Acoustic Legend Darol Anger: ‘Diary of a Fiddler 2’ Preview + Reflections on a Life in Music
Below is the transcript of my interview with acoustic legend Darol Anger. The link button takes you to the podcast, video, and show notes with links to the album, related episodes, and more:
Darol Anger:
It's a conversation where both people are talking at once. That's amazing. And you make something that's bigger than just the sum of its parts and it's uncanny and beautiful and just, I don't know if I'd even still be alive without music. So there you go.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Darol Anger is an acoustic music legend known as much for his innovative fiddle style beyond bluegrass and jazz traditions, and his teaching. Darol has helped drive the evolution of the contemporary string band through his involvement with numerous pathbreaking ensembles, such as The Turtle Island String Quartet, the David Grisman quintet, and his current touring group, Mr. Sun. This podcast episode is being released a few days before his new two album set, "Diary of a Fiddler #2: the Empty Nest", and you'll be hearing many clips from this brilliant collaborative project that features dozens of phenomenal string players and improvisers. You'll find the titles and performers from these clips in the timestamps, and please go over to Bandcamp and buy this album, which you'll find linked in the show notes.
You'll find some related episodes of this podcast linked for you as well with some of the many wonderful musicians we talked about in this wide ranging conversation. Anyone interested in the history of American acoustic music will be curious to hear Darol's stories from his long career and his advice to students from his many years teaching at Berklee and online at Artistworks. Most importantly, I'm sure you'll be inspired by Darol's openness and generosity to musical connection. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms and I've also linked the transcript. It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode where you'll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast.
Well, let me just start by saying thanks for joining me, Darol Anger. It's just an honor to have you on the show.
Darol Anger:
Oh, thank you for having me, Leah. This is great. I don't know how we could even sell a single record without folks like you. I really appreciate it. People that are just interested in music to the point where they'll actually set up a camera, it's pretty great.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So this episode's going to be coming out just right before this great album is released. So we'll be focusing a lot on the album. There's lots to talk about, but I am hoping we can get to some other things. You have such a rich musical life. Right now it's summer festival season. Are you playing some festivals?
Darol Anger:
Yes, yes. Actually, I'm doing a lot of music camps this summer in addition to the festivals, but I'm hitting some of the big festivals like Grey Fox and Rocky Grass, and we're just finished doing the Swannanoa Gathering, which was a blast. It was really great. A lot of old friends both in the instructor and the student population, so that was great.
Leah Roseman:
So what makes a great summer festival for you?
Darol Anger:
You get to see your friends, hopefully it doesn't rain very hard anyway. Yeah, there's a place that you can sit as a 72-year-old. I appreciate some of the amenities that you wouldn't necessarily notice if you were in your twenties, but it's nice. But really, the festivals are wonderful. You really do get to see the people that you might even live two miles from and don't see most of the year, and then you have to go 500 miles away to see your neighbor. Thinking about people like Tim O'Brien and Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, of course, and those guys said, we're in, we kind of land in town and you want to hide in the house for a couple of days. You just talk to like 850,000 people. So there's that. Yeah, you get to and see what people are your friends are doing and new people too. That's great. You get to kind of like what's going on out there? Who's playing what, and they got a big idea and is it great? It might be probably is people that are playing people, younger people, they're just getting better and better. Every time you see 'em. They're just playing more stuff. Rocky Grass is going to be interesting in that way because Molly's band is all there, but not as Molly's band. Molly's got a new band, but Bronwyn and Lyle both have bands at Rocky Grass, so there'll probably be some kind of reunion thing, but in the meantime, we've got this, the molecule has split and turned into something very much more. There's more. More is more so to speak.
Leah Roseman:
Well, the scene must have changed so much over your career, so maybe we'll get into some of that. But let's dive into Diary of a Fiddler #2, the Empty Nest. So explain the title for people that don't know.
Darol Anger:
Oh yeah, this is in 1999, I released a record called Diary of a Fiddler, and that was a record of duets, just fiddle duets, mostly fiddle duets. There was a larger group on there, but basically duets, a couple of trios with other fiddle players, people that famous, really good fiddle players and people like Stuart Duncan, Natalie McMaster, Richard Greene, Martin Hayes, Alistair Fraser, Vassar Clements, folks like that. A bunch of these duets of just fiddles, no backing band or anything like that. So you really got to hear what fiddles can do. That was sort of in response to camp, these music camps, especially fiddle camps that had just started really hitting, and especially Mark's camp Mark, O'Connor's camp, because he had every style represented in his camp. Everybody, it's kind of like everybody was there, and so we all got to meet and hang out and play together, and that was incredible.
So that became a recording. So that was 26 years ago. And this new recording is a album of mostly duets, a couple of trios and one very large band with former students or people that I've had some kind of mentor relationship with often. Sometimes it is maybe a couple of years of studying at Berklee. I was their private teacher. Sometimes it was just a situation where we'd meet at camps, I'd know their parents, and I might just say a word or two or something like that. All these folks seemed to be okay with the idea that I've had some kind of mentorship relationship with them, and it's just a lovely thing to come back and all these incredible fiddle players, they were already good usually when I met them, and I was lucky enough to get to work with them in some way. Certainly Brittany Haas, Alex Hargreaves, all these folks.
