Grammy Award-winning violinist Mark O’Connor talks about composing and his upcoming performances with the Hot Swing Trio.
By: Daniel Shearer
Few people make a living as jazz violinists. Of the many hundreds of performers and composers who have shaped the genre since the early 20th century, only a handful have been fiddlers.
The reason for this is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has something to do with the difficulty of performing jazz on the instrument. Maybe the big band era, loud and brassy, simply replaced swing-style fiddling with a more powerful sound.
More likely, though, the dearth of performers working in the field today stems partially from the fact that so few have trodden that path. Violinist and composer Mark O’Connor suggests this lack of "heroes to look up to," as he puts it, makes it harder to find accomplished teachers.
"The violin is a really versatile instrument," says Mr. O’Connor, who is perhaps best known for his recordings with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and double-bassist Edgar Meyer, Appalachia Waltz, and the Grammy Award-winning follow-up release Appalachian Journey. "It’s been said that jazz is difficult on the violin, where it’s more natural on the saxophone, so I think other styles of folk fiddling, and classical training, is much more accessible to kids and to parents having their kids learn music.
"With violin, most people have to start early, and if parents can’t find a jazz violin teacher, which is very likely, those children will grow up playing either classical or folk music, like Celtic music or country and bluegrass. I think that it’s an ongoing dilemma."
Mr. O’Connor knows the value of role models. At age 13, he saw Stephane Grappelli perform, planting the seeds for the French jazz violinist, arguably one of the greatest of all time, to become his "huge violin hero." At age 17, with Mr. O’Connor well on his way to an impressive career, he found himself in the enviable position of auditioning for an American tour with Mr. Grappelli and famed mandolinist David Grisman.
He nailed the audition by the time he graduated from high school, Mr. O’Connor had already released a handful of traditional fiddle albums with Rounder Records but oddly enough, his biggest break didn’t come until the first tour rehearsal. A multi-instrumentalist, Mr. O’Connor had auditioned for the tour as a guitarist.
"Then, the first rehearsal with Stephane, he found out that I also played violin, and then he wanted to hear me play right away," Mr. O’Connor says. "After he heard me play, he wanted to play with me, and then said ‘You’re gonna play duets with me on stage at night, at the end of each show.’"
Mr. Grappelli became his mentor during that month-long tour in 1979 and several more months on the road the following year. Twenty odd years later, Mr. O’Connor continues to put those lessons to good use. In January, he and his Hot Swing Trio, guitarist Frank Vignola and bassist Jon Burr, released In Full Swing on the Odyssey label, a division of Sony Classical. Influenced by Mr. Grappelli’s work during the 1930s, around the time he recorded with guitarist Django Reinhardt, the album features appearances from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and vocalist Jane Monheit, a duo that joined Mr. O’Connor for a performance Feb. 4 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.
Following that concert, Mr. O’Connor hit the road on a four-month tour with the Hot Swing Trio, with stops at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia Feb. 15, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark Feb. 16, and McCarter Theatre in Princeton Feb. 17.
"Jazz violin is not that widespread," says Mr. O’Connor in a phone interview from his home in San Diego, Calif., a few days before his scheduled trip to Manhattan. "There’s probably less people that play jazz on the violin than about any other idiom you could of think of for the violin. That makes it a small club.
"So yeah, it’s an interesting thing for the string world. Jazz on strings, there’s a really keen interest in it now though. The last 10 years, I’ve been putting on my fiddle camp. One is in Tennessee and the other is in San Diego, and we see over 300 students from all over the world between the two camps. And jazz, even though it’s the least popular music for violin, it’s one of the most sought-after instructions at our camp.
"People want to know more about it," he says. "They think, through jazz, that’s where the key to improvisation lies. For violin, if you switch the word from jazz to improvisation, I think there’s a huge interest among the string population that wants to know more about improvisation on their string instrument, because this type of training is really devoid at most academic institutions."
Although Mr. O’Connor began gaining recognition as a soloist and composer for classical music ensembles in the late ’80s and early ’90s, much of his efforts until that point were devoted to recording work in Nashville, where he performed with Dolly Parton, Clint Black, Vince Gill and many others. He had a recording deal with Warner Brothers throughout the ’80s and had been composing since his early teens in Seattle, where he grew up, but his solo career seemed to be languishing.
"I came to a point where I was about 29 years old," Mr. O’Connor says, "and I remember this kind of epiphany I had, where I was reading a journalistic article, and the subject was Stephane Grappelli, Jean-Luc Ponty, one of my other great jazz violin heroes, and myself.
