Tracy Silverman

Episode Podcast and Video

Leah Roseman:

Good morning, Tracy Silverman.

Tracy Silverman:

Hey Leah. How are you?

Leah Roseman:

I'm so happy to meet you. This is really awesome.

Tracy Silverman:

Likewise. Likewise, I've been enjoying the of the episodes. They're so interesting. The folks that you're interviewing and the perspective is very, very cool.

Leah Roseman:

Well, thank you. I've been listening to your podcast a lot.

Tracy Silverman:

Ah, thanks.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I think you're the first ... Well, I talked to one of their guests who had done some podcasts a while ago, but you're the first guest I've had is ... You started at the same time as me, with podcasting during the pandemic. It's interesting. We weren't performing, so we needed other outlets for connection.

Tracy Silverman:

Exactly.

Leah Roseman:

There's so much to talk about. You've just premiered an amazing new work by Roberto Sierra.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

With the American symphony orchestra. I was even interested to read about them, like, what is this orchestra? It's really fascinating actually.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. I think their motto is something like we play music you've never heard before or something like that.

Leah Roseman:

Accessible and free, free concerts.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. Right, exactly. They really have a mission to uncover stuff that either new stuff, they commission this piece, so they're bringing new repertoire into the cannon or into the concert hall, but also playing stuff that just doesn't get played a lot, sometimes historical stuff, sometimes fairly recent contemporary music that. As so often happens in the contemporary music world, something gets premiered and then forgotten. There's a lot of opportunities to ... a lot of great music. It's an interesting mission that's different from a lot of orchestras.

Leah Roseman:

You're also going to be playing it with some youth orchestras. I thought it was interesting how the composer had to be mindful of not making the orchestral parts too tricky.

Tracy Silverman:

Exactly. Exactly. It was a real challenge for Roberto, who is just so masterful as a composer in my experience in working with him and I've worked with a number of really good composers and it's so interesting how different everybody's process is. Maybe we can dig into that a little later, but at any rate, yeah, it was a challenge for him, several challenges for him that were new. I think he enjoyed because he's written a lot of concertos actually and was just finishing an acoustic violin concerto while he was writing my electric violin concerto. Keeping all of these trains of thought separate was a whole other triumph for him. A few things, first of all, the orchestra part had to be fairly playable and approachable so that youth orchestras can do it. Although the youth orchestras we're playing with are professionals, they are remarkable, very high level playing going on. But then of course, the challenges of writing for an electric six string violin, which he's never written before, which we spent a lot of time back and forth, me just demonstrating what these potentials are and different possibilities that he might... the pallet of colors I was trying to lay out for him that he could employ.

Then given on top of that, the fact that I play in a nontraditional way. It's not just like, "Oh, I'm a concert soloist playing an electric violin with vibrato and Russian Bohol and blah, blah, blah." or whatever. I really have a whole other vocabulary of techniques and an approach, an ethos of how I want my voice on the instrument is not sort of a generic violin soloist that you can swap out. "Oh, I played the premier, but 15 others violin soloists can play the piece." It's a little different because there are techniques that are, not unique to me, but that are non-classical shall we say?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. It's easier actually to show. I know you're willing to best out your violin than talk about the stuff.

Tracy Silverman:

Absolutely. Yeah. Here, let me get it. This is my main six string that I play. This was built here in Nashville by Joe Glazer, who's a great guitar maker and technician here in town. I've got it running through my pedal board. I think you can hear that okay.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

Is that level good? First of all, the instrument has two lower strings. Let me stand up here. It's kind of like a Viola with a high E and a low F or violin with two lower strings. Violin strings. Viola C, and a low F a fifth below the C.

So it's like your low F fourth finger on the cello low C string. It's almost down to the bottom of the cello range, but more significantly it's only one fret away from being at the bottom of the guitar range. That low F is like the very first fret on the low E string of a guitar. That was really where I started my whole journey with electric six string violins, was a journey to sound like guitars basically. I can explain that later, but right now I'm just going to demonstrate for you a few things. Technique wise, in terms of playing wise without getting into like effects or anything like that, one of the techniques that he used is the chop, which a lot of people know and use. But he was using it creatively where sometimes I'd be chopping triplets and putting poly rhythms into all of that. Sometimes there's fours, then I'm adding little triplet subdivisions in there, the Casey Driessen stuff, that kind of stuff. He's using that. Actually I should demonstrate, I created all these different sounds that I programmed for that.

Certain things like for the chopping, I use that because it brings it out better. There's a sound that I use for this, what I call percussive bowing, it's something I've been talking about in blogs and in my teaching, but it's this idea of muting the strings like guitar players do and playing. Those are completely dampened sound, just percussive

There's a variety of sounds you can create with that. The beginning of the third movement starts off with these big orchestral hits where it goes bum and then there's like three bars of rest and then, bum, another big hit. In between he has me doing stuff like - Ricochet and all this kind of stuff, but it's all this muted, percussive playing. That's not your standard issue Juilliard technique.

One of the other big things I'm using a lot is distortion in this piece. But because it's not just a tone, a lot of these effects change the way you play the instrument and what you are capable of doing. If you're using distortion, you have to dampen strings otherwise they just ring, even when they're just left opened, they'll be ringing a lot. There's a lot of technical things in how to use some of these effects, but one of the effects that he used really effectively I think, I was telling him about with distortion and distortion essentially is amp distortion like guitar players use to create rock and roll sounds. That grindiness is the distortion, which you can program all kinds of different distortions, but I programmed a pedal so that I could bring the distortion in gradually and have different amounts. If I wanted to go like, or a little bit, all the way to that, all these different gradations of distortion. There's a pedal that's actually controlling the amount of distortion. What he's using is this idea of subtraction tones. If you take two notes on a violin, because of the bow, it's a unique situation because we can sustain in a way that guitars can't.

I can play two tones. These two notes as tri tone. If I put distortion on it, you'll hear a third note, bum, turns it into like a dominant seven chord. I'm not playing that note. It's a really cool thing. He uses that in the second movement where I'll be bringing in distortion, stuff like that. Those are some of the less classical kinds of techniques. Of course, the way I'm using vibrato is also quite different going for a more, what I call a vernacular style. Even if it's something like he's got a melody at one point that's like, something like that and I can play it classically like that, or I can play whatever I was kind of improvising there, but that kind of thing. The approach to a melody can be quite different from the classical style. Hope that's helpful. Any other things that you might have wanted to see?

Leah Roseman:

Well, yeah, maybe you want to play a bit more later. I know you've developed something for acoustic players to have their violins self supporting.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, I am working on it right now. In fact, with Joe, the guy who built this instrument, we're working on basically a version of this, which is a neck strap and a chest support, or like a shoulder rest basically, which are going to be able to attach to an acoustic instrument securely. It will be the world's first lockable shoulder rest that will not fall off an instrument. The world's first neck strap for violins and violas. Hoping to get that on the market later this year. I've been working on it for about 10 years. I've been working with a patent lawyer. I've got two patents on it already. It's just like an ongoing drama, but we're getting closer. That's what I'm told.

Leah Roseman:

For those people listening to the podcast who can't see. Tracy doesn't have a chin rest. You've moved the violin up at the beginning of your rock and roll career.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

It was really far down.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, it was. That's interesting you noticed that.

Leah Roseman:

You had to use a tiny bow because you couldn't reach.

Tracy Silverman:

Exactly. Yes. I was playing the violin more or less the way you would play a guitar, down across my belly when I first got started, way down there with a guitar strap under my arm. It's basically like playing a little guitar with a bow, except it's tuned in fifth. Because it's so low down there, yes, I was using a quarter size bow because otherwise you got all this extra bow you can't use.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

You can't really get out of first position. It was a little bit ridiculous, but it taught me an approach to playing chords, to playing rhythm because I was basically functioning as a rhythm guitar player while I was singing. I wanted it low so that it wasn't interfering with my chin, because you can't sing if you're holding up a violin. I didn't want it near the microphone where I'm going to keep hitting the mic with the bow. I just dropped it down here. I wanted it to sound like a guitar. I wanted it to look like a guitar. Briefly a short story for that explanation, which I said I would give, is that all my friends, my peers were not into classical music for the most part. The kids in high school were just the average kids, were listening to rock and roll. This was in the seventies, you got to remember, when I was in high school. It's a very long time ago. Rock and roll was the coin of the realm. I mean that was the lingua franca. That was what everybody spoke and liked.

I wanted to play music that they got. I just wanted to play something they didn't think was old fashioned, hoity toity classical music or whatever they would think if you played a violin. It was an instantly old fashioned sounding compared to electric guitars and Jimmy Hendricks and Led Repp and all that kind of stuff. That's what everybody listened to and I wanted to speak in the language that they understood. That's the more intellectualization of it. The main reason was I wanted them to think I was cool. I wanted them to like my music and think I was playing something cool and not old fashioned. That's how that started. As much as I always have to give the explanation that I love classical music, it was my first love. That's why I started playing the violin. Since I was a very little five year old kid, I fell in love with the sound of the Sibelius violin concerto. I wanted to be able to play that. Rondo Capriccio, all that kind of stuff.

I was fortunate enough that we had those LPs in the house and I loved them. Somewhere in my teens, I figured out that I had really become that nerd ball kid who walked around school with a violin case and glasses and curly hair named Tracy. That was a tough, row to hoe and I desperately needed something that would give me a shot at being slightly cool. This was my solution. That's kind of how that whole thing started.