Alex is playing with Billy Strings. I think most people have heard of Billy Strings and John Mailander who's playing with Bruce Hornsby, Bronwyn, Keith-Hynes, who I just mentioned, was playing with Molly Tuttle, many, many more folks, and I just feel so lucky to have worked with all these folks. So there was so much there that I had to, well, I had to make two CDs. I just couldn't bring myself to cut anybody out. So I have a loud CD where we're playing loud and fast along with a bunch of folks, and then there's a cool CD where we're playing kind of spacey and kind of focused, but kind of easy, so you might be able to sleep to that or meditate or something like that. So we have two possibilities there if you're feeling like you need to get going and have some coffee, we got one. And then the other one, just like when you want to go to just relax and have a meal or something.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm hoping we could play clips of a number of these tracks for people to hear. We might start with Brittany Haas, because she was featured on this podcast last year, and a lot of people, listeners will know her
Darol Anger:
Great! And Brittany is one of my long-term. I couldn't love Brittany anymore if she was my own, but I think of her as a niece or maybe even in some ways a daughter. She is just completely, we're close and she helped me produce the project. So yeah, that's great that we're starting with Brittany, she's really the person that I feel the closest to. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, you've done a lot of producing over the years that kind of careful listening. I was curious with this project, were they all recorded in the same spot or not?
Darol Anger:
Well, mostly it was here at my house, we just set up mics in the room and because it's just two instruments, it worked fine, just the two fiddles. We just threw blankets over the furniture and a couple of microphones and we got it. And that was nice because we were able to hear each other really well. So that worked out very well, except for just one with the big band where that was during the pandemic, that's kind of got the whole project started back in 2020 when we were all trapped in our houses. I was thinking, well, what can I do and maybe just shoot some money to some of my fellow fiddle players? So I made a track of myself playing sort of a baseline to a fiddle tune, Liza Jane, little Liza Jane, just good old fiddle tune. And I decided to do it in kind of a second line style, so a New Orleans parade style.
So it's kind a different feeling. And then I just sent the track out to 26 different fiddle players, all of whom I have been some kind of relationship with. And I said, just listen, it was just me and a click, and they played to just me and that click, all of them. I thought it would be unfair if people in the later parts, they had to deal with all these other tracks and how are they going to think to fit anything in All these people have musical taste, so all they listened to was me. So it's like this amazing thing where people are kind of feel like they have all the room in the world to kind of go crazy and do their stuff over this track. And when you put it all together, I don't even know how to describe it, you'd have to hear it. It's mind boggling and really, yeah, I always get a new hairdo every time I listen to it because it just goes straight up. It's just fantastic. Just so beautiful. Really makes me happy. I think it's going to make a lot of people happy. It's very joyful. Sounds like a big parade. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
It really does. And it's true. The first time I heard it, it really took me by surprise. I thought, what is this? What's going on? But yeah, it's definitely a party. That must've been hard to produce that track though.
Darol Anger:
Yeah, yeah. It is funny. The irony is it was just people in the room by themselves recording just like recorded everybody's garage or their bedroom or their basement, but it does sound like just a big what we wanted to have.
Leah Roseman:
So speaking of the Liza Jane parade, unfortunately, Mike, when he recorded his track shortly after that, he suffered from his aneurysm.
Darol Anger:
Yes. Mike Barnett, yeah, just shortly after. He may have done some other things, but it might be, if not the last thing he did, one of the last things he did when he had use of his left hand. So really there's a very elegeic, it's so joyful, and yet it's like being in a time machine, knowing what's going to happen. It's very upsetting. But his playing is so beautiful. That guy Mike Barnett is one of the most incredible talents, but it's not just talent. He worked harder than anybody and he was mastering so many different styles of fiddling. He was studying with Tatiana Hargreaves. They were going long distance back and forth. He was studying with her, he was studying with Billy Contreras, the great, probably the most intensely technical jazz fiddle player ever, and just working on his music all the time. And so it's really sad, but any piece of anything that he did is valuable, I think.
And this particular, it just broke the track out as a separate track. And so it's just me and him and his accomplice, Alex Hargreaves, who they went to Berklee together and they were together a lot and they worked out all these great things. You can hear on Mike's, his duets record. He has a duets record where the most intensely just complicated Byzantine track is him and Alex just playing this amazing stuff together. So I thought, well, we better have Alex on there. Anyway, Alex was doing a lot of beating rhythm Anyway, so just the rhythm parts. So that worked out fantastically. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
But I understand Mike's gone through a lot of rehab. He's doing pretty well.
Darol Anger:
He is doing everything he possibly can and keeping it a positive attitude. He lives here in Nashville as well, and we see him a bit. I'm probably going to be going over there this weekend and hanging out. He's working on all kinds of things, and I'm kind of after him to start doing more producing. I think he's got incredible ears, and it's something that he could do, I think. He hasn't lost a bit of his thinking, ability, everything. The only thing that's not there is his left hand, which really, it's a great day if he can turn a doorknob. So that's tough. That's a real tough thing. But I'm also suggesting might have to buy him a Dobro or something, see if that, maybe that'll do. Who knows? I don't know, just trying to keep a positive attitude about it, and he's definitely still Mike and he's on top of it, and he's working hard
Leah Roseman:
Now. Your style of playing, which combining bluegrass and jazz and many other styles of music, when you got into this, you developed a lot. So you dropped out of college way back? To play more, basically?
Darol Anger:
That's my little set pieces. My big career decision was to drop out of college, to play bluegrass music in pizza parlors. But I was in the right place at the right time. I was in the San Francisco Bay area at a time where it was cheap to live there. There was a lot of music, art and all kinds of stuff going on. The technical guys, all the Apple guys were in the garages soldering stuff together, and there was just a lot of creativity in that time. Yeah. So yeah, I was kind of ruined for traditional or any kind of pure style, whatever that is. Pure style is what some combination, some very specific combinations of any bout of other styles. So really, that's just kind of a shibboleth to use one of my favorite words this week. But yeah, so I was really interested in the Beatles.
