Mark O’Connor – String ties
In 1994, Warner Bros. released his first classical album, Fiddle Concerto. It was followed by six albums on Sony Classical: 1996’s Appalachia Waltz, 1997’s Liberty, 1998’s Midnight On The Water, 1999’s Fanfare For The Volunteer, 2000’s Appalachian Journey, and 2001’s The American Seasons.
When Grappelli died at age 89 in 1997, a tribute concert was held soon after at Carnegie Hall. Backstage, O’Connor ran into Jon Burr, who had been Grappelli’s American bassist for the past eleven years. Guitarist Frank Vignola happened by, and the three men began to run through some tunes.
“It just clicked right from the beginning,” O’Connor says. “Jon leaned over to me and said, ‘The weirdest thing just happened; I looked over at you and I saw the old man.’ So we were all spooked, and finally I said, ‘We should keep this going.'”
They did. They formed the Hot Swing Trio and began playing some shows. It started out as a salute to the music of Grappelli and Reinhardt, but it soon branched out beyond that. All three men began composing new music for the group, and that material, as well as their arrangements of the period pieces, reflected their diverse experiences in newgrass, bebop, fusion and classical music. The trio released a live album titled Hot Swing! on O’Connor’s own label, OMAC Records, in 2001, and a studio recording, In Full Swing, on Sony’s Odyssey Records in 2003. The latter features Wynton Marsalis playing trumpet on three tracks.
“I can’t imagine playing this music without Frank and Jon,” O’Connor says. “We’re all very different kinds of people, but when we play, the rhythm is so enormous, you can’t help but get swallowed up in the momentum, which carries you to some other place. Other jazz violinists will tell me that my stuff isn’t 100 percent jazz, and they’re right, but Stephane wasn’t either. What he and Django took from gypsy music, tango and French art music, I take from Texas fiddling and newgrass. We both take a lot from classical music.”
Though he has devoted much of the past ten years to jazz and classical music, O’Connor hasn’t forgotten the country and folk roots that gave him his start and still gives him his distinctive sound. This year it will be 30 years since O’Connor’s first recording, and he got a jump on the anniversary by releasing Thirty-Year Retrospective at the end of 2003. Its 29 pieces cover the entire three decades, but the bulk of them come from his string-band days. Once upon a time, when he was nearly as well-known for his guitar and mandolin work as for his fiddling, O’Connor might have recorded all the parts himself, but he gave up the other two instruments six years ago.
“I developed bursitis in my right elbow, and I quit everything for a month,” he reveals. “When I started again, I still felt very tentative with the guitar and mandolin, because of the flatpicking motion. After six months, I had lost all my calluses, and it was almost like the writing was on the wall that I couldn’t keep up on all three instruments. Ironically, Bryan Sutton and Chris Thile had just arrived on the scene in very much in the style I played in. If I could point to any one guitar player who was in my style, it would be Bryan. He played all my original guitar parts but even better. I couldn’t believe it.”
If one of O’Connor’s ambitions is to develop a new kind of string player who feels equally comfortable with jazz improvisation, classical technique and hillbilly tunes, then Sutton and Thile are his most obvious success stories. O’Connor met them both at his week-long fiddle camp, which he started in the summer of 1993 at Montgomery Bell State Park just outside Nashville. It has proven so successful that it’s being expanded; a second event, an annual weeklong string conference encompassing cello, viola and double bass, has been launched near San Diego.
O’Connor had moved to San Diego in 1998 to spend more time on his composing. As long as he was in Nashville, he felt obliged to go to every birthday party, wedding, funeral, gold-record party or album-release party that involved friends — and he had a lot of friends. The only graceful way to decline was to say he lived 2,000 miles away.
“When I moved out to California,” he says, “these young kids lived a mile from my new house. They had a band called Nickel Creek, and they came to my fiddle camp when they were teenagers. Back in California, they’d come over to my house to swim in my pool and use my hot tub. When all of a sudden their career skyrocketed out of nowhere, I couldn’t help but compare what had happened to them with what happened to me. When the 30th anniversary of my recording career came along, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be an opportunity to publicly pass the torch to these young folks?'”
Thirty-Year Retrospective pulls together the various strands of O’Connor’s music. Though it is dominated by newgrass and old-time music, it includes such classical compositions as Caprice No. 4 and “Appalachia Waltz” and such jazz tunes as “Swingin’ On The ‘Ville”. O’Connor, Sutton, Thile and Byron House bring something of all four genres to every performance, adjusting the proportions as needed. Here, in the small string-band format, you can hear the glimmerings of a new American string music.
“It’s incumbent on people working on the concert stages to draw on the culture around them,” he maintains. “Folk music has always influenced the great masters and composers back to the earliest days. That’s not just my opinion; that’s documented history. For some reason, a few musicians and writers pass judgment on what’s happening on the streets of America as being unconnected to high art. I’ve had my greatest success making that connection.
“For years people said I was spreading myself so thin that I’d never reach my potential in any one thing, but I was busy becoming Mark O’Connor,” he concludes. “I can scratch out an old-time fiddle tune or I can arrange a symphony, because I’ve trained to do both and both feel good. In my case, I make them feed each other. Rather than becoming a split personality, I’ve made it work by having one feed the other constantly. So whatever setting you hear me in, whether it’s playing with an orchestra or at the Iridium or at fiddle camp, you hear that I was a student of both Benny Thomasson and Stephane Grappelli.”
ND senior editor Geoffrey Himes writes about classical music for the Baltimore City Paper, Peabody News and the Patuxent Newspapers in Maryland.