"I was so overjoyed to be included in that company, and it just hit me, kind of like a ton of bricks. I said, ‘Wow, I have the potential to really do something with my music, but what are they doing that I’m not doing.’ And I realized, for years and years and years, Jean-Luc Ponty, matter of fact, almost the majority of his playing life was as a soloist. And Grappelli, so many decades as a featured artist. And me, I was still a side man. I had my own albums, but my career was 95 percent side man, meaning I back up people.
"I was a guy for hire. I played on people’s albums, I backed them up on television shows. Famous people, but still, I was in the band. Yeah, they’d give me a solo now and then, but that’s not a career, and that’s not a musical direction. It’s not building a fan base. It’s not creating. I just wasn’t really doing much for my musical vision."
One of Mr. O’Connor’s first opportunities with the chamber music world came in 1989, when he received a commission from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival to write a string quartet that would meld American fiddling with classical European music. The result, which Mr. O’Connor performed with Edgar Meyer and other musicians, drew a standing ovation.
"Somehow, I was able to fit that in at the very end of my session-playing days in Nashville," he says. "I think that was a real impetus for me to move on, because I accomplished this 30-minute string quartet, and there was a real sincere interest in what I was doing with my music."
That performance paved the way for his next coup, Mr. O’Connor’s "Fiddle Concerto," which he has since performed 180 times with ensembles of all sizes, making it one of the most frequently performed violin concertos of the last half century. In August 2000, Mr. O’Connor premiered his "Double Concerto for Two Violins," with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Chicago Symphony, also performing the work the following summer with Ms. Sonnenberg and the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Mann Center.
On Feb. 4, the night of his Lincoln Center performance, the Cape Cod-based Gloriae Dei Cantores premiered its second commission from Mr. O’Connor, his a cappella "Folk Mass," a memorial for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"I use folk themes throughout all my compositions," Mr. O’Connor says. "I think even the ‘Folk Mass’ is full of Americana. I’m actually composing right now, my sixth concerto, for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a commission by them. I think I look at jazz as folk music as well. That would be one of the things I relate to Wynton (Marsalis), in that we look at jazz music somewhat similarly.
"My relationship with jazz music is a folk music from our country, something that was born out of the people, on the streets, in the rural communities, just like a lot of American music."
Mr. O’Connor has written many original jazz compositions, which he plays with the Hot Swing Trio. The group also has recorded music by Fats Waller, George Gershwin, Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington, along with original music written by the trio’s two other members, Mr. Burr and Mr. Vignola.
The trio formed for a Stephane Grappelli tribute concert at Carnegie Hall in 1998, several months after Mr. Grappelli’s death. Mr. Burr, in fact, had been the bassist for the final 10 years of Mr. Grappelli’s career, while Mr. Burr has made a name for himself performing with Chet Atkins, Lionel Hampton, Manhattan Transfer and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band. Mr. Burr also has a standing Monday-night gig with guitar legend Les Paul at the Iridium in Manhattan.
Regardless of the venue or the musical style on the program, be it jazz or a heady chamber music or orchestral work, Mr. O’Connor knows that an old-time Texas fiddle jam is likely to bring an audience to its feet.
"I think there’s nothing like a rousing fiddle tune for an encore, when you get people clapping and foot stomping," Mr. O’Connor says. "It’s real upbeat and real carefree. I don’t think I’d want to do that for a whole concert, but I certainly choose my times to do that.
"But I think folk music is a lot deeper than just that. People think of fiddling only as that, and certainly it is that happy, foot-stomping hoe-down that people automatically relate to fiddling. But it is an incredible tradition. It’s a serious tradition. It goes back many hundreds of years and there’s many layers to it, and those are the layers that I try to expose as my subjects for all my pieces that I work on."
Mark O’Connor will perform with his Hot Swing Trio at the Kimmel Center, Perelman Theater, Broad and Spruce streets, Philadelphia, Feb. 15, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $40. For information, call (215) 893-1999. On the Web: www.kimmelcenter.org; at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, Feb. 17, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $27-$30. For information, call (609) 258-2787; and at NJPAC, Victoria Theater, 1 Center St., Newark, Feb. 16, 2:30 p.m. Tickets cost $35. For information, (888) 466-5722. On the Web: www.njpac.org. Mark O’Connor on the Web: www.markoconnor.com