That's the thing that got me into playing music in the first place. I mean, of that demographic, that generation where I was must've been like, yeah, it must've been 10 or 11 years old when the Beatles hit, and that was it for me. Oh yeah, I want to play music. So that just continued through my school years, and I didn't know fiddling or bluegrass existed until I was about halfway through high school. And then I went to see a rock band, actually, the Young Bloods, some people may remember the Young Bloods, Jesse Collin-Young, and they had a hit called Everybody Get Together, Try to Love One Another Right Now, you all get together. That didn't work, but it was a great song. And they had a song called Darkness. Darkness, which had a fiddle playing on the beginning of it, and I hadn't really heard that.
I was at that point, I had taken classical violin lessons, but I was also into Eric Clapton and the blues guitar players, Led Zeppelin stuff, all that kind of thing, Hendricks. And I liked violin, and I was playing in the school orchestra, but I didn't connect it with any of the electric guitar stuff, which I was also interested in. And then I went and I saw, well, the Young Bloods didn't have the fiddle player because that was David Linley playing in the studio with them. But the opening act was Sea Train, which was a rock band with Peter Rowan who was playing Telecaster, which was wild. Think of Peter Rowan, young Peter Rowan playing Telecaster and doing all his yodelling and storytelling and all that stuff. And Richard Greene playing just the most rocked out. He sounded like any of those great electric guitar players. He could play all that stuff and fast. And he played Orange Blossom special, and it was great. And yeah, it's just for a 14-year-old boy that's like, what else could you want? So I said, well, okay, well, there's already 200 guys ahead of me just in my high school on electric guitar. There's guys that can play both solos to Crossroads. I can only play that first solo.
And that's of course that famous Cream piece with Eric Clapton, his Crossroads. If you can play. Okay, can you play the first solo in Crossroads? Yeah, I can play that. We can play the second. Well, I'm working on it. So anyway, so I thought, well, I already kind of have a bunch of stuff together on violin. I could just transfer all the stuff and I've been doing on guitar over to violin, and I would have a niche. Nobody's doing that in my high school. So that was cool. And then just researching that and finding Richard Greene stuff, I discovered bluegrass, and that was great because Bluegrass was exciting, super rhythmic, highly structured music that had a big premium on virtuosity and playing fast. So again, for a 14-year-old boy, that's it. That's the thing. So working in all that stuff and everything that I was listening to, just thinking I could do all this stuff on violin.
Cool. And so when David Grisman came along with the Mule Skinner band, which was not exactly bluegrass and old in the way, which was bluegrass, but with a very kind of a west coast edge to it, Peter Rowan's compositions were about all kinds of things. It wasn't just about wanting to go to the little cabin by the lake or anything. There was all kinds of stuff, coded references to marijuana and all that stuff that we were into. And of course, John Hartford's incredible Aero-Plain record with Vassar Clements, who Vassar played with everybody. Vassar just was himself, no matter what. He played with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He was playing with rock bands, the Allman Brothers, John Hartford. That was a model for me that was just like, oh, okay, great. And then my other hero, Byron Berline, who was very kind to me early on in my career, he played on the Rolling Stones record, right? So this was, it's all part of the big pile of inspiring stuff. So that was what was happening in the seventies for me.
Leah Roseman:
This name Byron, I didn't know who that was.
Darol Anger:
Byron, yeah, great, great. Started as a Texas fiddle player and somehow for some reason moved to Los Angeles in the late sixties, early seventies, and he became a session player. Anytime anybody needed to fiddle for anything, they'd call Byron and Byron had cred up the wazoo. His dad, Lou Berline was a national fiddle contest winner. Byron went and won the contest, went with his dad the first time, and he was just one of those great Texas fiddle players, a great, great Texas, and his sound was so incredible. It sounded like an electric violin that kind of sound people, I think it was like bone conduction where it sounds like the sound is inside your head. Also, Vassar Clements had that sound where it just grabs you can't not listen.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned Richard Greene now. It was his influence that got you to figure out chopping.
Darol Anger:
Yes. Richard invented the chop in 1964 when Richard was playing with Bill Monroe, king of Bluegrass, and nobody else was doing it yet. And I just thought that was the coolest thing you could possibly do. What I was doing, I was playing well guitar and playing chords on guitar, and also in my school orchestra, I was usually last chair, second violin, sometimes first chair, second violin, but always second violin, never first. So we were playing all inner parts and accompanying parts, and that's kind of what I liked. It's what I was kind of used to. And so the chop was like, oh man, yeah, I can play accompanying parts and do all this stuff. And Richard showed it to me. I don't think it took me very long to get it, probably about half hour or something like that. And then just kind of using it as an accompaniment thing, because we were playing in bands that didn't have any drums. Sometimes you just need to and somebody would need to hit a backbeat. It's just how it is, because rhythm as the most, if you don't have rhythm and music, then you don't have danceability and then you don't have social music, and then it's just you got to have it. For me, it's an essential element of music.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, all your music is so groove based. I even went back and listened to Diary of a Fiddler from 1978, and I certainly, when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I was listening to the Turtle Island String Quartet.
Darol Anger:
Oh, cool. Oh, that's great.
Leah Roseman:
Tracy Silverman was one of my early guests on this podcast. I'll actually link his episode to this. So of course, we talked about all listening. You had him doing, expanding his horizons, chopping and all that.