But I went to Julliard and when I came out there was a real fork in the road. I was like, okay, parents and teacher and everybody else saying, don't waste your talent, pursue whatever it was, contests, auditions, whatever chamber groups and stuff like that, or what I ended up doing, which was spending all my available cash and time trying to start rock bands, having a music studio I was paying a fortune for in Manhattan and hiring musicians at some points and knocking my brains out trying to play rock clubs in New York and all of that stuff. Sure that within six months I was going to be the first electric violin rockstar because it was plainly obvious that the time had come for that to happen.

Everybody exhausted the electric guitar. Here's something new Julliard, I can crush this. 15 years later, I couldn't get arrested. Then what ended up happening, I was just really pursuing this for years with several different bands. Started off as a very commercial thing then got into a really hair metal thing. This was during the eighties when that was not an anachronism yet. Then in Minneapolis, after I left New York, it became a grunge band thing, very influenced by Sound Garden and Nirvana, and just really heavy, almost always a lot of distortion and rock and roll. I was singing the lead singer for all this time. That experience, I only talk about it because it's a very non-classical experience.

I spent a good 15 plus years doing that and living that life, which gave me this dual citizenship and changed my experience in a way that's radically different from most conservatory string players who may have dabbled in that world, but maybe didn't really give everything up and put both feet in it. I was creating this instrument, which didn't exist, figuring out the gear, what to play it through. The fact that I was holding it down here, I started to say that really changed my technique. I discovered after doing that for 10 or 15 years, that I had come up with this way of playing rhythm with my bow, playing chords for myself that was not anything. It seemed very intuitive to me because it was what guitar players did, because I was just trying to sound like a guitar, but it was very different from what I was taught at Juilliard.

I was intentionally breaking down my old habits and trying to find and build new ones. Having a radically different position helped in a way. It wasn't until years later, because anytime I would hold a violin under my chin, my vibrato would go back to classical or jazzy, one or the other, but if I put on distortion and held the fiddle down here, I played with a completely different kind of vibrato. I approached the strings differently with the bow and the sound of that and the position of it really helped me develop something fresh and new with it.

Leah Roseman:

You mentioned Julliard a few times and you graduated quite young. You're like 20.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, that's right.

Leah Roseman:

I believe one of your old teachers was able to come to the premier of the concerto.

Tracy Silverman:

That's exactly right. Lewis Kaplan. He's doing great. He had ran the Bowdoin Festival, which a lot of Julliard folks and classical players are familiar with, big music summer festival that has been going for 50 years or something up there. He just stepped down from leadership of that. He's in his upper seventies now, or excuse me, upper eighties. He's 88, which I just found out. He came to the premier a couple weeks ago. I said, because I had said in a newsletter or something that he was about 90 years old and he is like, "I'm only 88. Hey." But he is looking great and busy running this Bach festival that he does. So wonderful to see him there. We were talking a little bit about, I was saying, "Hey, if it wasn't for you, I would never be here."

Because he was a big new music guy back at Julliard. He founded the Aeolian Chamber Players, which was a very groundbreaking ensemble because it was this mixed timbre ensemble, which nobody was doing back then, which was a violin cello, I think clarinet flute, piano, there might have been maybe percussion or something. It became the norm for new music ensembles, but at that time there were string quartets, there were piano trios, so they were groundbreaking and he always had this attitude of don't do something that everybody else has done.

What ended up happening was it drove me away from his world because he was telling me that to be original and to honor your original voice and all that kind of stuff. I honored it right out of Julliard into rock clubs. I think he, along with my parents thought was a huge mistake for many years, but it was wonderfully gratifying to hear him say that he really got it. He saw me playing and was like, "You're doing something nobody else does and now I get it. I see where you were going all those years ago and how that led to this." It's really come full circle for me just because I've been around for so long. But it's wonderful to see that happen and to be appreciated by people who really mean a lot to me and it would be heartbreaking if he said something like, "Man, could you play with less distortion?" You know what I mean? Or something like that. He didn't temper at all. He said like, "I get that you are following your vision and you're doing something original." To his credit that he's got a very open op open mind in that way.

Leah Roseman:

You also study with the legendary Ivan Galamian?

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, I sure did. Yes. We were alternating weeks with Lewis Kaplan and Ivan Galamian.

Leah Roseman:

How are those lessons different? I'm a violin nerd, so I'd like to hear a little bit about that.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. I'm trying to remember because it was a long time ago. The lessons with Galamian were pretty cut and dried. There was not a lot of talking. You would go in, you would sit at the piano, you would play your Gaviniès etude, which for some reason he loved that damn book, Gaviniès. He would sit at the piano and just gaze out the window and playing along the Gaviniès on the piano.

Leah Roseman:

Really?

Tracy Silverman:

Which is kind of weird, because there are a lot of string crosses and weird bow - whatever. He's playing it on the piano without looking just by heart. There's 24 of them and they all sound exactly like each other.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. You should know - I recorded all of them last year as one of my pandemic projects.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh my God. Okay. So you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's funny. That's awesome, because I could have used that when I was a kid. Anyway. Yeah. He'd play them on the piano, just staring out the window and then I played Bach. He would listen to the Bach, sometimes he would play it also on the piano and very few remarks if I got a Boeing wrong. My first lesson with him, my very first lesson, I walk in and I've got the Bach G minor first movement of the first Sonata and I start playing with it and I've never worked with him before. He's sitting at the piano, he's got this kind of goofy smile on his face. Like this, a little bit surprised. I'm like, "Okay, that's the way he looks, an old guy." I'm playing through, I play the whole thing and I played it exactly the way my teacher from Chicago, I just had transferred from the Chicago Musical College and I was working with Deborah Wood Schwartz, anyway, and she had worked with me for a year or two on this piece. I thought I crushed it. I played it pretty damn well. He gets up, walks over to my music, stand, shuts the music and said, "Next time you play my edition." And left the room.

That was my first lesson. I was like, "Oh my God, I guess I should have played with his fingerings and bowings."

Leah Roseman:

That's really interesting. My main teacher, Mauricio Fuks, he studied with Galamian. He would sometimes say things about him and we'd play from Galamian editions, but he'd say, "Galamian wasn't a performer, he was too analytical, but he didn't know what worked on stage, so forget that, do this."

Tracy Silverman:

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. It's very interesting. One thing that he said about the Chaconne, he was a man of very few words, but I remember that he did demonstrate and instruct me that each phrase starts on the second beat and he was like, "Don't make a retard into the down beat. And then start again. This is not the way to do it. Just play to the end of the phrase, take a breath and then start the next phrase." I thought that was very interesting and has really resonated with me. My whole approach to Bach is I think more like the Baroque players try to honor some of those things in terms of no vibrato and no retards like that. Those are traditional parts of that playing style, which I'm not really terribly well acquainted with, but I have arrived at the same conclusions, but I'm coming more from, again, the pop music, the vernacular perspective, and trying to really honor the groove in it is my approach, because there's so much groove in those sonatas, all the dance movements and stuff.

It drives me bananas when I hear string players playing the romanticized and very vibrato style that's appropriate for Fritz Kreisler. I do not think personally has any business in Bach, but that's my opinion. I went to try to find a version of what I'm talking about that I liked. I was listening to everybody's version of Bach and I could not find one that didn't do that. It was everybody, all the great soloists, whether it's, Yo-Yo Ma doing the cello things, Itzhak Perlman, whoever, nobody just plays it with a straight groove. That's my little thing.

Leah Roseman:

I know you still play Bach regularly, but you play it on your six string electric?

Tracy Silverman:

I do.

Leah Roseman:

Are you playing the cello suites as well?

Tracy Silverman:

I haven't really dug into those as much, mostly just the fiddle ones that I know better. It's such remarkably good music and fun and just stuff that I know.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. You've done some cool riffs on them. Also, I love your Beethoven Seven thing you did. It's really beautiful.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh, thank you. Thanks so much. Yeah. There's one where it was all about the groove and honoring that. There's something very rock and roll about and not changing. It's a little bit like Cashmere by Led Zepp. That's where I see so many similarities between rock and classical music. My approach to classical music is very informed by that.

Leah Roseman:

Before we leave your early education, I actually read an interview with Deborah Wood Schwartz saying that you were bringing like orchestral scores when you were so young, like Mozart symphonies or something, because you were already fascinated with composition.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. Oh, interesting. I'm, gee - I don't know where that interview was.

Leah Roseman:

I like to dig deep.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. Very good research. I guess I did. I don't really remember. I was always very interested in composing. Took composition lessons very briefly when I was about 12 for about a year. Yeah, I was a huge Mozart fan. I do remember that year when I was in Chicago, my dad for some reason had these little mini scores of the last six symphonies and we had this fantastic Bruno Walter recordings of it.

I had the box set of three LPs with a symphony on each side, and I just listened to the crap out of those things and followed the scores and was fascinated. I'll tell you what fascinated me about Mozart was how seemingly cheerful and light and elegant it always seemed, and yet how it had this incredible, heartbreaking pathos underneath. And I just thought that was so cool how he underplays the drama of it and made it so much more poignant because of that, rather than being sort of heart on your sleeve the way so many of the Romantic composers did. Which I also loved at that point, I mean, I was the first guy to sort of dig into Brahms and Tchaikovsky and all that kind of stuff. But I really respected the fact that Mozart left so much of that to your imagination to fill in, and just the way he would do that and... Anyway, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So I'm curious about your life, the intersection of being a composer and an improviser, and you improvise in so many different styles as well. How does that work for you? Do you start with improv, or is that a different process when you're composing?

