Home Across the Range

A lazy summer afternoon, and a conversation with a fiddler back home on the farm. Sounds relaxing enough, but pay attention. Don’t let the sun on the avocado trees or the eloquently spun lilt of a fiddle tune prove too lulling--information overload is a real risk here.

The discussion darts among topics: the possible Turkish origin of distinctly Appalachian music, country-music politics, Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun’s way with a chorus, the Kobe-Shaq Laker dynamic and the best approach to violin pedagogy.

The fiddler, obviously and uniquely, must be Mark O’Connor.

O’Connor, 39, is one of the world’s truly great improvisers, and for the last decade he has been playing increasingly complex riffs on his career, transforming himself from a country-pop sideman, band member and soloist into a classical-crossover-roots-jazz -et undefinable cetera composer. Probably the best-known step on this journey was “Appalachia Waltz,” a crossover collaboration with superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma and composer-bassist Edgar Meyer that dominated the classical charts in 1996.

Right now, he has a gaggle of wildly varied concerts, CDs and other projects working. The release of his first classical choral composition on CD is imminent. A swing tribute to his mentor, the late jazz great Stephane Grappelli, is already out. He will play three times--in programs emphasizing classical music and jazz--as a composer in residence at the Summerfest chamber music festival in La Jolla starting this week.

He’s also the host of his first West Coast fiddle conference, and will begin a national tour with Metamorphosen, the New York-based chamber orchestra, in support of the September release of “American Seasons.” The recording featuring his new concerto draws inspiration from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and Shakespeare’s ages of man imagery from “As You Like It.”

“Ten years ago, when somebody like Yo-Yo Ma did duets with somebody like Bobby McFerrin, it was completely crossover, something you did just for fun and then came back to the main stuff,” O’Connor says. “Now, it is the main stuff, bringing things together in a very sophisticated, classical way.

“This is an engine of thought that has helped me in my own journey. What I say doesn’t sound as outlandish anymore. Now it seems very familiar, almost foundational.” O’Connor’s journey includes a literal as well as figurative trek. About three years ago, he left the heartland of country music, Nashville, for the anything-goes West Coast. He moved with his wife and two school-age sons from Tennessee to a hilltop avocado ranch here with plenty of room for his wife’s horses and an expansive studio for him. A manager oversees the ranch, and the 5,000 pounds of avocados just harvested keep the whole place watered, if not much more.

It is tempting to see O’Connor’s geographical shift as a symbol of his journey away from commercial country-pop to a more unfettered, holistic personal music. And when he takes down his beloved white fiddle and plays a tune full of his characteristic wistful lilt, the sense of cultural disaffection and regret is made audible.

A relic of his wunderkind years (O’Connor won the national fiddle championship so many times as a teen that he was asked to stop competing), it is autographed by 24 of his heroes, from mentor and Texas swing paragon Benny Thomasson to the classical virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin. This violin has an implausibly big and warm tone for an instrument with the varnish replaced by a generous coat of white enamel paint. For 15 years it hung in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“The hall of fame moved into a new building last winter,” O’Connor says, “with almost four times as much space, but no room anymore for my white fiddle. It made me so sad. I said, if it is just going to be tucked away in a vault somewhere, then I want my fiddle back.

“It could have had something to do with turning in my Country Music Assn. membership last year, when they didn’t put the instrumentalist of the year award on the televised show. I had campaigned so hard for that and finally got it. Now it is gone again. It was very frustrating.”

O’Connor believes his fall from Nashville grace came not so much from what he was doing with his continually wider-ranging stylistic forays as with what he was not doing: the high-profile session work he had done on 450 albums in the ‘80s. He counts the decision to skip a triple-scale session on a Kenny Rogers project in favor of doing an interview with a small paper about his own music as a major step on his journey.

“Silly me--I thought that if I quit doing session work, the fact that I maintained my fiddle camps in the area and that I taught fiddle classes at Vanderbilt University would keep me in the community. I lobbied hard for a regular instrumental spot on the Grand Ole Opry but wasn’t able to get that. They are so conservative.”