Darol Anger:
Tracy is such a genius, and when I showed him the chop, I mean, he was one of those people that got it instantly and then has developed a whole program that really kind of takes it apart and says, well, why would you do it? How do you do it? Very, one of the smartest people and one of the greatest violists, that guy doesn't even, he doesn't know how good he is. He knows how good he is, but he just doesn't care. He'll just play whatever is needed. I just can't say enough good stuff about Tracy. Love that guy.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, so he plays six string electric violin for people who haven't heard him, but you normally play, do you play a five string normally, Darol?
Darol Anger:
I do play a five string acoustic.
And as far as how long I've been playing, which I just clocked over, I just, the little clock ticked over at 60 this year, 60 years of playing the violin or some kind of violin shaped object. And who had the five string acoustic was basically invented pretty much by Johnny Gimble. And then who was the great Texas swing violinist who has played with everybody from Willie Nelson on down. And in fact, I think he even played with, oh man, some of those original Texas swing guys. And then I heard Bobby Hicks was the next guy to drill a hole in his violin peg head and put an extra peg in there and have five strings. So Bobby did that, and then it, nothing happened for a long time, and then started building these things in Illinois, a guy named John Silakowski. And then once there were fiddles that were available, the gates kind of opened up. So the first person that I was playing with was Brittany. She had a five string almost from the beginning. And I'm going, man, that's great. That's a really cool five string. I liked that. I am not a big fan of the high strings anyway. I want to go low, but it took me a while to find something that sounded like myself.
One of the things that people say, well, are you virtuoso? And for me, I'm not really virtuoso. I'm a stylist. I have a sound that I kind of can't help sounding like myself. I'm bad imitator. I'm a pretty good, I just work pretty hard to stay connected to my heart and my music, and when I'm playing, just put it out there what I'm feeling. So that's not always good. If you're feeling bad, you got to buck it up. So that's going on with that. So if you pick an instrument, it's got to sound like you. And so it was hard. It took a while to find a five string, but I love the five string. I have a four string, four string, like Hanneke Cassel says, you mean? Oh, a four string, four string fiddle? You mean a violin, which is of course, like violins have four strings for the last 200 years, although there is a five string fiddle violin dated 1689, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you may know about this, Leah, you're nodding, maybe you know about this, but it's like, what happened? What went on there? Somebody made a five string, and it just looks like a regular, it's got all the attributes of a modern violin.
Leah Roseman:
Somebody I interviewed was playing with a fiddler, and they were playing a Baroque Five string violin, I forget the name. So I'd looked it up. So I was familiar with this.
Darol Anger:
So a lot of this is probably when people got an orchestra and the orchestras got bigger. The parts had to be standardized. People were playing stuff, custom orders, but if you had half the people with four strings, half the people with five strings, how do you write a part for it? Doesn't make sense. So yeah, things got standardized when the orchestras got big.
Leah Roseman:
Well, unless you're a double bass player.
Darol Anger:
Yeah, right. Yeah, the three string basses, all that stuff,
Leah Roseman:
Apparently a lot of them have five strings and yeah, it's a thing. Now. Anyway, let's get back to this album. So I'm probably not pronouncing names. So is it Enion Pelta?
Darol Anger:
Enion Pelta, I'm going to just grab my copy here. I happen to have a think I'm in good with the guy that made this and I got an advanced copy. Let's see. Okay, yeah, Enion Pelta, who was actually one of the older players on this, she came for some lessons back in maybe late 1990s or something like that, and just a great fiddle player who's living in Colorado and is doing a lot of things now. She's had a band, this band that sort of a Eastern European grass band. They do a lot of, it's called Tarka, and she's just one of those people that she can play anything. She can play bluegrass, she can play jazz, she can play Eastern European stuff. She's actually getting in with the University of Colorado there in, or maybe it's Colorado State. Anyway, it's in Denver, and she's starting to run a string program, roots string program there. She's just a terrific musician. And yeah, I love playing with her.
She's one of those people that can play, she can do, she can imitate me better and I can imitate myself. She's really funny, but she does a lot of things really well. Yeah, that was fun because that was a very, she picked out. So the whole thing was like, I didn't want to pay royalties. I knew there was going to be a lot of material on this, so it's all my compositions, which is, it was kind of fun because digging up what composition would work with which person, I was matching things to people. Some people chose the piece that they wanted to do, and Enion chose this crazy sort of Middle Eastern tune. I wanted to, okay, I'm going to try to write one of those Middle Eastern tunes where everybody plays the melody together and it's just like, it's got funny notes in it and stuff.
So she liked that and she played the crap out of it. She's just a great improviser, and that was really fun. There was a lot of just that's on the loud CD because she just kind of tore it up and actually she's great, she did a couple of things that nobody else did on the record. She did kind of a finger picking thing at the beginning and some other stuff. I remember part of her solo was one of those things where it sounds like feedback, just like it was sort of an elephant and some rhinos and feedback altogether. So it was very kind of African sounding, I guess. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I mean, what I find listening to this album, there is just so much variety and color to it, even though it's just a couple of string instruments.
Darol Anger:
That's great to hear, because really if you're talking mostly just two fiddles, you really have to, that could be so deadly. That's always been something when I'm writing music, I am writing in different styles that occur to me, and that's just something that happens. So we were able to worked with that, and of course, people sound different too, and everybody's got their proclivities. So yeah. Thank you. I'm glad. I was hoping that's what I was going for. It was enough variety to make it feel like it was worth if you didn't just get tired. I mean, you still really have to fiddling, you have to fiddles to this record. But yeah, thank you for that. I'm glad that it feels like there's enough variety.