Tracy Silverman:

That's a good and a very deep question. I often do compose by recording improvisations, and then I pull from them. I'll save a little bit of this, a little bit of that. That's definitely one of the ways that I compose, or have composed, depending on, again, on the piece, the project, what it is I'm shooting for. My last violin concerto, the Love Song to the Sun, it was really a big, like a 25, 30-minute work that had a storyline and many different melodies, and it was almost like writing a musical, in a sense. There was all these scenes, and... Or a film score. And that, I really had to keep logs in notebooks of this theme here, and this changes to that, and that transforms to this, and this theme, and then it goes to this key, and you know, kind of structured work. The whole structure of that was much less improvised.

But often when... Big chunks of it were me going, okay, here, I want to do this in this scene, and I would just sit down at either a keyboard or with a violin and just try a few passes at it, and then take like, I like this take, I like this bit, put it together in Pro Tools where I'd actually might record something, record a second track, record a third track, move stuff around, add some keyboards to it, go back, take this one out, rerecord it, and just kind of build it within the software. That's a lot of how I work.

Leah Roseman:

It's interesting with the storyline, because I know you had asked Roberto Sierra to consider using a narrative, and then he used different short stories for the concerto.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, which I think, he told me he really did not love doing. He kind of resisted the idea, because he doesn't like this idea of programmatic music, which I don't really have a problem with personally, but I know it's not every everybody. You know, composers, that's often sort of either you do or you don't. So I just proposed that, hey, here's an idea, take it or leave it. And I think he told me he was going to leave it, but then it kind of inspired him to think about, "Oh, well, I do love Jorge Luis Borges," this Argentine author. He was like, "Hmm, let me think if there's some way that I could use these stories," and what he ended up doing was, very non-programmatically, being inspired by the stories.

And in fact, sometimes the inspiration was more of it gave him just an idea for a compositional technique. Like in this one story, where the character kind of explores these 14 different doors, the Minotaur, he took away the 12 different notes of the scale and started with them all there, like all the doors are present where the orchestra would hit these big chords that contained all the notes, and then little by little, paring them away till it ends with no notes. There was just like, there's the B flat, there's the E flat and B flat, so he kind of went through and eliminated notes. So not terribly programmatic way, but inspired by something within the story, so that's how he approached most of those stories.

Leah Roseman:

And in one of your violin concertos, " Between the Kiss and the Chaos", which ended up being recorded as a string quartet with violin, but it was originally a puppet opera.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

And you know what's interesting, on this tiny podcast I have, I mean, you're the third guest who's written a puppet opera. How weird is that? It's not a usual art form, right?

Tracy Silverman:

Oh my gosh. That's crazy. That's crazy. Well, I've actually never seen it done. I would be very curious to see how they approached it. It's a project that I sure wish would've happened, it never happened. It's something I started with this puppeteer about 15 years ago. We were both parents at Waldorf school. We both had kids in Waldorf school and in the same class who were best friends, and it turns out that Brian is this sort of world-famous, world-class puppeteer who runs a puppet theater at the library, and he had this idea called Masters, for all of these great painters to sort of reveal their masterworks. And he's not only a great puppeteer, he's also an amazing artist, visual artist, painter, and an operatically trained tenor.

So he wanted to pull all these things together, create these puppets, sing the parts, and for me to write what he's going to sing. So that's how it started. And so we did three scenes, or two scenes, we actually only did two demo scenes on video of him doing that. One was the Michelangelo, David, and the other was Van Gogh, Starry Night. And I did a couple of other, Georgia O'Keefe, and I had a couple of other ideas, but the project didn't get funded. We couldn't figure out how to take it to the next step. So I had a commission to write a violin concerto, and I said, you know what I'm going to... I've got these cool little vignettes that I was really enjoying and really loved what I did. I'm just going to turn the vocal part into the solo violin part and do it without words, you know? And so that's where that came from.

Leah Roseman:

Very cool. Yeah, I can send you after the links to these puppet operas.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

It's a beautiful thing. So when you joined the Turtle Island String Quartet, it's funny but I realized who you were because I found out about you through Julie Lyonn Lieberman, and then-

Tracy Silverman:

Oh my goodness.

Leah Roseman:

And then I was listening, I was like, oh yeah, I used to love these albums and that sound I heard. But you were playing acoustic violin in that group, you had to?

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, yes. Yeah, strictly acoustic, and that came right on the tails of me coming out of like my hardest metal band from Minneapolis. Gutbucket was the name of the band, and so I just like veered from that, boom, to acoustic, only acoustic violin, colored silk shirts, playing fairly traditional jazz. So it was really kind of a big pivot for me, and to be honest, I wasn't sure whether I should do it, because it was not at all what I was looking for. I was trying to become a rockstar, and was moving into this sort of more fringe area of rock to do it.

But I tell my students to, in terms of career moves like this, to think of it as a dart board, and I'll give you it real quick, my dart board theory. With all the research you've done, you probably have heard me say it, but it's simply like, there are gigs like working at Cheesecake Factory or something like that are not on the dart board. So the outer ring of the dart board is maybe doing wedding gigs or freelance, whatever. Inner rings of the dart, like the center of the dart board is being a rock star. Right around that would be, let's say, being in a really successful rock band of somebody else's rock band or whatever. An outer thing of that, you know, as you move to things that are not exactly your bullseye, but are on the dart board.

So Turtle Island was a successful, wonderful, amazing group that was not at all the bullseye that I was looking for, but was definitely on the dart board. And so I took the gig because it basically brought me to a very center-close ring of that dart board, really closer than what I was doing playing in rock clubs, which was on the dart board, but a very further out ring on it.

So anyway, so I ended up taking a big musical shift over to Turtle Island, but it was a huge learning experience. And if there's any takeaway that I would love for people to have from this conversation, I've had a crazy eclectic kind of career that I'm very fortunate to have experienced. A little schizophrenic, but I've experienced a lot of crazy stuff, from this hardcore classical training to serious rock club nastiness and jazz with Turtle Island, Indian music with Terry Riley, and they were all... Even when I was freelancing in New York for 15 years doing weddings, I was doing strolling gigs. I learned a whole other repertoire and how to do that, and how to get tips out of people's pockets. All the things you learn with that, playing wedding gigs, the freelance world, it's all an educational process, and it was all kind of postgraduate work. Learning how to play by ear on wedding gigs that I had no idea what was going on was great training, ear training, you know?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I'd run across this strolling violin thing too, which intimidates the hell out of me. I can't imagine. So what, you'd learn a few popular tunes? How would this work when you started out?

Tracy Silverman:

Well, so I started out playing a weekly Sunday gig at the Yale Club that Stan Curtis is the fiddle player who had the gig, and did a lot of that. I was fresh out of school and needed a gig, and through a friend of a friend, they connected me with Stan. He's like, "I'll take him on. He can help sub for me at the Yale Club." So he taught me the ropes of that, and there's a whole different repertoire.

There are the French waltzes, there are about six or seven French waltzes that you play in a certain sequence and certain keys, and it's like a medley. It takes about six or seven or eight minutes or something. There's the Italian rumbas, same thing. There are the light opera things like Victor Herber, Vic... Victor Youmans, who is it? Like all that kind of turn of the century, weird stuff, sort of operatic, light opera stuff, European kind of continental repertoire.

So it was a whole repertoire that I had to learn, and it took me weeks of studying the stuff to learn it. And I was playing the harmony parts, so I had to learn the second parts. He was playing the melody, and then finally, I kind of worked up where I could sub for him, play the melodies. I knew the sequences enough to be able to call it, and you'd have like harp players, and they would all know the sequence, and you'd just kind of go through.

So there was all of that stuff. There was strolling tables, like in a restaurant, which was a little different, because a lot of that was taking requests and knowing Memories from Cats and Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago, all of that kind of stuff was what we were playing. Hopefully it's updated somewhat since the eighties when I was doing it. And how to be able to play, fake your way through tunes that you've never heard before. Like, oh yeah, how does that go? Could you home a little bit? And they'll be like, (singing). Okay. Oh, yeah. Then I'll play it for them and they're like, "Yeah, thanks. Yeah, here's $5."

Yeah, stuff like that. Leading wedding bands as a singer and knowing how to do that whole shtick, from here's a bunch of pop stuff for the kids, and now here's rock and roll from the fifties for, you know, and now here's a couple of Frank Sinatra songs, and I was singing all this stuff and playing. And then being in the cocktail hour bands with the jazz groups and playing bossa novas, all the jazz standards, learning those by ear, how to call the keys. Flats are up, it's like F, B flat, E flat, G, D, A, that's the way they did it in New York. Stuff like that.

So all that stuff was a huge education and really just made me a much richer player, I think, than people who have had a more strictly classical education and never really learned how to play all this other repertoire, whether it's this old-fashioned strolling kind of stuff, or jazz or rock or whatever, or world music from India and all that kind of stuff. But it's the reason why, when John Adams saw me playing one time, he was like, "I would like you to do this, because you have this weird combination of talents, and it's hard for me to find a classical person." You know, he could have gotten Itzhak Perlman to play his piece, but he was looking for somebody who didn't sound that way.

