A (not so) brief musical history

I always was attracted to all different kinds of music, hearing my mom's Nat King Cole and my dad's Dmitri Shostakovich with equal fascination. I had my first violin lesson on my 8th birthday, started playing bass guitar in rock bands at 13, and had toured Australia with the California Youth Symphony, and performed concerts with Duke Ellington and Jack Benny, before entering high school. I wanted to play bass with The Doors or Jimi Hendrix, and play like Jack Bruce or Phil Lesh, but at the same time I was starting to emulate guitarists and keyboardists like Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia and Ray Manzarek on my electric violin.

In my freshman year, I quit classical violin lessons, and just then discovered the viola. Right on the heels of that, I heard Miles Davis for the first time, specifically his Bitches Brew album. That changed everything for me, and from that point, I was most interested in improvising that way on the viola. Under the influence of that album in particular, I also took up bass clarinet in my junior year, and got to join the Foothill Youth Symphony (Band) on that instrument for its tour of Costa Rica that summer.

I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston for one year, right out of high school. I was the first viola major in the school's history, and ended up studying theory privately with vibraphone great Gary Burton in lieu of a string specialist on the faculty. Briefly lived in NYC after that, playing in my Berklee buddy Craig Hollander's band Cosmos Deck. Craig's massive, polyrhythmic drumset anchored the band, which also featured Alex Prokofieff's virtuoso bass guitar and composer/savant John A. Quinn on electric piano. I never played in a more brilliantly original group in my life, and nobody's ever heard of them. My electric viola was the perfect lead voice for their group, except I was a little too far behind them in my musical development to catch up in time! They had already broken up, and only got together again because of my enthusiasm --- so I came back to the Bay Area.

Up to 1977 I continued to play bass guitar in my own group Rainbow Feel, but increasingly electric violin or viola in other groups ranging from psychedelic rock to modern jazz. My group was a volatile mix of those two styles, and introduced drummer/vibist Joe Caploe, in whose group Neck N Neck and album "Hearsay" I would be featured many years later.

In the mid-70s I was active in Bay Area avant-garde jazz unit Smoke, recording one unreleased LP, and later with proto-world fusion band Solar Plexus, appearing on their 1979 album "Earth Songs," including an Indian raga on violin. San Francisco's celebrated Yugoslavian emigre jazz pianist Larry Vuckovich heard that violin solo of mine played for him over the telephone, and soon after that we began working together on his debut LP "Blue Balkan" (actually recorded early in 1980 but not released until mid-1981). "Blue Balkan" featured one of my idols, vibes immortal Bobby Hutcherson, playing marimba together with my violin for a unique blend of Slavic folk melodies and driving modern jazz, and has since been re-issued on CD with additional 2001 recordings that also feature me, as "Blue Balkan; Then & Now". I also appeared on Larry's following album, "City Sounds, Village Voices," and continue to perform with Larry's Blue Balkan Ensemble to this day.

During the late 70s and early 80s I attended San Jose State periodically, playing viola in combos and even the big band there, winning an Outstanding Soloist award at the Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival. I got my first hands-on experience with Indonesian music there too, in the Javanese gamelan that resident composer Lou Harrison built. In a contrasting note, I performed Charles Ives' Second and Fourth Violin and Piano Sonatas in a 1978 recital with the late pianist/composer Michael McCandless. Harrison, who had been an acquaintance of Ives, believed it might have been the first such performance (of the 4th most likely, but perhaps even the 2nd) in San Jose or the Bay Area.

In this same time period 1977-1983 I was playing fiddle in several country and folk groups, toured Alaska with celtic/bluegrass group Banish Misfortune, and once was voted Best Fiddle by the Northern California Country Music Association. I also was nominated for a Bammy for my jazz violin work with Solar Plexus, and twice received honorable mention in the category Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, Violin, in Downbeat Magazine's International Critics' Poll --- most likely on the strength of my appearance on "Blue Balkan."

From 1981 on, I have performed all over California with world-jazz multi-percussionist Ian Dogole, as a member of his group Global Fusion, alongside him in the group Ancient Future, and in featured roles on four of his CDs. We also collaborated for much of the 1990s with bassist Bill Douglass in a trio called Sultans Of Swatch, and my CD features both players as well. I've done some of the best playing of my career over the years in support of Dogole, who's also an innovative composer and dynamic performer, based in Mill Valley, CA.

Recently, the group called Smoke has re-emerged in a new incarnation, CAJE (California Art & Jazz Ensemble), and I'm featured on viola and electric viola on their 2004 release "Opus de Funk Vol. 1." Other notable CD appearances include "The Crossing" by guitarist-composer Tom Taylor, "Asian Fusion" by new age/world beat artists Ancient Future, and "Tokyosphere" by American ex-pat John Kaizan Neptune, the shakuhachi (bamboo flute) master. On that album's "Tokyo Blues," I made what is thought to be the first jazz performance on the Japanese 3-string fiddle called kokyu. I've since played it on CDs by Ian Dogole, Ancient Future, Neck N Neck and others, as well as on "Pluck!"

Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s I was based in Honolulu, majoring in Japanese Area Studies and Ethnomusicology, but also studying and performing Beijing Opera. In 1986 and 1991 I toured the People's Republic of China as concertmaster with the University of Hawaii Beijing Opera Company, playing the 2-string fiddle called jing hu. I might have been the most accomplished 'red-haired devil' on that instrument, or even the only one, at that time.

I've also gone pretty far into multiple Indonesian musics, including Javanese, Balinese and especially Sundanese. Since the 1980s I've specialized in performing the Sundanese violin style called biola, studying with Andrew Weintraub, and performing in his group with the master musician Burhan Sukarma. Over the years I have incorporated this music into original jazz improvisations on my own CD "Pluck!" as well as on recordings by Ian Dogole and Ancient Future.

I'm proud of touring the West and Midwest with the pioneering San Francisco Mime Troupe on its 1994 Offshore tours, performing on viola, Japanese kokyu and Chinese jing hu in the band.



Though I returned to California in 1992 after almost 8 years in Hawaii, it wasn’t until 2001 that I took up Hawaiian music, singing and playing the ukulele. Within 6 months, I was performing every weekend with the Kapalakiko Hawaiian Band, probably the busiest and best-known Hawaiian band outside the Islands. But I wasn’t playing the uke --- I was playing viola! That’s right, in the Hawaiian paniolo style descended from Sam Li’a. I sang all unisons and harmonies, and some lead vocals, while my viola took the role typical of a steel guitar, supplying the traditional fills between verses, as well as solos. I also played several gigs as a bass guitarist with Kapalakiko (my first paid gigs on bass in 25 years!), and in all I must have sung at least 500 different classic songs. I’d guess that there at least 100 songs that I performed at least 100 times with that band. (See also my post below, "My start in Hawaiian music".)

It’s fun in the last few years to be performing songs that I’ve learned under the direction of a living legend, Kapalakiko's main man Saichi Kawahara, but also using skills on ukulele and vocals that I had to develop on my own. Maybe that’s why for me, the ukulele more than anything else is something I did just for myself, all by myself. It came purely out of my love and longing for Hawaii, but at the same time it tapped into a lifelong interest in plucking strings. It was as though I had been looking for the ukulele all my life, without knowing it. I have plucked the viola live and on record since the 1970s, and it was just as I discovered the ukulele and begun concentrating on Hawaiian music that I conceived the idea of summing this up on my 2003 CD “Pluck! (Directions In Jazz Viola).”

-- eg