Screwing Around

I haven’t been writing …but have been screwing around with the violin. Mostly just playing along with old recordings of my former band, which has been surprisingly fun. The band was comprised of me and Tim and Dave, who played guitar and bass. Unlike me, they taught themselves to play, which is pretty cool. I liked their rough style and tried to match it by dropping some of my classical habits, which never worked. That’s what happens when you start playing at five years old—shit just sticks.

Tim and Dave had a country western ska band when we met. They drank a lot of beer. Then me and Tim started playing Eastern European folk music together. Then Dave said I want to play with you guys. We all drank a lot of beer. Then one time on vacation me and Tim found an old Romanian stand-up bass at a flea market. It had a huge crack in it but still had a big dark sound so we bought it and strapped it on top of the Subaru and drove it nine-hundred and forty miles back to Dave, who repaired the crack and taught himself how to play it so he could be in the band. Eventually he learned how to use the bow which is a lot harder than plucking the strings. Sometimes I got frustrated with his beginner bowing skills, but then I remembered he was teaching himself. After a couple years he started studying for real with a great teacher and ended up becoming a jazz bassist and learned to read music and got really good and joined an orchestra.

Me, I’d always had teachers. My teachers, at different intervals and for varying amounts of time, included Ron Copes, Robert Lipsett, Sheryl Staples, Glenn Dicterow, Greg Fulkerson, Mark Steinberg, and Gilles Apap. Those names probably don’t mean much to most people but they mean so much to me. In the world of classical violin, they represent a kind of lineage, because of who their teachers were, and so on, eventually going back to the original masters in Eastern Europe. It was an enormous privilege to study with them and I’m forever grateful.

So I learned from the best, but threw it all to hell (so dramatic) to become a busker. Playing on the streets or in bars (dark taverns if you want to be romantic, and I did) was a way to enjoy performing without pressure. One of my teachers, Gilles, had done something similar. He was a prodigy who had studied with Yehudi Menuhin, but then he kind of cracked—started playing with Ravi Shankar and Stephane Grappelli, got interested in Gypsy music and Old Timey and Indian music and all kinds of crazy shit. He was my teacher when I was a teenager. Later, after he’d started playing the crazy shit and I’d started the band, me and Tim and Dave went out to his cabin a couple times to jam—and to try and learn something. We, especially me, wanted to learn how to loosen up more, how to listen, how to improvise. Gilles had a huge, smiling poster of Stephane Grappelli, who he had loved, on the wall. When I pointed at it he said “That old queen? He was the sweetest guy in the whole world.”

There’s a homeless man who lives on my block. He has a van but doesn’t sleep in it—just keeps all his possessions inside. Stacks and stacks of yellowing books and magazines, mostly. He’s sometimes out of his mind on drugs but sometimes he isn’t. He often comes around my house, walking or on his bike—circling, coming close, pausing. It freaked me out until someone told me he was coming to listen to the music. So I stand inside and play my violin as he circles around and around on his bike, head bent down, listening. It turns out that before he started using, he played guitar—played with Gilles, did all that eastern european jazzy shit. A real pro. It’s hard to think about.

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Here’s me and Tim and our friend Mark on banjo, playing in a bar.

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Here’s me and Tim and Dave. Playing in a bar.

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Here’s me yesterday, harmonizing, kinda, with a recording. Inspired by Tom Waits’ Green Grass. The violinist in the recording (me) makes some questionable choices involving vibrato that I would never make. That’s the problem with recordings, and on that note, please forgive:

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