Leah Roseman:

So this was-

Tracy Silverman:

So that's kind of the irony of my journey, is that my parents didn't want me to, but I never would've gotten to Carnegie Hall if it weren't for this weird journey that I took.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So John Adams wrote this concerto, "Dharma at Big Sur", for you, which you opened at Walt Disney Concert Hall, I believe, for people who don't know. And you've done an amazing little sort of arrangement where its solo, because you do all these solo gigs where you have the part, so there's a version of that piece you perform.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes. Yeah, I have a solo program that I do, just a one-man recital kind of thing with looping, and I have solo versions of these concertos. So I have about a 12 or 13 minute sort of suite from Dharma where I'll play, I set up a loop that kind of replicates as best I can the orchestral score, and then I play a chunk of the first movement, and then I add this rhythmic layer to that that replicates the score in the second movement, I play a chunk of the second movement. And I do a similar thing with a Terry Riley concerto, where I'll have like five of the eight movements, little sort of suite of those together in about a 15 minute piece. I'm creating something like that for the new Roberto Sierra. I have versions of that of my concertos that I do.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And yeah, let's talk about looping, because you're pretty early on the scene. And I know in one of your things, "Axis and Orbits", you like , are randomizing, which is really interesting to me.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Because to me, the problem with looping is the harmonies don't change. It's limiting, it's more about rhythm.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, exactly. Right.

Leah Roseman:

Actually, could you show us any looping? Do you have that set up at all?

Tracy Silverman:

So standard looping, you create something and then you play over it, and typically that could be something like, in its simplest form, I could play a rhythm part for something like a... So I'm going to record this little phrase, so that's recorded and then I can just play on top of that... You know, whatever. So that's like its most basic form, or I could take that rhythm part and layer it, layer loops on top of it. I don't typically with this one, but just for the heck of it, I'll add some tones so you can hear what happens, so let's say... So that's now there, and I can keep layering on top of it. Now there's two I can add to that.

So you can layer on top of a loop. So those are the basic kind of functions of looping, but what I did with this, "Axis and Orbits", was in order to avoid the obvious, repetitive nature of that, I recorded loops at different lengths and I did it in different ways. In some pieces, I coordinated them so that they rhythmically lined up. So let's say this one is eight beats and this one is 12 beats and this one is 16 beats or something, so they had a rhythmic way of intersecting, but you can also do it freely where you have a loop that's 11 seconds, you have one that's 24 seconds, and whatever, one that's six seconds, so they're cycling at different rates. And if those loops have chords or harmonic information, that information starts randomizing pretty quickly.

And my challenge was, how do I solo over that when I have no idea what's coming? And it kept me on my toes, you know? So I used it in the first movement of that piece, and actually, when I perform it, I do it a little differently. But it's a little hard to demonstrate, because it's such a long loop. It'd take a couple minutes to do. But that's the concept, the idea of that looping, is that you can use it to surprise yourself and to create challenges like that, that are unexpected and serendipitous sometimes, and sometimes not really what you wanted.

Leah Roseman:

So for people just starting out with looping or curious, they're looping curious, what do you recommend as first steps?

Tracy Silverman:

Well, there are simple one-button loop pedals that are really easy to get involved with and cheap. But if you want to do stuff where you have different sections of a song, where you can really kind of create a solo program and create arrangements that are using looping, I use something called a Boomerang, but there are a lot of options out there. I know Roland makes a really good loop station. A lot of them have clicks that will quantize your looping so that they're seamless, so that the start and end point of the loop are exactly on a beat. The Boomerang doesn't do that, you have to kind of nail it. So there's different options.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I was thinking, I mean, to me, there's an overlap, because I know your son does beats and you made an album with him.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, that's right.

Leah Roseman:

To me, there's a bit of a mesh with that, with both those art forms.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, yes. And although the term loops and looping is kind of, it's the same word, but when people talk about drum loops, they're usually talking about a sample of a drum part, you know?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

A drum beat. And what I'm talking about here is live looping, so just recording loops. But a lot of similarities in the fact that I'm often using this looping rhythmically and creating some kind of a-

Leah Roseman:

That's what I meant, yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, creating some kind of a rhythmic part. And one of the things you can do with this is you can have like master and slave loops. Trying to get this cable out of the way. For instance, I couldn't throw down a purely rhythmic part, like a... So I'm just randomly making something up. And let me get to a sound here where I can do this... And I've put on a bass sound, so I'm using an octave to drop my sound. So let's say, put down a little thing, or I could do a two bar. Right? Because the original loop is just one bar, three, four repeating, and I'm going to do a two bar, so...

Whoops. I totally screwed it up. My loop is now three bars. This is why this stuff is a little tricky. You got to kind of work it out. I meant to turn it off here, but I didn't, so it's on for another bar and then starts again. And then, so that's like a three bar thing, and then I can play on top of it. And so I've got drums, bass, and a rock guitar, and it really sounds more like a band than a violin player.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Yeah, I'd mentioned your son, and I was thinking you made that album during the height of the pandemic, right, when you were-

Tracy Silverman:

Yes, we sure did. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, it was kind of an interesting, fun thing. I thought, well, we'll just do this as a father-son kind of thing, because he was really getting into beats at that time, which he's still into and has gotten much better at, but he was just getting started. I didn't even know he was doing it. He was just kind of taught himself how to do this stuff from watching stuff on YouTube. And I was like, what are you doing?

And as a way just to sort of encourage his journey with that and to respect that, I started playing on it and was like, yeah, this is really good. I'm going to play on this stuff and make a record out of it. So we ended up doing that, and we were finished with it and just about to put it out when the whole George Floyd thing happened and all of that happened, and suddenly it seemed like the idea of me and my son putting out a record of hip-hop beats just seemed like a really, really bad idea.

And my intention of it was to learn about this music to honor what he was doing, and I learned a ton, and for me to sort of play in a style that, I found, that it was very releasing for me in terms of my violin playing. It allowed me to do a different kind of playing that I felt like I used to do more in my rock and roll days when I was just really trying to sound as non-classical as I could back in those days, trying to sort of set another course for myself and my technique in playing.

And I started listening to this going, first of all, the whole hip hop world was fairly new to me, and he was really turning me onto all of these rappers that I had never listened to seriously and taken seriously. And I was hearing all these cool subtleties of the way they're behind the beat, and the way they're the way the vocals are such a rhythmic part of rap. So much energy comes from the vocal, and I was trying to capture that without words on the violin. So it was a real challenge for me as a violin player, and I thought, what would somebody do, who was like a young person who really knows and loves rap and hip hop, how would they approach the violin if they'd never been taught classical violin, had none of that experience, none of that sort of baggage, if you will?

And so that was my challenge. I was thinking of Matisse, Henri Matisse the painter, who said the hardest thing for a painter to do is to paint a rose, because in order to paint a rose, you have to forget every painting of a rose that you've studied your whole life. And so for me, I had to forget how to play the violin. I had to say, how would I play this to this music if I had never heard of violin before, and somebody just put this in my hands and said, here, make some sounds on this thing? So that was kind of my approach to it, which was very refreshing.

And anyway, I was going to shelf the whole thing and not put it out, because it just seemed like a bad idea at that moment. But a friend of mine, who ended up taking the promo shots for it, said, "No, no, you have to put this out. And what you're saying is important, and what you're doing is important and positive, and believe in it." And to that end, we took one of the tunes called Take Sides and found this Elie Wiesel speech, from his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he basically said, "We must speak out. We must not be silent." And that, I felt, included me as a privileged white male. I was like, hey, I've got a responsibility to speak out as well. So that was how that happened, and it was sort of an interesting side, a personal challenge for what to do with that record.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. You'd mentioned Terry Riley, I know you worked with him for many years, like in terms of a mentor and influence.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And the album that you made with him was a totally different again type of playing.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. Terry is a huge influence in my life, musically and personally. Spending time a lot of time with him, which I have over the 25 years or so that we've known each other, he's really taught me a lot about how to be an artist, what's important. His approach to music is so free, and there's such an integrity to what he does. And yet, such a... You know, has this wonderful integrity, and yet this wonderful freedom, where he's just fine with trying anything and going places and taking huge risks on stage.

I was in the trio with just me, Terry, and Gyan, his son, for many years, and we would just go on stage with a tune that had a melody and a very loose structure, and one night it could be 10 minutes and one night it could be 30 minutes. And he would just let out the leash for us, and just say, "Take it and run, go wherever it takes you."

And some nights we'd get into a real heavy rock and rolly kind of thing, I would just kick the distortion on and get into something I'd never really done with that tune before. And he would just be there on the piano, just smiling and there, and then he would go off into something that we had no idea. Is he going into a different tune? What is he doing? I'd look at Gyan, and Gyan would be just smiling like, "I don't know, that's my dad." And that was the way we played and performed and worked together. Just hugely inspirational.

Leah Roseman:

I interview a lot of improvisers, because I'm fascinated with that, and I always ask people if they hear what they're about to play. And I've heard you say that you believe we have to hear what we're about to play.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. Yeah, in the same way that you hear what you're going to say just before you say it.

Leah Roseman:

Do you though?

Tracy Silverman:

Exactly, exactly. But you do in that split second. So that's the interesting, the timeline, I think, is what you're asking about. Are you pre-thinking this, or is it really, truly spontaneous, right? How does that function? And if it's truly spontaneous, how are you able to make sense of it without practicing it?