Leah Roseman:
So if we could get into your teaching a little bit, not like Berkeley was a huge thing, and also your online artist works. Where do you want to start?
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, with Martin Hayes, Tracy Silverman, Brittany Haas, Joe K. Walsh, Leslie DeShazor, Julie Lyonn Lieberman and Sara Caswell. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month.You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend? Thanks! Now back to Darol.
Darol Anger:
Yeah, well, maybe the online thing, because it's ongoing. I've been doing that for maybe 13, 14 years now, doing an online fiddle school with a company called ArtistWorks, which is nice that they're doing it. A lot of people are doing their own programs now, and it just seems like so much work, and I'm still trying to get out and tour and play and record my own stuff and write music and have a garden. So having a company do a lot of the work there is cool, and especially because there's a technical thing that's very cool about, it can actually, if you sign up, it's a subscription model. If you sign up for this, you can actually record yourself with your phone and upload your little recording of you playing something into the site. And then I respond to that personally, maybe a few days or a couple of weeks later, you get a personal response from me about what you're doing and how you're doing it. And that's some of the other companies Online lesson things don't do that. You just sign up for, you get to all these lessons and they're great, but you're kind of struggling through it on your own. So that's kind of a good thing. I'm liking that, and it just keeps going on.
I've developed kind of a nice relationship with a lot of folks who've been on it for five or six years, and they make progress. That's great. A lot of dear friends. And when I go play shows, some of those folks will show up and then I get to meet them in person, and it's always great. So that's cool. And then I spent 10 years at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Leah Roseman:
Before we get into Berklee, I just wanted to follow up with ArtistWorks. Yeah, I talked to Brittany about it as well. I mean, I had done a little bit of video feedback with people early in the pandemic who were in different time zones. I find it a hard thing to do, and I was wondering if you get a little overwhelmed, so many people that you're working with.
Darol Anger:
Yeah, well, there's other folks, friends of mine who are also run programs on ArtistWorks, Mike Marshall, the mandolin player, Tony Trishka, the banjo player and guitar player, Brian Sutton, the guitar player. We're all in kind of the same kind of bluegrass category at ArtistWorks. And Mike especially, I think he gets a lot of people. I think the fiddle players are a little more shy, so not everybody is going to make a video of themselves bad enough to hear yourself on tape, but to see yourself on video trying to play, I know that it's kind of miserable for me. I make faces when I'm playing and it's just from 30 feet away in a show. It's not that bad, but if you write up on a camera, so I get a regular, I just have to stay on top of it, but every week I just go in and do five or six or eight or 12 or 17.
But that's the thing. I mean, it's usually the submissions are only about three minutes or so, three or four minutes. And then what's nice is I can watch those a few times and really zone into what's going on. I don't have to just make a spot judgment because it's a lesson we got to get out of there in 45 minutes. It's also nice for both the student and the teacher, because you can do this at three in the morning in their basement if you want. You don't have to make an appointment. That's the worst for me, having to make an online appointment. I always miss them. I almost missed this one, matter of fact, but Sharon, my wife, reminded me and I was able to clean up. I was out digging in the garden. So yeah, so that's nice. It's kind an on-demand thing in some ways. All those lessons, you can just take 'em anytime. And then the exchange thing is also kind of this, you can listen. It's always there no matter what time it is. And so people with kids or schedules, people with lives can fit this stuff in and the cracks, and you can just do it 15 minutes or whatever length you want at any time. So that's a great thing.
Leah Roseman:
And your wife, Sharon, she plays banjo and bass.
Darol Anger:
She is a bass player and a mandolin player. She's a great
Leah Roseman:
Oh, mandolin.
Darol Anger:
Great mandolin player. Yeah. Sharon and I both have the distinction of having played in bands with Tony Rice, which a lot of your viewers way know that name because he's kind of one of those guitar gods. He's up in the pantheon with Django Reinhardt and Eric Clapton and those folks. Yeah, very intense experience. So yeah, Sharon's got a mandolin program on the competing platform, Peghead Nation, but she doesn't have to do the interactions. She just makes these great lessons. She's an amazing teacher.
Leah Roseman:
So if we could jump over to years at Berklee.
Darol Anger:
Oh yeah. Well, yeah. I was at Berklee from 2007 to 2017 or maybe 2008 to whatever it was. It was amazing times 10 years of having a day job, but it was probably the best day job a musician, professional musician could have, because basically you did almost 40 hours, but they were compressed into two days. I'd get there at eight in the morning and have private lessons until about nine at night and do that for maybe more like 20 hours a week. But whatever it was, it felt like 400 some weeks you finish up at nine. Really, all these kids, I mean, most of 'em were kids in the sense of being under 21, but you do get some adults, people in their late twenties who want to go back and really complete their education. They just want to get serious about music. But the cream just the best music.
It's Berklee. It's got a worldwide reputation. And so I get these kids that were coming in, they were playing, I mean, as far as in the amount, the number of notes, if you wanted to just a note count per minute, if you could, you wanted 800 notes per minute or something like that, these kids could do it. So a lot of it was just kind of reminding people why we do stuff, why we play music. These kids are coming out of things where they've been practicing like crazy just to get into Berklee, and then maybe they're the best in their neighborhood, and their mom thinks they're a genius and they maybe are a genius, but all of a sudden they're plopped into the school with all the other geniuses from every other neighborhood, and they're going, ah, oh God, I'm not special anymore. I better practice my butt off.
