News April 26, 2012

newest news

What a difference a year made… things changed
mostly for the better in 2011 and I’m looking forward to a great 2012 of playing and teaching and releasing wonderful new music.
I sincerely hope that your year is a good one too.

April is the coolest month. A sprint to the finish line, with tons of shows interspersed with teaching at Berklee.

Starting with a duet show with Emy Phelps in Portsmouth, NH and an amazing concert with banjo genius Ron Cody, cellist Mike Block and singer Heather Masse at One Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine celebrating his brand new CD of jazz standards… very special! see the concerts page.

… Somehow, also a benefit concert for One Longfellow with Brittany Haas and Joe Walsh, Wes Corbett, and Courtney Hartmann. And a wonderful house concert in Boston with Emy Phelps and Sharon Gilchrist. Mike Block and I also have a residency up in Oneonta, NY later in the month.
AND.. a rare Psychograss appearance at the Old Settlers’ Festival, down Austin way!

This March was a real marathon, very rewarding but incredibly busy. Couple days in the SF Bay area, recording a slew of new lessons for ArtistWorks online Fiddle School, then on to the American String Teachers’ Convention in Atlanta, then to the Magnolia Springfest in Florida, where I played music with Rushad Eggleston, Sharon Gilchrist and Emy Phelps, and a whole bunch of friends such as Yonder Mountain and Emmet-Nershi bands. Wuhu!… A good Spring Break.

Then a major concert in Denver with an all-star cast of brilliant Colorado musicians, on March 31:

The fantastic Wintergrass Festival up near Seattle, where I reunited with Bruce Molsky and Rushad Eggleston in the brand new Old-Tyme Kozmik Power Trio:

Valentines’ Day shows in New England from the 9-14, a Workshop at the Joe Val Festival in Boston, a bit of performing with VASEN in Maine with a hand-picked Berklee string group.

A new recording by Emy Phelps, produced by Darol Anger… download cuts here.

Fun times in Boulder on New Years’ with Yonder Mountain!

Another semester of teaching at Berklee College Of Music has begun,
but work at the ArtistWorks School of Fiddling continues apace, with new interviews, lessons and performances being added all the time.
Some nice resources available now over on my ArtistWorks School of Fiddle site. We fiddlers now have a great interview with the incredible Brittany Haas, alumna of Republic Of Strings and current driving fierce in the phenomenal band Crooked Still.

Brittany is one of the world’s most rhythmic and accurate fiddlers, and her
approach to bowing has to be seen to be believed. Great tunes and
informative conversation make for lots of spillover into Bluegrass, Old-time
and just plain Great Fiddlin’… in five parts for economical
time-management-style watching.

http://www.academyofbluegrass.com/media-department/478

Lots of exciting shows and events happened last summer!

at the Saddleback Festival, Maine:

Republic Of Strings mini-reunion at Saddleback Bluegrass Festival, summer 2011

The Freight & Salvage Summer String Explosion! July 9th, Berkeley, CA

…And for Northern California: Weed! July 6th

And the incredible Northwest String Summit, Portland, Oregon.

ArtistWorks School of Fiddling

And… Rockygrass!

the Artistworks Bluegrass Band

An amazing new teaching project:

The
ArtistWorks Darol Anger School Of Bluegrass Fiddle (and other styles coming) is happening NOW! Please come check it out if you are a fiddler-it will be a great community resource, starting with over 200 fiddle lessons and the ability to exchange videos. it’s just too cool. Join soon!

I’ll be teaching at a few great camps this summer.

One of my favorites is the newish Live Oak Fiddle Camp down in the Texas Hill Country near Austin. A smaller camp, with fantastic food and a startlingly beautiful setting, with indoor sleeping arrangements, this camp is a great and effective way to rocket your playing forward and really connect with some other excellent players. Not recommended for absolute beginners.

http://www.liveoakfiddlecamp.com/

Also check out the fantastic O’Connor Fiddle Convocation, held at the Berklee Campus in Boston, MA,and Mike Block’s amazing String Camp in Florida. Sadly, these camps run the same week… so this year, I am doing Marks’ thing.

http://www.mikeblockstringcamp.com/

http://www.berklee.edu/summer/MOC

And for you Bluegrass Fiddle maniacs,

the Augusta Heriage Bluegrass Week in Elins, West Virginia is incredible, amazing, and very intense.

http://augustaheritagecenter.org/bluegrass/

What Just Happened:

This was the Spring issue. I think Kimber Ludiker’s on the summer cover. We’re both holding Jonathan Cooper fiddles!

We just finished the Spring semester at Berklee, working with a truly awe-inspiring crop of fantastic musician-students. Watch out, world, here they come.

