The King of Crossover

-- violin n. any instrument of the modern family of string instruments played with a bow, developed from the viol and characterized by four strings, a somewhat rounded back, and f-shaped sound holes, etc.

fiddle n. a violin. . . . Now usually humorous or deprecatory.

--Webster’s New World Dictionary

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Once upon a time, the violin was a gritty street instrument, disdained in favor of the patrician viol. But the gradual supplanting of the mellow viol by the more brilliant violin was one of the defining instrumental characteristics of the Baroque era. And although the violin has been an icon representing European art music at its loftiest for generations now, in some quarters an arriviste’s embarrassment is still felt over its fiddling country cousins.

In these crossover times, it may not be surprising that the worlds of the violinist and the fiddler are beginning to come together again. But it is surely notable that the most durable bridges are being constructed from the fiddling side.

Consider Mark O’Connor. Just named the Country Music Assn.’s Musician of the Year for the sixth consecutive time, he also has a new recording, “Appalachia Waltz,” a collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and composer-bassist Edgar Meyer, that made its debut on the Billboard classical chart at No. 1. And although he was one of Nashville’s premiere sidemen in the ‘80s, working on more than 450 albums by artists ranging from country hero Willie Nelson to New Age harpist Andreas Vollenweider, these days he is more likely to be found fronting a symphony orchestra than backing a country star.

He has even composed a Fiddle Concerto that takes the cultural history of the instrument for a scenario.

“With the Fiddle Concerto, what I tried to explore are the bridges to cross between folk fiddling and classical music,” O’Connor says. He is speaking, with quiet animation, in a hotel lounge between a rehearsal and a performance with the Phoenix Symphony conducted by Doc Severinsen. The tall, rangy musician attracts some stares when he gets up to demonstrate a point about posture, but then he has already been accosted twice by fans and seems inured to public attention.

“The Fiddle Concerto really is a journey, a travelogue. In the first movement it sets up a conversation between a violinist and a fiddler. Each of the two personas interpret the themes in their own style.

“But that’s not enough. So in the second movement, the music goes back in time to the Baroque era, where it’s possible that the violinist and the fiddler could have been the same person. Then there’s a transition that hints at the present day. As the third movement takes off, the two styles are now completely in sync, meaning you cannot tell the difference between the modern-day classical violinist or the modern-day fiddler. I use an old, old dance form, the jig, that has traditions in both styles.”

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Though crowned by success, O’Connor’s journey to this point has been a difficult one, personally and artistically. At 35, he is self-possessed, radiating joy onstage and soft-spoken zeal in conversation. But as a child in Seattle, he struggled with both family problems and his own musical identity. His parents were both dance instructors and O’Connor and his younger sister were trained first in that art form. Although he had early success with the guitar, winning a statewide competition when he was 10, it was the discovery of fiddling--through a Sons of the Pioneers concert--that really unleashed O’Connor musically. He tried to make a violin out of cardboard, and when his parents could finally afford a real instrument for him, the best he could find in the way of an instructor was an only slightly more experienced 13-year-old girl.

“The defining moment in my early music education was discovering that I could be somebody unique through my instrument and have people respond to it,” O’Connor says. “I remember the very occasion. It was five weeks after I got my hands on a violin, and I was already playing at a square dance. I remember getting bored, because I only knew three tunes and they wanted me to keep playing all night. I said, ‘I don’t know any more tunes.’ They said, ‘Well, play those again.’ And again, and again.

“I realized that in order to please myself, I had to find out what these little tunes could yield, what they could give me. And I started improvising that very night, changing a note here and there, making substitutions. I didn’t know what to call it, but I felt like I was doing something good with music.”

A few months later, O’Connor got himself to Weiser, Idaho, where he captured the under-12 division at the National Old-Time Fiddlers’ Competition. More important, he met Benny Thomasson, then 64 and the grand master of Texas-style fiddling. Thomasson was living in Washington state, about two hours from O’Connor, who began to travel to his home and stay overnight, soaking up hundreds of fiddle tunes.

“Benny Thomasson was the significant mentor that somebody like me needs,” O’Connor states solemnly. “He has to be considered one of the great innovators in American music, when all is said and done. What he did in fiddling was revolutionary, taking it from a street type of legacy to a highly disciplined art form that takes a lot of time and careful study to be able to articulate.

“He was also a really nice gentleman and he seemed like he could be my grandfather. So he represented a whole life away from my family and the problems that we had. I learned so much about music, but also about growing into my talent and maturing as an older person.”

The key element in Thomasson’s fiddling for O’Connor was its creative mutability. “What’s different about that style,” O’Connor says, “is that it involves influences in music that were in Texas at the time that Benny was honing in on this new direction in old-time fiddling. The big thing that was happening in the ‘20s and ‘30s was Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. So you give Bob Wills the credit for developing a new style of music by fusing country and hillbilly music along with polka music from Mexico and jazz from New York, which he heard on the radio.”

As befits the professor of traditional and progressive fiddling at Vanderbilt University, O’Connor then launches into an enthusiastic and detailed comparison of different fiddling styles, but the discussion always returns to improvisation and poly-stylistic creativity.

“That’s what I like, mixing it up and involving different styles.”