And that's when you get hand injuries and things like that. So trying to keep people centered and sane. It's a big part of the Berklee experience, just trying to remind them what they're doing and keep 'em coming back to themselves and why what they're doing. And some of these kids, I'm thinking about people like Ella Jordan and John Mailander who are on the record. Ella came from a musical, her sister, and she played Texas swing and Texas fiddling. They came straight from Texas to Boston, and John had known a little bit before that he came from San Diego, also a brilliant fiddle player. (Music)
But they were all asking questions like, well, why would you want to play all these weird notes against the seventh chord? What does that do? And those are the questions you want to hear. Even though it brought me up short, I felt like, oh, well, just assumed that that's why you're here, right? You're here at Berklee, so you can play a bunch of weird notes against the seventh court. I'm going like, well, what are we saying? When do we play a B flat and a C natural against a chord? Which has those particular notes are just like a half step away from the notes that are in the arpeggio and sometimes in jazz. The thing is, you're never more than the half step away from the right note, but sometimes a half step away is the farthest you can possibly get from the right note, right?
So, and it was so great, I said, John, you just asked the question of it is the most important question. One of the most important questions in music is like, why do we want to play these funny notes? Because are we saying, what are we saying? Are we saying I'm smart? Are we saying I know a bunch of stuff? What is it? So that's the meat. This where I was trying to get there with everybody, whether or not they were studying jazz, there's a lot of those folks. The only note of jazz that they probably played was maybe in school, and they're not playing jazz now, but they are improvising, which is really cool. Jenna Moynihan, one of the great Celtic fiddle players of all time, I don't care who you, she is just so is just hearing her, is all the fiddle players put together in one and in this beautiful, just so, perfection personified. She's just a beautiful, beautiful player. So yeah, I mean, I got her playing some seventh chords a little bit, but mostly it was just trying to get, just getting relaxed, just playing, being able to just play something off the top of your head, just improvising in general, whatever style you're playing in. (Music)
And just enjoy it. So a lot of it was just playing together in a positive emotional and mental environment, just like we're doing on this record. And that was the program.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of interaction with the other faculty, Berklee must have changed a lot over the years. Joe K. Walsh was also on this podcast. I think he was like, when he was there, there wasn't really a mandolin program as there is now,
Darol Anger:
Right? There really wasn't. And they had just hired a great man player, John McGann, who might be familiar name to some folks, he had some records on Rounder, and he was definitely a beloved figure there at Berklee. It was a small, it still is. It's a small string faculty, but super supportive. There's the joke about college faculties in general. Why is there so much backbiting and backstabbing and just horrible feelings going on in academia? It is because the stakes are so low, but I just feel so lucky to have such a positive experience. Mimi Rapson, Rob Thomas, Matt Glaser, who really put the thing together, Melissa Howe, I thank all those folks on the record. There's a lot of thank yous going on. These kind of Pied Piper types like Matt Glaser and Alistair Fraser, who really just draw young people into this world where they can have meaningful, emotional and physical interactions with other people of any age, including their own age without the weirdness. It's just intense, meaningful interactions with other people through music that you don't always get. How do you get that something where, I mean, you can sit at a cafe and talk about life and have a real good intense conversation, but when you add in just getting in sync with another person at so many different levels, it's not just breath, it's heart rhythm. It's thinking about, it's thinking, what is that other person going to do? How am I going to make that better?
It's a conversation where both people are talking at once. That's amazing. And you make something that's bigger than just the sum of its parts, and it's uncanny and beautiful, and I don't know if I'd even still be alive without music. So there you go.
Leah Roseman:
You've toured a lot over the years. Do you want to talk a little bit about playing challenges or staying relaxed? We talked about avoiding injury. Do you want to get into any of that?
Darol Anger:
Oh yeah, sure. The fiddle, all these string instruments, cello, fiddle, anything, bowed string instruments. It's just the learning curve is pretty steep at the beginning. It's hard at the beginning, and then in the middle, you've played for a few years. It's also hard and kind of steep. And if you've been playing a long time, it's also hard. It's just hard all the time. You have to stay in shape. It's like, this is the thing that lately I've been thinking about the idea that a fretted instrument got all the lines and dots. It's sort of like a contract because you've signed a contract up here at the peg head, and then everything's was going to follow. If you get it right here, if you get everything worked out, then you can kind of trust that everything up here is going to happen properly. You just throw your fingers down.
But with a violin is just a big, or already it is just a big blank black space. And so with the fretted instruments, it's civilization, but with the violin, you kind of have to kill your own food and build a fire to cook it every time you want to eat. Right? It's like the wild. You're always out there kind of constucting your own reality, installing the frets every time you play. So it's like, I feel kind of this sort of, there's a tribe of crazy people who just persist. We're just pursuing perfection. You can get the possibility of getting perfectly in tune on a bowed instrument. The possibility is there somewhere, somewhere out there, it's there. You can sort of maybe get there some days for a minute. So pursuing that, and of course the range of expression is very wide. That's one of the great things. And I'm pretty proud, like you mentioned, there is a lot of variation in the way people sound, what we're doing, the range of sounds. That was part of the original thing with the Diary of Fiddler with the original, was I kind of just playing around with accompaniment to all these great fiddle players and well, what can you do all the different things that you can do to make a complete sound.