Emy Phelps with Darol Anger in concert : a great series of shows starting in Portland, Maine through Boston down to Washington DC, mostly featuring Emy’s songs.

Delfest with Psychograss was a great party, with fun workshops and late-night jams.

the incredible Maeve Gilchrist’s new recording (produced by yours truly) is available now.

Alsadair Fraser’s VOM fiddle camp!

A musical gift to my friends: Me ruining some Bach in my kitchen, with a slide show of places I visited in 2010, including Utah, Big Sur, Seattle, Mt. Shasta, and Beacon, New York. Please enjoy this knuckleball delivery of the greatest musician of all time.

The Store is back online. we have a new order-filler who is taking care of orders, and re-stocking our shelves with all the recordings and stuff for sale.

May we suggest Darol’s Heritage recording, or possibly the newest Darol & Mike extravaganza, Woodshop?

great gift ideas for the fiddler in your life.

Drones are back in tangible existence as a CD! If you just want something to give as a gift or would like to be able to touch what you buy, we have a nice stack of drone CDs on the shelf waiting to be sent out. Still $10, plus $3 for shipping and handling.

ALSO still available as a digital download.

Darol’s Bluegrass playalong book &CD, published by Homespun Tapes

Each of the five book& CDs in this new series highlights one of the instruments of a standard Bluegrass band. This one features the spectacular fiddle playing of Darol Anger. Darol plays the melody and a solo with an all star band backing him up - then drops out so you can take a solo, which is transcribed in the book for you.
The band consists of top players Todd Phillips, Tony Trischka, Matt Flinner and David Grier.

We saw the release last year of a couple of amazing solo recordings, including the phenomenal harpist Maeve Gilchrist and the wonderful mandolinist Joe Walsh. Oh yeah, I engineered them. And play on them.

h3.LAST YEAR:

A filled-to-the-busting point summer of travel-related actvities;
High Sierra Festival, Shasta Fiddle Camp, Oregon Country Fair, Northwest String Summit, Ossippee Valley Music Festival, Augusta Heritage, Saddleback Mountain Festival.

AND the Republic Of Strings, fresh from an amazing weekend at the McCoury’s family festival, Delfest, swung down the Front Range last June:
Loveland, Denver, and the Appenzellers’ great 4 Corners Folk Festival in Pagosa Springs all in Colorado.

I finished building my first violin under the tutelage of Luthier Jon Cooper… on the one-year anniversary of my move to Maine.

Teaching at Berklee; on my 3rd semester now! and 317 Main Street.

My Summer String Camps

I taught last year at a nice selection of music camps, down a little from 2009’s record total of seven. I think five last year… so it’s down by more than 40% now. Due to chronic schedule clash, I had to miss one of my favorite camps: Mark O’Connor’s Fiddle Conference, this year, to be held in Boston.

This year, I limited the camps to just a few:

Mike Block’s amazing camp in Florida:
www.mikeblockstringcamp.com

The Live Oak Fiddle Camp near Austin, Texas:
http://www.liveoakfiddlecamp.com/

Rockygrass Academy:
www.bluegrass.com/rga/

However, with the ArtistWorks School of Fiddle, every day can be a Fiddle Camp day.

A new tradition: Christmas Music this December, with the Republic Of Strings and others in New England. From YouTube:

Darol Anger is now Associate Professor at Berklee School of Music

Darol has been named Associate Professor for the Berklee School of Music, Boston MA, according to an announcement by Matt Glaser, Artistic Director of the American Roots Music Program. Anger will teach improvisation and vernacular music styles to students of the world’s largest private music college.

With a student population of over 4,000, Berklee College of Music prepares students for music careers through the study and practice of contemporary music. Eighty percent of the school’s graduates go on to careers in the music industry. For more than half a century, the college has reflected the state of the art of music and the music business. With more than a dozen performance and nonperformance majors, its diverse and talented student body represents more than 70 countries, and a music industry “who’s who” of alumni.

not-so-recent highlights:

I was honored to perform at the Grand Opening night of the new Freight And Salvage Concert Hall in Berkeley, the legendary west coast acoustic music venue in which I have regularly performed since 1976. A historic and extremely emotional moment, which also featured a musical reunion with pianist Barbara Higbie. Here I am on stage with the great Alasdair Fraser, and members of my Monster Quartet: Lauren Rioux, Natalie and Brittany Haas.

Check out those CDs from the catalog!

Crosstime Darol with the amazing pianist Philip Aaberg. Darol & Phil worked together in Newgrange, and were labelmates at Windham Hill. This one features some radical reconstruction of some classical classics by Gershwin and Ravel,, and some of Darol’s most evocative compositions. And for those cozy winter evenings, don’t forget the Heritage recording…