... Able to make sense of it without practicing it. And the answer to that is it's remarkably similar to this conversation that we are having. You have some ideas of what you want to ask me. I have some ideas of the stories that I want people to know about me. But the exact words I'm going to use, when I'm going to say them, completely unrehearsed. I haven't practiced what I'm going to say. And I'm thinking, sometimes, slowly, but sometimes I'm putting my words together, hopefully just before I say them, and not just after I say them. And that's the way our brains work, which is fucking remarkable, to understate it. The whole what's going on in our brains that allows us to have an idea and spontaneously communicate that using a shared language is what makes the human species fairly unique. Although animals do a similar kind of thing. But it's the same process when we're playing.

The difference is that I have practiced, just simply practiced, the ability to spontaneously play what I'm thinking of on my instrument. And it's just the way you learned how to speak. At first, you didn't know the words to things. Little by little, you knew them and you immediately associated what you wanted with a word, and was able to say it and communicate it. And that process just became... It took years, but it's something your brain developed because you needed it. And the same thing can happen on an instrument. And the easiest way to develop it is to simply sing along with what you're playing. And that's... People think it's so difficult, and such a parlor trick, and like, "How do you do that?" And, you know, it's sort of the George Benson thing of (singing). Got some delay on here. Just get to a... just plain sound.

But it's as easy as what I'm doing right now, just speaking. So I have an idea of what I want to say. I have an idea of what I want to play. I want to go (singing). And you just kind of know if you... If you kind of know... You have to have a sort of orientation of what your key is like. What is A? Where is a reference point? Middle C or something. So if I go (singing), I know it's third to the fifth, it's a C major triad. I can just feel it. Now, I may not always have that intellectual thing, but often, if we're playing jazz or something music, something tonal, we have a sense of a chord. It's a D major chord. Now I can ask you to play a D major scale or something, and any classical musician can do that. I can say, "Play a D major scale in alternating thirds." Any classical player can do that. And that's really... And if I said, "Sing along while you do it." You could do that within five minutes of trying. And that's the exact same process that I'm using to improvise with.

So it's really... Most classical players are so close to being able to improvise and they just don't realize it. It's just a baby step away from what you can already do, and it's just a matter of practicing it. And by practicing, I mean, like, a few weeks of practicing and you'll be able to sing and play along to whatever you hear in your head. You hear it. If you see... you know that's a C. Okay, so you sort of orient yourself. And now if I go... I just... I know where that is on the instrument. You know where the notes are on the instrument. You've been playing the instrument long enough, the muscle memory is there, and it's just a tiny baby step away from improvising. So, taking the magic out of it.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

I know. I'd love to make it... "Oh, it's this thing you classical musicians will never understand. You have to spend years in the darkness." No. It's basically like playing... You can play a scale in G major, you can improvise in G major.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I mean, a lot of the improvisation I've been trying to do is not tonally based, it's not over harmonic changes. And that's a little bit different. And I don't have perfect pitch, so I can't always know... But, yeah. And not everyone has given the same answer as you, as to whether they always hear.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. One thing I'd like to add to the improvisation story thing is that, one of the things that I've been teaching lately with strum bowing is to use rhythm as an entry point to improvisation, rather than notes, and keys, and scales, and chords. So using that whole tonal thing of, "Okay, I'm going to play in G major. Great. I know what G major is. I can do that." To start from a rhythmic perspective and say, "Okay, the groove is..." So I'm going to use that as a way to start, and I'm going to go... and find that there's all these rhythmic subtleties that I'm doing, without even trying to, just because they happen. Even when you're trying to play the same thing over and over again, you'll play it a little differently. And if you give yourself a little freedom to do that, you end up improvising rhythms.

Now you may not think of it as being the most creative improvisation in the world because the beat is staying the same, the subdivision is the same. Yeah, it's a limited version. You're not reinventing the wheel every time you do that. But you are creating improvisations within that group. And for rhythm players, that's a big part of what makes it work; that you're playing the same two chords over and over again, but it doesn't get boring. How is that happening? Like listen to Stevie Wonder play Superstition, and it's just the same... It's like one chord the whole time. (singing) It's a dominant chord. But holy cow, he can play that for an hour and it's interesting. Now, there's a very perfected art of rhythmic improvisation going on there, very intuitive, effective way that he's making us move, physically, because of what he's doing rhythmically. So, I think that's a good thing for a lot of classical players to remember, that you can do a whole lot of rhythm with... a lot of improvisation with very few notes, or with no notes.

Leah Roseman:

How does that Stevie Wonder tune go? You have your fiddle there. Can you play it?

Tracy Silverman:

Oh my gosh. You know? You know, I never really figured it out on fiddle, but it's like... I'm not playing in the right key. I think it's in E flat. Something like that, but anyway... It's just kind of a cool, funky groove. If I was going to do it, I might do it in a different key. Something like that.

Leah Roseman:

Your fluidity is astounding. I'm just like trying to get you to play more! I have to say, I went through your strum bowing book, and the etudes, and I'm trying to get the chop going. And you'd be interested with my orchestra. We just played... Well, two really, really hard weeks with super rhythmic music. We premiered a percussion concerto by a Canadian composer, Nicole Lizée, and her writing is really... it's hard to read off the page. It's not... Beyond mixed meters. The meter changes every bar, and all these loops. She's also a DJ and it was this crazy long percussion concerto. And we played Right of Spring on the same program. National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada, here in Ottawa. Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh, cool!

Leah Roseman:

And then last week we played the Canadian premiere of the Wynton Marsalis Tuba Concerto. Which had some basic jazz rhythms, but again, like... Like, I listen to a lot of jazz, but when you're just seeing it on the page, it's not always so obvious, the feel of it. But especially with the Lizée, I have to say, and the Stravinsky. I use some of your ideas of ghosting, like filling in that way. It was fantastic. It saved me a ton of time. Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. So, I mean, the idea for... I'm not going to get into a whole strum bowing thing, but one thing that's I think tricky for people to realize, is that the idea of strum bowing is basically just highlighting the fact that you can... bringing out the subdivision of the beat, what I call the groove on. And a lot of times, as a melody player, for violins especially more so than cellos, we're playing melodies that are not reflecting the rhythmic subdivisions. And it can distort our playing so that we don't honor those grooves. But I guess my point is that the idea of strum bowing is that you're constantly keeping this grid of down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. But in reality, it doesn't apply itself to a lot of actual music, because you have to use a different bowing.

So my example of a classical music that I use is the Beethoven 7th with that... Sorry, I keep turning my battery off. Is that the rhythm is... so that rhythm often gets distorted. So instead of being... one, two, three... it becomes... And so in order to put it back into its proper rhythmic container, we need to subdivide it. So using this idea of strum bowing, you can go like... and to feel that. But in reality, you can't really use that when you're playing it. It goes too fast and... You know? But it does help you to understand the rhythmic integrity of it. So it's, I think, helpful in that sense, so that you go, "Okay, that subdivision, I'm not... I'm not counting, basically." When my teachers used to, you know, what everybody does. You don't hold a long note long enough, or rest long enough because you just like, "Oh, I'll just shorten that." But not respecting the grid underneath it. Anyway...

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I had used definitely with my students obviously playing subdivisions for long notes and stuff, but I had never tried ghosting rests in that way before this. And in this piece, we had things where we'd have loops where you'd have a 1/16th rest, and then later 2/16th rest, and 3... between your things. And you can't use a metronome for that, so you have to find another way.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And that was the way.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah. Oh, very cool. Very cool. I'm glad that was helpful.

Leah Roseman:

Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

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Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

Tracy Silverman:

Leah Roseman:

Darol Anger introduced you to the music of Gismonti. Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes he did.

Leah Roseman:

And I knew the name, but I hadn't really... So I was listening to some of his music. I was like, "Oh, I can totally see the connection there." Did you ever get to work with him?

Tracy Silverman:

I never did. I never have. We've considered commissioning him to write a concerto, which I think would be super cool. So, that's still an idea that's out there. I'm just a huge fan. I heard his music and I just... I went like, "That's exactly the way I would write... I want to write." He had this tune called Maracatu, and there was this way he had this descending baseline by whole steps, and just the way he was organizing it and all... It just spoke to me immediately. But Darol played for me... And Darol Anger was brilliant for this. He introduced me to so much great music. And he would just force me to listen to stuff. I would be in a car back then with cassette tapes, and he would just say, "Here, listen to this."

And I was always of... I had sort of a natural resistance to that and I don't know why. You'd think everything about my values would suggest otherwise. But there's some weird thing that's like, "Ah, I got too much stuff in my head. I just don't... I don't need something new. Don't show me an artist." And a lot of times it was fiddle players and I was just... As much as I have respect for bluegrass players and stuff like that, there's a limit to how much of that I really want to listen to. Just personal thing with old timey and stuff. I'm good for a few tunes, but...

Anyway, so he... Like, "Here, I got this tape." I was like, "Ugh." And then, as soon as he started playing it, and it's this tune Loro. It's just this great tune, this Brazilian thing, and the recording is so amazing. What the drums are doing and the way he's playing the piano. Yeah. And it just... it became one of my favorite tunes ever and... huge fan. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

You did a couple recordings with different percussionists, one of them Caito Marcondes. He's also Brazilian.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Caito.