Just suggest the sound of bass, drums, piano, guitar, whatever, with just a violin or just a viola or a baritone violin, which is lower than a viola, but higher than a cello. And since then, I've gotten in this baritone violin that is the same as the cello. It's the same range as a cello, except it's got an E string, which the cellos are all hate me for. And that's a great thing too. Then you have a much wider range of, so I can play bass notes and things like that with that instrument, so that's fine. About half the record is me playing that baritone five string violin. And that's cool. So that helps make more variation in the sound.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You'd mentioned earlier in your first diary of a fiddler that Martin Hayes was on it, the Irish Fiddler.
Darol Anger:
Yes. Yeah. I kind of had the Celtic connection. It was so cool. I don't consider myself a Celtic player. I'm not very good at it. I've been working on it. Jenna has been helping me, actually. Jenna Moynihan, I just get kind of balled up in the little squiggly dos and squaly das. It's good to be all those little ornaments that are so beautiful when they're played right. And they're so annoying when they're not. But she just keeps telling me, well just relax, and I'm going, trying to, so yeah, I don't really, but I love the style and I can make a frame. And that was beautiful. I did two things with Martin. We did a version of a Beatles tune, which was so beautiful because Martin, he's got that lonesome sound. He says it himself. It is just that beautiful wistful thing. And so when you put something like, "I get by with a little help from my friends", sad, and it's happy at the same time. It's just one of those indescribable songs. And then we also did, and I didn't know this at the time, I asked Martin to play Banish Misfortune, which is sort of the Celtic players. It's kind of like Rocky Top or something, or Orange Blossom Special. One of those tune that, oh, nobody plays that tune. It's so dumb. We don't play. That's like, nobody plays that tune. It's overplayed.
Yeah. But I had kind of a really more interesting arrangement for it. We changed keys. I had a pretty fancy a lot of plucking and bouncing the bow accompaniment. And Martin, he said, well, normally I don't play that tune, but with you, I will do that. And I'm like, wow, thanks, man. And it worked of course, if you don't want. So those kinds of things. And then of course, I got to play with Alistair Fraser, the great Scottish Fiddler. And that guy, he's, again, one of the most influential fiddle players in history. I think he's really gone beyond, he's spun a whole three or four now, generations of post Celtic fiddle players, people that have a strong roots in Celtic music, but are playing all kinds of music, pop music, everything. The guy is just such an inspiration. So we just played, just sat down, we didn't have any playing at all, and went on to playing some crazy stuff.
He picked up this crazy instrument made by a fellow named Danny Farrington, who makes custom acoustic guitars for the stars in the shape of whatever. You can make a guitar in the shape of a tea cup, or then the shape of the country, music star', swimming pool or whatever. So we made this crazy shape violin that can't even be tuned up to pitch. It's just like a little cockle shell. It's just made out of really thin wood, and it's just got this crazy shape. Half of it is missing, but it still sounds cool. And so Alistair picked that up and like, oh, I will play this. Let's goof around on this. And so we wound up playing some crazy, like a Straspey which is kind of a march, kind of a martial March kind of thing. And we just turned it into this crazy, just out jam that went on and on. So he's a real inspiration to me. And I played a duet with, well, Natalie MacMaster, who is Celtic in the sense that it's, yeah, it's like maybe the original Scottish fiddling from Cape Breton and Natalie is super inspiring to me. I think she brings out when I wrote a tune just for her to play with me, and I think it's one of my better tunes. She's just so great and a beautiful personality. You probably interviewed her. I don't know. She's just so wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I haven't, but she plays with our orchestra quite often here in Ottawa.
Darol Anger:
Oh, fantastic. That's great.
Leah Roseman:
But Martin, my interview with Martin Hayes, I have to say, is one of my most listened to interviews on this podcast. It was great. And he played quite a bit too.
Darol Anger:
Cool. Oh, he's so articulate. And yeah, just very highly, a highly evolved fella. That's how I see Martin.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I'll link that too so people can check it out. So I've made lists. There's so many tracks on this album, and I don't want to leave people out, but if there's things you definitely
Darol Anger:
Want to, yeah, it's a lot. I know
Casey Driessen, who is kind of the link to the original Diary. He was on the original right at the end. It was like he and Hanneke Cassel were the young Turks, and we did a thing or recorded that. Wow. Somewhere up in Vermont, somewhere in a big hall, empty hall. And so yeah, I had to get Casey because he's done so much with the chop, and I had this great sort of like a gospel tune kind of thing, and it just was perfect. I was so proud of how that turned out. Casey really worked on it, and we had quite a bit of, it is through composed, it's written, and then of course, we played our solos back and forth and did a couple of mutual solos. But the ins and outs are very highly arranged. He just learned it. And man, it was just great. I love working with Casey so methodical and works really hard, and we get a good blend with baritone and his five string. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
So do you want to talk about Emmy Phelps?
Darol Anger:
I was with Emmy for the 10 years that I was in Boston teaching, and I think she's obviously a musical genius and one of those kind of invisible virtuosos who was just, could kind of do anything you needed to do on the instrument. Great musical memory. I never had to worry about whether she would remember it. We were doing all these really complicated arrangements, never had to worry about whether she would remember the arrangement. She remembered them better than I did. Really the first vocalist that I was able to work with in a meaningful way. One of the greatest singers I think that I've ever heard, really. And just a beautiful, extremely complicated and very deep person who I miss terribly every day.
And I am glad we were able to make a record records recordings, but in the of a record documents of the music that we were able to make. We've got three, this is five years now since she passed away, and this was the first year I've actually been able to even just listen to the, she passed away on the solstice June 22nd, 2020. And so yeah, this last solstice a couple of weeks ago now we've just gotten into July here of 2025, I think. Still 2025. Yeah, five years later. I was able to listen to some of the records and just not completely come apart. But yeah, I just can only be grateful that we were able to be together for basically about 11 years.