The joys of multiplicity are quite apparent in “Appalachia Waltz,” the new recording of trios and duos--many clearly reflecting Texas-style fiddle music--performed by O’Connor, Ma and Meyer. According to O’Connor, the project was Meyer’s idea for his initial outing on the Sony Classical label, although actually making the recording came only after long gestation. A composer and bassist as comfortable writing for and performing with the Emerson String Quartet as he is with the Modern Mandolin Quartet, Meyer particularly wanted to do something new with Ma. To that end, he enlisted fellow Nashville resident O’Connor, with whom he had worked often before--Meyer, for example, is the bassist in the recording of O’Connor’s String Quartet, which is coupled with his Fiddle Concerto.

“We would be handing back and forth floppy disks, DAT tapes, audio tapes, sheet music, having people running back and forth between our houses,” O’Connor recalls of the their effort to create material to interest Ma. “I would write something and he would arrange it, or he would start something and I would finish it. We did some things completely together. It was a big responsibility to keep the world’s greatest cellist happy.”

Ma was indeed happy. “It’s just so vibrant and so exciting,” he has said about the Texas style. “It acts like a magnet--you’re irresistibly drawn to it.” He booked the new trio in a couple of concerts, and the recording followed. With the release of the album last month, the three musicians began a concert tour two weeks ago in Tokyo. It comes to Los Angeles this week, courtesy of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts.

Do not expect a literal re-creation of the popular album in concert, however. Not only do some of the pieces include opportunities for improvisation, but the order will be changed and the group has three other works that never made it onto the recording.

“Live, we like playing all the duets back-to-back, whereas on record I think that would have been too much,” O’Connor says. “Edgar really stressed a mixed-bag kind of approach; so we’ve got fiddle tunes, we’ve got Celtic tunes, we wrote some things that were kind of easy-going, some jazzy things, funky things, aggressive kind of stuff. I think what happened was that all of us ended up liking it all.”

Although O’Connor’s development as a composer now seems to have certain inevitability to it, he was very reluctant to take the steps that he has in recent years. He has always composed or improvised his own music--of the 15 albums to date under his own name, only the first three were largely traditional. But as a young musician new to Nashville more than 12 years ago--”The Seattle scene was not helpful to a person like me, a lot of jealousy there,” he explains--O’Connor was sucked into the voracious maw of session work.

The material rewards were many, but the intense schedule and constant work for others left him with a failed marriage and an uncertain sense of his own musical worth and direction. Although newly remarried and brimming with musical and personal confidence, the artistic doubts of those years still seem painful.

“What I didn’t have the confidence for, or what I stopped short of, was putting 100% of my time into my own music,” O’Connor muses. “I was used to the idea of people calling me a hot kid, or up-and-coming. But when people started comparing me to musicians like Jean-Luc Ponty and Stephane Grappelli, I thought, ‘I can do more to deserve this lofty position that I guess I’m working toward. What is it that they’re doing that I’m not?’

“I realized that Ponty and Grappelli, for many, many years, had spent 100% of their musical time with their own music and dedicated their lives to their own music. I, on the other hand, was dedicating only about 10%, max, to my music. I couldn’t help but wonder, what would happen if all of a sudden I gave all of this up, doing all these sessions and television shows, helping other people with their careers.

“And so I did it. In 1990 I just gave it up cold turkey. I sat there in my living room, twiddling my thumbs. It was real tough to deal with. For the first time, I was dedicating my time to my own creative possibilities.”

From that came the Fiddle Concerto, itself another long process of growth for O’Connor, who taught himself orchestration via textbooks. The Fiddle Concerto had its first performances in 1993, and in 1995 he released a recording of the work on Warner with conductor Marin Alsop and her Concordia orchestra. During this period O’Connor created a popular one-man fiddle show and recorded several successful albums, such as “New Nashville Cats,” which won a Grammy in 1992, and “Heroes,” on which he plays with violinists who have been big influences on him, including Grappelli, Ponty, Doug Kershaw and Pinchas Zukerman.

O’Connor has an album of his solo work--including his six violin Caprices, as well as pieces for guitar and mandolin--coming out early next year. Also due is a recording of his second fiddle concerto, the “Tennessee” Concerto (with Alsop conducting the St. Louis Symphony), in which, O’Connor says, the soloist does not compromise his basic fiddling style but rather draws the orchestra across the stylistic bridge toward him.

Here in Phoenix, O’Connor’s performance is on the pops series, but he has recently performed on a program with the Fourth Symphony of Beethoven (his favorite composer), and believes that the Fiddle Concerto actually works best with more complex music.

“Every audience is valid,” O’Connor says, “but ‘pops’ is a label that I see going out of style. I think that to accommodate the Appalachia Waltzes, the Bobby McFerrins, Marcus Roberts, Chick Corea’s Mozart, there’s going to have to be something new.”

The urge to reach all audiences is an external manifestation of O’Connor’s multi-stylistic obsessions. And although his missionary zeal for fiddling is quite real, even his teaching is more about unleashing creativity than about preserving a particular style of music.

“I want to make sure that we turn out people who love music, who want it in their lives. There can only be so many professionals, but everybody should have the chance to have art in their life.”

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* Mark O’Connor, Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer perform Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m., at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood. $44 to $47. (310) 825-2101.