Tracy Silverman:

Caito. Yeah. We met Caito. We were down... We, with Turtle Island, went to Brazil in like '95 or something like that and played a festival down there. And I don't remember how our paths crossed, but Caito then wrote a whole record, basically, that he hired Turtle Island to record. So he came to the US like a couple years later, we did a whole record with him, and then after I left Turtle Island, I reached out to him and said, "Let's do a record together." We did this record North Meets South. Which he came up to Nashville, we recorded it her, but then I subsequently came down to Brazil a few times to play on these percussion festivals and various things. So, yeah, Caito's an old friend and he's still blowing it up down there, doing great stuff.

Leah Roseman:

I love that album. Really. That's great.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh, thank you. Yeah. I love Brazilian music. I love the... just the warmth and humanity of it. For some reason there's an informality to Brazilian music that's just so wonderful. Not sure what that is. It's just part of the culture that I love.

Leah Roseman:

So you do a lot of teaching at university there. Are you teaching just strict rock, or jazz, or what are you doing with your students?

Tracy Silverman:

I actually don't do a lot of... I don't have a lot of students at Belmont University. I just take one or two a semester, and I have an ensemble, a jazz string quartet, which is sort of like a Turtle Islandy sort of stuff. We'll do Turtle Island arrangements, or new arrangements that the kids write, which I really encourage them to do, or other arrangements of mine. Or Danny, like Danny Seinberg from Turtle Island, I just had him send me a bunch of his stuff and we're going to do some of his stuff. But I do online lessons, and of course all the strum bowing workshop kind of stuff, which has been really kind of occupying a lot of my educational time.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, and you've written string orchestra arrangements for strum bowing stuff to really bring it into the schools.

Tracy Silverman:

Yep. Yep. I do a lot of stuff with high schools and I'll often write something new for them. I just wrote something for the school in Ohio. The string director of the oyster there, Rachel Gamin, so I wrote a piece called Jammin' With Gamin. I wrote something for some friends of mine up in Aurora, Illinois and their Waubonsie Valley High School. And it's called The Strummin' Waubonsies. So I keep... I take these opportunities to create new stuff that basically illustrates... uses strum bowing, so that in the process of playing a concert with the kids, I can really teach them how to do this kind of stuff. And it'll often be a situation where I'll have a whole orchestra section taking something that starts out like... and then goes to... and getting them all to groove this together by keeping that subdivision going in your hand. And getting a groovier style of playing violin than... as it comes bowing which tends to be distorted.

Leah Roseman:

So we talked briefly about Darol Anger. I know he was really... showed you the ropes in terms of like... Because the touring you did with Turtle Island must have been so different than what you were doing in your rock days.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes. Yes. Which wasn't touring at all, which was just playing local clubs. So yeah. No, it was a huge... The whole Turtle Island experience for me was hugely educational. Again, the takeaway that all of these different things were just educations for me. Yeah. The whole touring stuff and how to do all of that. But also playing wise. Darol taught me how to chop. What I was doing with my rock bands was a little different. I was playing rhythmically, and playing rock and roll to accompany myself, but it was typically more of power chordy kind of stuff like... And so I was doing stuff like this, more guitar kind of like... You know? Or... Playing very rhythmically. But I was not doing this chop stroke really the way you would do it on an acoustic violin, to bring out the overtones and that kind of stuff.

So he sat me down and taught me how to do this, and it's subsequently become how I teach people to chop. But he was doing... He was like, "Okay, here's the chop. It's a downstroke, and you want to make an upstroke." So you got two sounds. And then he would do like... And then he would go like a... I was like, "Wait, wait a second. That is not... this. Those are two different things." He's like, "Yeah, it is. I'm just speeding it up."

So there was a lot of in between there that I had to figure out for myself. And the thing that I think I'm kind of proud of as a sort of teaching invention, is that I started teaching not just this chop, this simple chop stroke, but what I call a compound chop. Because I noticed what Darol was doing is this... doing two of them fast. Not just going down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, but going oney and a twoey and a... So it was a four note thing. And I noticed Casey Driessen is also doing a thing. He kind of thinks of it as a... like a front middle, back middle, front... So he's got a little different approach to it. But I was...

Finally, and just in an attempt to try to explain what Darol was doing to people... Because I could kind of imitate him, but I didn't know quite how I was doing it. So I finally broke it down and I realized I can teach this as a compound chop. And then that's the basis, basically, for a vertical version of strumming, where we're able to keep subdivisions, which are typically 16th notes. So, we need to be able to divide a beat into four parts rather than just two. And so that's what this was able to do. And so then I realized, "Okay, these are both doing the same thing." They're both subdividing the beat. One horizontally and one vertically. But musically, they're accomplishing the same goal, just in different parts of the bow. So I started thinking of all of this rhythmic playing as strumming, rather than chopping versus shuffling. It was all kind of subdividing. And that's kind of where the whole strum thing started.

Leah Roseman:

It's interesting when you were saying, like, you were a little resistant to like, "Don't put on another cassette." Because as a performer, often I just don't want to listen to music. It's just like I... Right? I just...

Tracy Silverman:

People always ask me, like non musician friends, "What are you listening to these days? What's cool? What should I listen to?" And I'm like, "Don't ask me. I do not... I don't like music. I don't listen to it. I find it..." I was once actually... I went so far as to tell somebody, "I find it too manipulative." It's like, if I listen to music, it's like they're trying to get me into their mood. It's like, I want to be independent of that. Because it's really true. Music is very manipulative of your... you know.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Actually that brings me to another question, because I think in your interview with Martha Mooke, you were talking about how music can completely change your emotions. And she was saying there was this tune and she kept listening to it, it was bringing her mood up. So I was going to ask you actually, if, during the darkest days of the pandemic, there was music you were going to, but maybe not.

Tracy Silverman:

You know, there's definitely stuff that I can't listen to without smiling. And a lot of that is stuff like Stevie Wonder, that Gismonti tune. There's a Salif Keita tune called Africa, which is just... If you don't dance to that, you're not...

Leah Roseman:

Can you play it?

Tracy Silverman:

No pulse left. Oh, gosh. You know, I've never... Believe it or not... It's one of those things where it's like, "I love this record. I would never even try to play it because I would never be able to do it." It's just this great... (singing) It's a real Afro-pop kind of thing. It's hard. Believe me, I'm not doing it justice. Anyway, it's one of those things that just, you can't sit still.

So I do tend towards music that is upbeat like that, rather than stuff that makes me super weepy. Just because I'm an easy guy to get to cry for... Sometimes things... I'll just hear music that just... Well, I shouldn't say... Nessun Dorma, things like that, hearing Pavarotti sing that aria just instantly makes tears just fly out of my eyes.

And there are things that pop singers can do, like Aretha, that I just... Did you see a Summer of Soul, the movie? Great doc about the Harlem Jazz Fest and... Who was it? Wasn't Cissy Houston. It was... Oh, great gospel singer. And just sitting there, the tears just streaming down my face. There's something about... Often gospel music, and music like that from the black church tradition that just hits such a... so directly, in such a visceral way, that you can't help. You just respond like a nerve is hit, you know? It's funny. Anyway, I do still like music.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Well actually, for me, like this podcast that I've been doing has really helped break out of just listening to whatever, to focusing in on records a lot of my guests have made, or stuff they're into. So, that's been pretty cool actually. I go down a rabbit hole and hopefully my listeners follow and check out their music afterwards.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Your discography is huge and varied, so I hope people who've made it this far into the conversation will go and check out your many records.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh, thank you.

Leah Roseman:

We were talking about percussionist actually, because Roy "Futureman" Wooten, you did a record with him. That's a cool guy. And he does, like, cool instruments that you can't see in the air. Like...

Tracy Silverman:

He is a very cool guy.

Yeah. Yes. You know, he's the percussionist drummer from Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. And many years ago, back in the '80s, started playing this drumitar that he invented, which looked kind of like a guitar, but it had pads, midi pads. So he was really kind of breaking ground at the time when that was a very new thing to have a sort of a drum-midi trigger like that. Now there's a thing called a zendrum, which is basically modeled on his first drumitars. But as amazing as all that stuff is, when he sits down behind a drum kit, he's just one of the funkiest, best drummers you'll ever hear. He's so much fun to play with. He just makes anything you're playing just sound better. It's just as simple as that. It's just... He adds just a swing, a feel to it that just feels so good.

So yeah, we've been playing together for years as a duo and that's... Again, another person who was hugely sort of, kind of a mentor in a way. I mean, I've learned so much from Roy about being relaxed, improvising, jumping into any situation. But he's such a chill guy and I can be such an uptight guy. And then it's such a... It's great for me to have somebody like that to model... you know what I mean? How to... Just showing up to do a gig, and just bringing yourself, and just knowing that that's enough. You know, that's a whole lot to learn from somebody. Doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but you could spend 10 years picking that up.

Leah Roseman:

My whole life, it's been trying to get that. I wanted to bring that up, actually, just this feeling of being vulnerable on stage, and how improvisation must have helped you as... coming out of this classical world that was so straight and narrow.

Tracy Silverman:

Yes. Yes. Well... Let me just put this down for a sec. I think the reason I do what I do, is because I needed a way to kind of create my own rules, because I was just not comfortable having to fulfill everybody else's expectations of what a classical violinist does. Because, frankly, I really got turned off to the whole Olympic kind of competition, of trying to play something with the fewest mistakes. To me, that's just such a non-musical approach, non-creative approach.