Still, the move to Southern California isn’t completely about cultural disaffection. Climate was a big part of the decision, he says, along with a general desire to get back to the West Coast (but not the Seattle area where he was born).

And O’Connor is making every effort to fit into his new community. A longtime basketball fan, he happily transferred allegiance to the Lakers (although he no longer accompanies televised games at home on the guitar, due to trouble with bursitis). He has also become an almost monthly fixture in the Southern California music scene.

This past season, he appeared at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido with the San Diego Symphony, and presented a four-part lecture series on American violin and fiddle music at the San Diego Museum of Art. Last year, he drove up to Los Angeles to record the fiddle solos for John Williams’ score for “The Patriot,” work he would be happy to have more of.

And he drove up last month to see the world premiere of a new dance Twyla Tharp choreographed to some of his music. The son of two dance teachers, O’Connor has worked with dancers before and has always been “a little underwhelmed. But this time, when I saw the rehearsal, I thought, ‘Oh wow, so this is what it can be.’ It was just marvelous.

“The hardest stretch for me is to embrace a different interpretation of my music. But that is one of the things I like about how flexible instrumental music is. I am amazed at what people can get out of it.” For O’Connor, reinventing himself has gone hand in hand with reinventing American music. And both have involved a closer look at roots as well as a mind wide open to the possibilities.

Consider “Let Us Move.” A 15-minute piece for chorus with violin obbligato, “Let Us Move” is the centerpiece of “Appalachian Sketches,” a disc from the Cape Cod, Mass.-based choir Gloriae Dei Cantores due out in September. O’Connor’s work mixes various elements, from traditional shape-note singing to jazz licks, in a propulsive structure reminiscent of a Baroque passacaglia.

Some passages of close, dissonance-spiked harmony suggest Balkan or Middle Eastern singing. According to O’Connor, that may not be a separate, exotic ingredient in the mix so much as a part of Appalachian style itself.

“This is a mystery I am starting to unravel for myself,” O’Connor says. “I’ve been challenged to dig deeper and to find the essence of American music. I’ve been doing some research and I think that many Appalachian or Melungeon cultural elements are Middle Eastern or Mediterranean in origin.”

“Melungeon” is an umbrella term for tri-racial groups and sub-cultures in the broader Appalachian area, from Ohio to South Carolina. Tradition has long posited a sort of pan-Mediterranean component to that heritage. There is suggestive genetic and linguistic evidence for these links, and a whole industry of Internet-spurred genealogical investigation into the subject. O’Connor finds persuasive explanations here--particularly in the possibility that in 1586 Sir Francis Drake dropped off at the lost colony of Roanoke several hundred Turkish or Moorish sailors liberated from service in Spanish colonies further south--for elements he sees and hears in Appalachian culture and music.

“More and more, I’m going to start developing what I think were the original sounds of this music,” he says. “The commission for ‘Let Us Move’ came at a point when I was making these discoveries for myself and experimenting with vocal sounds.”

“We wanted to do some more early American music,” says Elizabeth Patterson, music director of Gloriae Dei Cantores. “There is maybe what you could call a depressed awareness of some of the original sources of music in this country. Appalachia is one of them--music carried so much of their life and customs.

“So we thought, look around and see who is a really authentic performer, one who is also able to cross over with a fresh voice. We knew about Mark doing some classical things with Yo-Yo Ma.”

The idea of doing a piece with text was a fascinating problem for O’Connor. It took almost a year but he finally got a musical theme in his head that clicked when he rediscovered a Charles Wesley hymn, one that his mother used to sing--the words matched his mood and the music in his mind. It includes an alleluia that he could draw out, using the voices almost as instruments.

“A lot of my instrumental music is spiritual in nature,” O’Connor says, “but it was a big deal for me to commit my instrumental music to words. It was something I was feeling at the time, right when the elections were going on and I felt that the country was being divided. ‘Let Us Move’ just jumped out at me--music can move us in a positive direction--and it became a healing time for me.”

