now. It’s a completely different direction. You used to have kids who were playing Vivaldi, and they were doing the Suzuki. Now you’ve got kids who grew up playing “Rubber Dolly” and “Boil Them Cabbage Down,” now they’re starting to get interested in classical music and jazz. They can already play. They’ve got great rhythm, and it’s just so exciting.

DI: What is the baritone violin?

DA: That’s a fancy name for this piece of junk that I inherited from David, actually. [laughs] It’s a fiddle that’s strung an octave below normal violin. It’s a fourth interval below a viola, but it’s still just a violin. It’s got these thick strings, they’re big like cables, and because they’re twice the mass, you can tune them to half the pitch -- a little physics there. I’ve loved the sound of it since 1974 or ’75. I heard Vassar play one. There was a company making an electric violin that had these thick strings. It appealed to me because it’s more in my vocal range, and it sounded like a cello, but I didn’t have to carry a big cello around. David Grisman had this old violin that belonged to his uncle. We said, “Let’s put these heavy strings on it, and I’ll just use it for certain things.” It’s wound up being, kind of, a signature sound for me. It’s really been great to be able to go back and forth between the two instruments.

DI: Tell us about some of the live things you’ve been doing, such as the collaboration with Johnny Frigo.

DA: I’ve been doing shows with, not only Johnny, but with some other folks -- Matt Glaser, and Joe Kennedy, Jr., one of the pioneers of bebop violin. Four generations of jazz violin. Then we pick a young person who’s just starting to get into jazz violin. I just thought that there were some shows that we had the opportunity to do. And people get to hear Johnny, who is a national treasure, just an incredible player. He’s 83 this year, and just playing incredible. If I can play like Johnny when I’m 53, I’ll be happy. I’m working on it. I don’t know if I’ll get there.

DI: You also have NewGrange…

DA: …our all-star bluegrass band…

DI: …and Psychograss, and so many other projects.

DA: There’s just all these great musicians out there. I guess I’m more of a collaborator type. I like to spark off other musicians, and this is a really good way to do it -- just get in these all-star groups and go after it. There are so many great musicians out there, and I love to play with all of them. Mike Marshall and I have our Anger-Marshall Band now. I’ve been going out and playing some shows as a special guest of the String Cheese Incident, with the real young guys. [laughs] It’s really fun to come in, sort of the old geezer, and say, [old voice] “Aww, I remember when I played that tune in 1985.” [laughs]

DI: What can you tell us about your Diary Of A Fiddler CD? It’s an all-fiddle release?

DA: All fiddles. No fair any other instruments. [laughs] Well, there are a couple of cellos on there. That’s really a combination of a lot of the work I learned to do with Turtle Island, in that I could go in as a duet and make it sound like a complete rhythm section. Two fiddles make a band, you know. I do a lot of my rhythm stuff. There’s nothing more exciting than just go in, no safety net, no nothing, and just play with another fiddler, just get in there and hook it, crank out the rhythm. Some of the greatest fiddle players agreed to do this. Again, they’d come through town, and I’d kidnap them, and we’d get into the studio and play for a couple of hours.

DI: The studio in your garage?

DA: Yes.

DI: What’s on the horizon?

DA: Mike Marshall and I have another Anger-Marshall CD coming out this summer. We also did another special thing. The guy in String Cheese Incident, Michael Kang, their electric mandolin player and fiddle player, decided he wanted to make a record with his heroes, and that band includes Paul McCandless, Mike Marshall, the rhythm guys from Leftover Salmon, Tye North and Jeff Sipe, our drummer Aaron Johnston and myself. It’s an amazing band. I think that’s going to come out in the beginning of September, and it’s called Comotion. We’ll probably try to do some touring. Just another all-star, crazy thing. [laughs] I’m really excited about that, because Paul McCandless has always been such a hero of mine, too. His group, Oregon, has just completely changed music for so many. Their approach to music, in general, has been so inspiring for a lot of people, including me.

DI: It must feel satisfying that young people are listening to you play, being inspired by you, just as you listened to others.

DA: It’s just a trip, you know. Makes me want to practice. [laughs] Give them something to listen to. [laughs] Something worth listening to. It’s really exciting, and I find, weirdly enough, that I do have stuff to say, and some small amount of advice that I can give, for what it’s worth. And people listen. [laughs] It’s really odd, but it’s great. Then I get to do stuff with Johnny, where I’m, sort of, the kid again. It’s really great. I’m playing every side of the fence.