So it's a funny thing. Performing, that's your job, is to try to learn something so you're sort of bulletproof, that you can get up and play it, and feel confident about doing something very difficult. And people kind of come to see you do that. And there's a certain amount of it. People are there to hear you tell a story, to make a musical statement of some kind, but there's also a certain aspect of that, which is, "Let's watch this virtuoso play something." Sort of like watching a basketball player, or an athlete do something that they can't do. And there's a thrill to that. But there's also a tight wire that the performer walks because of that, you know?

But at any rate, I guess the bigger picture is that I sort of was not comfortable doing that, and standing up and playing the Tchaikovsky concerto that everybody has heard, everybody knows, and it's supposed to go like this and, "Oh, you didn't... You dropped a note." Or, "You didn't do that." Or whatever. Everybody... So I was like, "I'm going to do something nobody knows how it goes." Either...

Everybody. I was like, "I'm going to do something nobody knows how it goes." Either I wrote it or I created the style and nobody can tell me I'm not doing it right, because it's my own little world. It's my own little niche. And so I think a big part of my career was that. Was just like, "Let me create something where I can't..." Nobody's going to judge me on their standards because you have to judge me on my own thing. Whether that came out of some form of fear or vulnerability or uncomfortableness or what, but there was certainly a certain amount of moving away from pain and moving towards pleasure in the whole thing of, "Let me not do what everybody else did. Let me not be the 38th version of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in the catalog, which used to be the Schwann catalog if anybody remembers. But let me try to advance the state of the art of string playing at the same time. Sort of both of those things happening, I think, if that makes sense.

Leah Roseman:

When March 2020, when the world shut down and our lives as performers got cut with very uncertain future, you stopped practicing for a while, right?

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, it was a difficult time for me. Actually, I was just intending to dive into this Strum Bowing project of creating these online courses. I was about to do that. Anyway, as it happens and I was about to start a podcast to sort of be related to that and to try to start building community around what I was doing. I was sort of taking a turn away from performing and into this more educational kind of pursuit, but I did intend to have some income to make that transition possible. And when the rug completely got pulled out from under me for a period of a year with zero income and relying on as a freelancer, basically, which is the way the state unemployment system saw me, I was not eligible for anything because they did not have any unemployment for self-employed people in Tennessee.

I was completely... I had had the national... The money that they were sending out, which lasted for a couple months, whatever. Thank God my wife had a job, was able to keep her job, but so I'm not sure what you were asking exactly about that moment, but it was a very difficult moment for me because I basically wanted to start this new transition to sort of a new business and was planning on making a lot of investments towards that and buying cameras and this software to run the back end of the marketing. It's a lot that goes into starting a business and really couldn't had zero wherewithal to do it suddenly. It was very frustrating. And so it sort of ended up making that record instead and doing my best with one camera and an iPhone, and then sort of upgrading as I went, but it was a struggle.

It was a struggle and very, very demoralizing for me personally, partly because I turned 60, right like two weeks after the pandemic hit, like the first week of April is my birthday. And so it was right then and suddenly the bottom dropped out. I was like, all my future plans for this business just seemed unreachable. How are we just going to keep the house? And suddenly then had a house full of kids at all. My grown kids showed up from Chicago and everybody was living here. Together we were all kind of quarantining together.

And it was just a crazy moment career wise for me and age wise to sort of turn 60 and suddenly to feel like I had no future for the time being, was a difficult, very difficult position to be in. I really struggled with that for a while. I didn't... I haven't really talked about it at all. And because I think everybody struggled and nobody wants to hear about my struggle, but if it makes anyone feel any better, I did have a rough time for that first year. It was really rough.

Leah Roseman:

What helped get you through it?

Tracy Silverman:

Work, doing this work, just doing what I could do at home and hoping that... Just trying to make my time useful and hoping that at one point it would... The money part of it would balance out and would pay off. Since I couldn't go out and earn any money, I could create assets, create a record, create music, create video, create, be creative, productive, and figure out how to invest in that later once I had some income rolling in again and how to... Because you can create anything you want, if you don't have the wherewithal to bring it to the public, it's like a tree falling and nobody hearing it. After creating all that stuff, the whole job of bringing it to people is a whole somebody else's job and somebody else's money.

But of course in our world, now this is part of being a musician is being an entrepreneur. And I think that's something a lot of your guests have spoken about in your podcast is, how are we all as creatives coping in this environment? Because holy cow, it's not enough to just do your work anymore. It was difficult to find yourself in a position where you could do that ever, because you had to either have a record deal or I don't know, a college teaching position that allowed you to have time to work or something if you're a writer, but the whole dynamics of how we create a space for ourselves to create is tricky. It's really tough. And I've had to learn a lot from younger people, from students, how to use social media, how to use... And things that I don't avail myself of.

There are people using Patreon and people using Kickstart and blah, blah, blah. There's all kinds of ways of funding yourself. I try to do things that hopefully will work for me. And it's difficult also, I think being older, being a little more established, it's hard to do things that kids right out of school will do and can do. And there's a sort of, I don't know, it's tricky. I found my myself in a funny position where I was sort of this... A friend likes to call it. You're a world famous, starving musician. I found myself with a reputation that a lot of people knew of. And yet I needed a gig, I would've taken a wedding gig in the middle of the pandemic if I had one. It's a funny position to be in.

Leah Roseman:

And this "Ficciones" concerto, did that help you get practicing again? Because that sort of got going?

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, yes it did. It kicked my butt. It definitely got my fingers in shape fast. Thankfully, I've got a great manager, Brian Horner, who put this commissioning project together. It's really what he does. One of the things he does really well is gets an orchestral consortium together. He got the American symphony as the lead and the Vermont symphony, Meridian, Mississippi, the Richmond youth orchestra and San Antonio youth orchestra. And now we have about a dozen other orchestras who have now become really interested in it. After the success we had at the premiere and good reviews and we have a recording coming out of it and all that kind of stuff. His job's to get all of these people. Put all these pieces together and he managed to do that really kind of during the pandemic. Coming out of the pandemic when orchestras said, "No, we're going out of business. We're not taking on any new projects. We're not commissioning anybody. We can't even pay our players."

And somehow he managed to find enough people and we managed to work with Roberto to make it affordable and to pull this off. Kudos to him and to the orchestras for taking, continuing to take chances on new music, which is always a difficult thing for them to do. There was a lot of things that lined up and I'm so grateful to have a new piece to work on and to have something to sink my teeth into and to be creating new repertoire, which is really what my mission to put stuff out there so that other six string electric violin players besides me will play this stuff.

I'm happy to be the first one to do some of these pieces, but I really am hoping that I'm not the only one, there's a Rudolph Hawkin at University of Illinois has a six string doctoral program, electric violin, not six string, an electric violin doctoral program that he's doing. And a friend of mine, Matt Bell and Chuck Bond Trager two great electric violin players are taken it, getting their doctorate. Matt is actually using my concerto as one of the pieces that he's working on.

This is all stuff that was just a dream when I started doing this in the 80s. That anybody else would ever be crazy enough to play an electric violin, let alone be able to get a degree in it and to have repertoire that other people can play. It's very gratifying to see how the world has changed in the 40 years, that we're doing this.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I mean, you were building literally your first instruments.

Tracy Silverman:

Yep. With Mark Wood back in 1981, Mark was the first person who ever made a six string violin as far as I know, except for maybe some Gamba makers back in the 1600s or something. And he had a couple of them that he had built. I found out about it and went out to Long Island and met up with him. This is way pre-internet. And we started building them out in his dad's woodworking shop, because his dad was a carpenter and started knocking out these electric instruments. He had a way of doing them. He showed me how he did it. I started changing them. I started commissioning Luthier to make them for me. And once I kind of got into more hollow instruments that I couldn't make and I sort of split off and did my semi hollow instruments that I've been doing since the late 80s.

Mark, of course has wood violins. That's a huge company. Now that's one of the main makers of electric violins in the world. I'm so incredibly proud of what he's done to bring electric violins to the world. I don't think there's anyone in the electric violin world who's done more than he has for this industry. I'm proud to be teaching at his camp this summer in a few weeks, the Mark Wood Rock camp, bringing kids from all... Young high school kids and teachers from all over the country to just geek out on electric violins and to play together and stuff like that. That's the future of strings that I'm really focused on. And want to try to fan those flames. People who are doing that kind of stuff. That's the kind of work that I hope to help add to the mix of string playing, there's lots of people doing classical stuff. They don't need me to do that. And there are a lot of people who are bringing classical strings to communities that aren't, that don't have access to that and that's important work.

And I don't ever want to underestimate how important it is to bring Mozart to people who have, and Bach to people who aren't familiar with it. But my mission is a little different. I'm trying to bring people who don't listen to Mozart and Bach to strings to play them. And how would you play a violin if you never heard Tchaikovsky? It's sort of a little bit, and it's a different thing and to bring rock and roll to the concert hall. It's pathways that are intersecting going back and forth and sharing stuff, but it's all stuff that wasn't happening at all 40 years ago. That's for sure.

Leah Roseman:

Sure. Do you have a drum set in your house? Yeah.

Tracy Silverman:

I do.

Leah Roseman:

I was curious if you had learned to play drum set early on just to help your rhythm playing.