This may have been O’Connor’s first choral piece, but thanks to his insatiable experimentation and gregarious networking, he was involved in another large-scale choral work, with violin obbligato, just before he got this commission. He was the violin soloist in Tan Dun’s, “Water Passion After St. Matthew,” a work that was premiered in Stuttgart last year and is due out soon on CD.

“Tan Dun was a big influence. He is a friend and a colleague that I met through Yo-Yo Ma. He knew I liked water, and probably felt like I do that there are associations between Asian and American music. I was inspired by what he made voices do.”

O’Connor’s new jazz album, “Hot Swing,” is another project with a basis in collegiality.

“When Grappelli died [in 1997], people asked me to do tributes,” he remembers. “Since he was one of my teachers and mentors, I said yes to every one. In the process I met some musicians and sort of rediscovered my swing repertoire. It felt so good, I wanted to do more.”

The CD, a straight-ahead jazz trio album, features O’Connor, guitarist Frank Vignola and bassist Jon Burr, and it has been released on O’Connor’s own label, OMAC Records, which he sells through his Web site, https://www.markoconnor.com, along with his sheet music in downloadable form.

The “American Seasons” project--besides the CD and tour, it includes a PBS special based on a performance of the work interspersed with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”--began with O’Connor’s composition; it was Sony that put him together with Metamorphosen. The tour, which begins in November in Washington, D.C., will feature O’Connor’s string orchestra arrangement of his signature “Appalachia Waltz” and Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen” (which gave the ensemble its name), as well as “American Seasons.”

“Thirty musicians. This is the only tour I’ve ever done with a band this big,” muses the former member of the country-pop band Dixie Dreg. “This is difficult music to play, but we’ve got it about as tight as it can be. I was really blown away by this group.”

“American Seasons” represents “a considerable advance in fluency; it is concise, lyrical and irresistibly rhythmic,” according to classical music critic Richard Dyer, writing in the Boston Globe about the premiere. “The movements are thematically interconnected. The opening movement, for example, includes a passage that moves through all 12 keys as a statement about youth’s infinite possibilities. The last movement brings this music back with more complex harmonies that dissolve, then open again on fresh perspectives.” O’Connor’s summer bookings should only cement his good standing as a new member of the Southern California music community.

His appearances this month at Summerfest, in La Jolla, came about in part because the 2001 festival director, Cho-Liang Lin, is part of his far-flung circle of friends.

He’ll play some of his “Appalachian Journey” music for string trio on the program Friday, and his Quartet for an Aug. 14 collaboration with another local institution, the guitar-playing Romeros. On Aug. 16, he presents another Grappelli tribute, with guitarist Steven Mackey. He’ll also participate in the festival’s program of free lunchtime panel discussions. “I’m really excited about doing this with my friend Jimmy Lin,” he says, using Lin’s nickname and talking happily about the caliber of player he’ll be working with--cellist Carter Brey, violinist Lin and others.

Concurrently with Summerfest, O’Connor will oversee his Fiddle Conference at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Again, diversity, imagination and synthesis will be at the core of an O’Connor project. Although the instruction will emphasize improvisation, the curriculum covers the gamut of classical, folk and jazz styles, with mariachi and Latino music a new addition in San Diego. All the students--nearly 300 total, of all ages and experience levels--work in all areas, no specialization allowed.

“The more they know, ultimately the better off they will be,” says O’Connor, in his ambitious and omnivorous way. “I’d like to take them all the way from having an open mind to having a job. The long-term goal is to have a full-tilt, summer-long festival and to provide an alternative form of string education. It is a shame to constrain musicians with a narrow education.”

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Summerfest La Jolla opening concert, Friday, Sherwood Auditorium, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. 7:30 p.m. The festival continues through Aug. 19. For more information, call (858) 459-3728.