A letter from Darol Anger
Fiddles On Fire in England
May has been an especially eventful and broadening musical month. My first English tour in 24 years (the first one was with the David Grisman Quartet and Stephane Grappelli's group in 1981) was a Fiddles Of Fire tour, organized by Folkworks up in Gateshead, which is up near the Scottish border, across from Newcastle-on-Tyne, home of the famous ale. The 2 towns are being fixed up with new architecture and improvements, and the whole tour started with an indoor festival at the amazing Sage building, which is a brand new arts building right on the Tyne river. This is it.
A fantastic lineup for the fiddles On Fire tour: The Fiddlers 4, (me, Bruce Molsky, Michael Doucet, Rushad Eggleston), the great Scots fiddler Catriona MacDonald (with the insanely talented pianist David Milligan), the amazing Irish fiddler Cathal Hayden, the youthful and brilliant Swedish/English fiddler Emma Reid, and an incredible Hungarian fiddler named Beata Salamon, who founded the premier Hungarian folk group Meta in 1983. By tour's end, we were able to get quite a lot of mixes and combinations with the various fiddlers and turn it into more of a show rather than just a succession of acts.
The tour took us all over England, and I spent my birthday in London at Queen Elizabeth Hall. We had a great bus and driver who put up with a lot of noise; music, singing, yelling, etc. We went to Wales and southern and eastern England, and all the way up to the Scotland border. And I like England. People there kicked out the Puritans, I now remember. You can say fun Anglo Saxon words. The encores got really maniacal with everyone onstage. And of course, featured as a main character in our roving comedy, the English Countryside, archetypally lovely. It was so great listening to the accents flying —�� the Shetland/Scot England, Irish, Hungarian, French-Cajun, Bronx (Bruce) and California with Tennessee undertones. The conversation was a concert in itself.
A chop lesson on the bus; we couldn't get to the fiddles.
We spent 3 days teaching and performing in this beautiful building, and listening to other international artists, including an incredible one-string African violinist. Rushad, the other fiddlers and I got to try these instruments. They are difficult and sound more like a flute than a violin. The left hand position is especially strange. I wish I had a sound file to put up... I'll try to get one.
SOULGRASS...
A week after returning, I participated in a re-creation of Bill Evans' new release (Actually September '05) Soulgrass, at the famed Yoshi's Jazz Club right in my home town of Oakland, California. What a band! Bill Evans, one of the most underrated and incredible saxophone players on the planet; Bela Fleck, playing all electric banjo for this week-long gig; Jimmy Haslip, bassist and co-founder of the Yellowjackets, one of my favorite bands; and the legendary Vinnie F. Colaiuta, world 's most-recorded drummer and all-around maniac. Fast company. Incredible music.
I wound up playing the Eric Aceto electric 5-string through a rather elaborate system, which featured 2 tube preamp stages, a Acoustic Image amp, and 2 older EV PA speakers. It all worked real well�just had to catch up with myself. What a ride! I haven't had the opportunity to play really long solos with that kind of harmonic freedom in a long time�it took a while to get used to it. Plus I got to experience the monster musicians for 8 shows and 2 days of rehearsal. A kick in the pants.
In June, more Republic Of String shows in the Bay Area, and a long trip beginning in Telluride with Jerry Douglas
From left: casey Driessen, DA, Jean-Luc Ponty
On to Mark O'Connor's Nashville Fiddle Camp
from left: instructors April Verch, Sara Caswell, John Blake, Angella Ahn, DA
then to the Yonder mountain String Summit in Oregon� whew!
A nice vacation in July with a mini-residency at the famed artists' colony UCross in Wyoming,
then more Republic Of Strings at the Grey Fox Festival in NY and other festivals all over the country....
Thank you,
DAROL