Tracy Silverman:

Interesting question. I really suck at drums. I have it here more for my kid who was really kind of more into drums and was playing drums for a while. I mean, it's something you really have to practice and with Roy "Futureman" Wooten for so many years, and really seeing all the cool stuff and he's got this great Facebook group called Rhythm Hackers and to see, how he overlays fives on top of fours and all these cool patterns and shifting accents that he does so effortlessly. Yeah. I mean, I picked up a lot from working with him, but I can't play it. I would never try to sit behind the drums. It's hard. You got to practice that stuff.

Leah Roseman:

I'm just curious. And just like a geek question in terms of your violin playing, do you practice a lot of double stops because you're playing chords all the time?

Tracy Silverman:

I do. But not as much as somebody like Billy Contreras or something who does, I don't know if you're familiar-

Leah Roseman:

I listened to that interview, which is breakdown. It's like a blow my mind.

Tracy Silverman:

Oh my gosh. But what he can do with that Western swing stuff where everything is double, we have these twin fiddles and it'll be four part harmony, carefully worked out where they're both playing double stops all the time. I don't do to that extent, but I definitely use... I think of the violin as a portal instrument. And that's one of the main things that I'm trying to change in terms of the approach to string playing. I've just written this book. I'm sure you've noticed in your research called the "Rhythm String Player", which is sort of a follow up to "Strum Bowing". All right, now that you know the technique of Strum, how do you use it?

How do you apply it? And the basic idea is to think of your violin as a chord instrument, like a guitar and treat it like a guitar. And so there are chord patterns that we can play that are basically like bar cording on a guitar. If you're going to learn how to play a guitar in your first lesson, you're going to probably learn two chords. You're going to learn E and A, and you're going to be able to go back and forth between an E cord, a open chords. There's similar kinds of stuff on a violin where we can play a G.

G seven chord or G dominant chord or G major seven chord. There are all these three finger patterns. And so once you learn that simple sort of chord thing, you can play a 2, 5, 1 pattern, in any key. And then the question becomes, how do you strung that with your bow and how do you do something that's not jus down there, but uses more of the range, breaking a chord with some harmonic melodic kind of thing, arppegiated thing, or let's say like, where I'm sort of combining playing a chord with, and it sort of ends up the net result being that you're kind of playing chords the way a guitar player does. And typically in a song you might only need two or three chords. And you can, if you're just kind of vamping between two chords, whatever. That kind of double stopping is what I tend to use a little more and chordal kind of approach to the instrument.

Leah Roseman:

Do you have any kind of routine with your practicing?

Tracy Silverman:

No, not really. I generally focus on what I need to learn. I've been really focusing on the, on "Ficciones", which so much in my practice time is not just playing the violin but programming effects and making the chart more readable. I'm like that program on this program. By the time I actually get to practice it's kind of focused on drilling passage work like you would with any concerto, working on intonation. Why is this phrase always out of tune? Oh, it's the half step is here, not there, you know, whatever, all that kind of classical training, bringing that to bear. And then also trying to figure out where am I going to make it? Where am I going to do my stuff? That's more, where am I going to put the multiphonics, where I'm going,

That kind of stuff and how to interpret the piece. More focused on what I have to perform next. If I'm doing a solo program, I'm going through all my repertoire, my pieces, jamming on them, trying to figure out and the solo parts, what can I do that's different? How can I approach this solo that I'm not just playing the same solos that I always play over those chords? Maybe there's some other cool harmonic interest I can do, or maybe I'll try add harm, just different things that I try to freshen up arrangements. A lot of my practice time is focused on that. How can I... Sometimes I'll have a loop and I'm like, "Oh, you know what? I could add little melody to that loop." And I sort of start changing the arrangement a little bit. Arrangements get more and more involved sometimes as I play them over the years.

And that's the kind of work I do. I'm rarely doing... I don't do a lot of scales. Although sometimes every once in a while, I'll really try to work on my jazz language a little bit and I'll do stuff like playing augmented scale or patios. And I do this thing where I'll go, one little thing that I do and I teach my students is what I call full range one position for pentatonics for instance. Where you'll go, like, let's say an A minor pentatonic and play the whole scale all the way down as high as you can go in one position, then do it B flat, that kind of thing, or do a similar thing with, like I was saying, augmented, and just kind of getting that muscle memory whole tone scale, stuff like that, diminished scales, simple patterns, or.

That kind of stuff. Sometimes I'll do just to make sure that muscle memory is there and fresh because those become very useful in improvisations and that muscle memory, we were talking about improv before that muscle memory is your fluency in a language. That's the exact analogy, their analogous. I can speak off the cuff. I mean, without preparing, because I'm fluent in English, I could not do this in Spanish. Okay. I would have to write it out, practice it or whatever, to some degree until I was more fluent, then I could sort of haltingly speak off the cuff, whatever, but the fact that I'm fluent and my speech is automatic is something that we take for granted and the same thing with music, this muscle memory of how to play within a whole tonality, or how to play within a diminished tonality and to have that muscle memory where I can just play anything within that tonality and be able to make that work. That's my fluency. It's important to keep that... The fluency happens kind of partly in your fingers, actually in the muscle memory. In our speech, it's kind of in our tongues.

Leah Roseman:

I think it's all our brains.

Tracy Silverman:

Our mouth, because-

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, It feels...

Tracy Silverman:

It's a lot of brain, but it's actually a physical part of that, that people from different language have an accent because their mouths are saying things differently. They're not saying THS, they're saying ta instead of the. Whatever, all of that stuff, it's the body and the brain are very closely connected when all of this stuff happens. A big part of improvising is just being able to tap into that fluency.

Leah Roseman:

Do you feel like you have perfectionistic tendencies?

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, unfortunately.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I was wondering about that. Because, but then you're an improviser and you're a rock musician, so that must help you counter that.

Tracy Silverman:

It's a very interesting subject, an interesting point, that you bring up, won't go into great detail about it, but yes, to be a violinist, requires a real perfectionist kind of mentality. I think we all are familiar with that. I think it comes from the need to play in tune, as I like, I sometimes tell students, their intonation is just sloppy. It's not getting better. And I'm like, "Look, you just simply have to be pickier. If it isn't right, fix it." And having good intonation is a matter of being really picky and being very, like if it's... It's like, you're cleaning off a mirror. If there's a little smudge it's not clean, it's not clean until it's clean, and that's kind of the way intonation is, it's sort of musical hygiene.

And so you can get into this very... That search for perfect intonation and it brings out a very perfectionist mentality in us. And improvising is a very different process, as I was sort of intubating before this idea of learning something, being Bulletproof and getting up on stage and being able to play it well and performing it well as an athlete, it's a very different process than sitting down and exploring music and writing something where you're sort of the writer, the old typewriter, you're writing something, you take it out, throw it in the trash, write something else, take it out, throw it in the trash. That's your process as a creative, as a creator is to experiment, explore, try things. And one end of a hundred things that you try is going to sound great. And that's your process, which is the exact opposite of performing. You get one shot and you got to nail it. I've always had a problem with these two very different things, processes that are happening.

And that's why I think that the bridge to that is the sort of muscle memory fluency. That's how you can create spontaneously and not make it, something where you're regretting every note, "Whoop that's the wrong note. And to a certain extent when you're improvising jazz, it's within a very kind of known context. You're not recreating the wheel, you're playing often within a key, within a chord, within a chord progression. There's a lot of parameters that if you've done it, before there's only so many options that you could take. I mean, obviously it's free, but within certain limitations, you're not just free to do anything. And if you are free to do anything and it's free jazz, then there are a lot less wrong notes. It kind of balances out somehow.

Leah Roseman:

You've been so generous with your time today. And I do like to close out if you, if you wouldn't mind around the idea of either the young Tracy Silverman looking back when you're 20, advice you give him or just young people today, just kind of different questions, but I'll let you pick.

Tracy Silverman:

Yeah, what advice I would give? That's always a tricky one because, you don't want to sound like sort of an old Fuddy Daddy or something, but I guess one thing for sure, for me, I had a lot of arrogance as a young person. I still have a certain amount of that I've tried to temper, but I think if for young people, if you're talented, and if you sort of know you've got something going on, it's really easy to get absorbed in that. And it's important to get absorbed in that because that's how you create your voice and create your art. But it's really, I think what I would tell my younger self is to be more open, to Darrell putting a tape in the tape deck and all of the richness of my playing came from people exposing me to new stuff.

Whether it was my brother turning me on to Frank Zappa and Jean-Luc Ponty, who I hadn't heard before he gave me and Jimmy Hendrix, he gave me some records and sort of blew my mind with that stuff or Darrel with Gismonti or even learning strolling violin stuff. That was not something I actually even wanted to learn particularly. But all of that, it's all of those experiences that take a minute of your time, that take you away from yourself and force you to listen to somebody else that really make you the musician that you are. And I guess what I'm saying is it's more important to listen. The first thing you do as a musician is to listen before you start playing, make sure you're listening as much as you are playing, listening to other people.

Leah Roseman:

Awesome. Thank you. Well, it's been amazing meeting you and thanks so much for everything.

Tracy Silverman:

Likewise, wonderful questions. Thank you for being so insightful and having done such incredible research. Wow. It really makes me feel very, very negligent as a podcast interviewer.

Leah Roseman:

Well, you know your guests, right? They're friends of yours.

Tracy Silverman:

Sometimes. Yeah. Usually I know them personally.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, no, you're an awesome podcaster. Okay. Well thanks.

Tracy Silverman:

Thank you.

Leah Roseman:

My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives and music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peeks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.