Leah Roseman:
I'm so sorry for your loss. I hadn't heard of her, but then I listened to your albums and her albums because they're right on your Bandcamp, so that was a wonderful discovery to know about her.
Darol Anger:
Yeah, she'll just take you to the deepest place and yeah, definitely. I just lucky to have been able to be around her for the time that I was.
Leah Roseman:
And Darol, you're tuned The Crooked Road to Emy, was that written for her?
Darol Anger:
Yeah, she made a recording. We spent some time at the Grand Targhee Festival, and she just kind of audited Daryl Scott's songwriting class. And of course, she was totally the star. And of course, she felt bad about that because other people had paid, and Emy had been doing it for so long because Darryl just kind of latched onto her as somebody who he could work with as an example for the other people in the class and all this stuff. And she did write, she wrote a great song about her father in that class. That is incredible. And also, so we, Darryl Scott, he's a genius and a great songwriter, and she decided to cut one of Darryl Scott's songs, which is The Crooked Road, which is a beautiful song about I walk a crooked road. I realized that looking back at my life, it was the straight and narrow for me, even though it was a crooked road, all these beautiful ideas about just trying to do what you do and being yourself, all the themes that Emy's so obsessed with anyway. And so she said, well, yeah, we should have a fiddle tune to go with this. Should we come out of this tune with a fiddle tune? So can you write one? And so basically, I wrote that tune, the Crooked Road, which is basically, it's based on the Buffalo Gals, if you think about it.
It's the same chords as Buffalo Gals. And if you did a Canadian style Texas melody to Buffalo Gals, it would probably sound like that. It's got a little crooked thing in it. Yeah, it's got an extra beat. So it's crooked in the sense that we talk about fiddle tunes as being crooked if they have odd numbers of beats or bars. And so that's always going to be connected to Emy, in my mind, that tune. And so I played it with Tristan Clarridge, another former student who I've worked with forever, who was also very, he and his sister Tashina were very tight with Emy Phelps. They lived close by, and Emy would put them up. They would do house concerts at Emy's house when Emy was living in Ashland, Oregon. And so we both have a very strong connection, like a independent, but super strong connection to Emy. So it made sense for me and Tristan, you can hear it. You can hear though, loving that one because we both miss her. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
In terms of your current projects, so you're playing with Mr. Sun?
Darol Anger:
Yeah. What a great group. Mr. Sun is in his 12th year. Yeah. Well, Mr. Sun is my main band and has been for 12 years. I love that band. I think it's ironic that I would probably still be playing in the same format. Violin, mandolin, guitar, bass, kind of the band that I kind of started with, right? Well, two mandolins, the David Grisman band was basically that format. But these guys are not only at the top of their field, they're all some of the best players ever, but they're fully individuated. You can tell exactly who's playing with me. I mean, that's kind of my thing too. So we have this, you can tell it's Mr. Son, like, bam. And we're good friends. We love each other, and there's all the usual stuff in a relationship. There's little annoyances and things like that. But basically, we are just committed. We love playing together, and the music is, there's nothing like it.
So I love that group. We've recorded another record, which will come out in a few months. I don't know when.
But I don't know, I'm trying to think of something I could wrap up here as far as the record, which is, I'm just so excited about it coming out, and it really feels like sort of a valedictory kind of project. I feel. It's something that I'm proud of that I was able to work with all these incredible musicians, and I certainly don't take responsibility for the way they sound or anything like that. They sound like when they showed up, they sounded like themselves, and they were already great, but I feel like I didn't mess anything up with them. And we had a great time. And I think that if you're just being able to play, this is a lot of improvising, just playing together, just these sort of open musical conversations that just go wherever they go, and there's some really magical moments, especially in the endings. Some of the endings we just kept going until it ended and we didn't even know it was going to end. And then all of a sudden, this perfect moment happened. (Music)
And it happened again and again. So just these kind of lovely, just little episodes of life where two people who really have mutual respect and love are interacting in a musical way according to their individual personalities. It's just a beautiful thing, and I just feel so lucky to be able to make music in that way. That's kind of what it's about for me, life and everything. So yeah, if this was, I hope it's not going to be the last project I ever do, but if it was, I would be fine. I could leave. Anyway, so that's it.
Leah Roseman:
I really want to thank you for taking the time to do this today.
Darol Anger:
Oh, it's been a pleasure. And thank you so much for making this happen. I really enjoyed talking. I know I've been talking a lot.
Leah Roseman:
That's the idea. But I'm curious, you were gardening right before this. What are you growing out there?
Darol Anger:
Oh, well, it's Tennessee down here and just growing. You can grow just about anything right now. The tomatoes are coming up. They're doing pretty well. We got green ones. Okra, of course, since it's the South, you got to grow some okra and peppers. A lot of different peppers. Yeah, growing some, I'm not a big fan of hot peppers, but I do like these cubanels, which are really good. They grow well here, and you just pick 'em when they're really small and then fry 'em up, and then some poblanos, which are always nice. I've just put in a bunch of squash, different sizes of squash, so hoping to get some really good squash plants going. We're going to want to eat a lot of that stuff this summer. So yeah, just kind of standard stuff. Not a huge garden, but big enough to make a difference.
Leah Roseman:
How do you deal with the okra? How do you cook it? Do you pickle it?
Darol Anger:
Oh, I like pickled okra. Sharon doesn't, but if you just fry 'em, they're okay. Yeah, if you can just bread 'em or just dry fry 'em, they're not so disgusting.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support the series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
