5 Minutes with . . . The Renegade Orchestra

By David Templeton | From the March/April 2025 issue of Strings

In a place like the San Francisco Bay Area, it can be a challenge for a new rock band to stand out from the crowd. With so many venues featuring live music on a nightly basis, it’s not easy to build a following in an environment crammed full of neo-punk collectives with names like Fake Fruit and Moms with Bangs, industrial noise pop groups such as Amanita Supernova and Space Moth, or any of dozens of Grateful Dead cover bands. Catching concert venue bookers’ attention, and then convincing an audience to pony up the cover charge on show night, is often a daunting task.

This is especially true when you are a sizable ensemble of classically trained string musicians. The fact that you play covers of Jimmy Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” does not necessarily help, though the fact that you are the only group doing it carries a certain “curiosity factor,” which is at least a good first step.

Jason Eckl, the cofounder and front man for the Renegade Orchestra, has learned that the secret to standing out in a crowd—aside from playing music that gets everybody saying, “Did they really just do that?”—is all about staying creative and being willing to take chances. 

For example, in December of 2024, posters began popping up in neighborhoods in the North Bay promising an afternoon performance by the Renegade Orchestra at a “secret theater.” Only after purchasing an online ticket would buyers be sent the location of the show. As a result, something rare began happening. A paper flyer became the focus of online postings around the Bay Area. A full two weeks before the mystery show, it was almost sold out.

“The original idea behind the ‘Marin Secret Theater’ event is, honestly, that in Marin there is a beautiful retail space that used to be a beautiful concert venue, and now it’s just sitting there empty, with the possibility of reopening it as venue again in the near future,” explains Eckl. “The idea of making it a mystery show was sort of an accidental necessity, but it’s turned out to be more of a feature than a bug.” Though the undisclosed location is a reasonably small, 100-seat venue, Eckl said the success of the show accomplishes two things. It tells the venue owners that it might be time to bring music back into the space, and it proves that it sometimes takes breaking the rules a little to turn some heads in your direction.

That’s something the Renegade Orchestra knows all about. “What we do is not something that people immediately understand when you explain it to them,” Eckl says with a laugh. “Our very existence breaks a lot of rules.”

Eckl is married to Rebecca Roudman, a cellist in the Santa Rosa Symphony and the Oakland Symphony and the lead singer-player in the popular ensemble Dirty Cello, of which Eckl is also a member. Roudman, in turn, is a member of the Renegade Orchestra. It was directly because of Roudman’s connections in the world of classical music that the idea for the group was born.

“Because of Rebecca, I have seen a lot of orchestra concerts,” says Eckl, who is primarily a guitarist. “I’ve seen hundreds of them. And for all the beauty of that kind of music, and for all the majesty of a giant orchestra, it’s always bugged me that the players in an orchestra, as artists and individuals, don’t get the attention and audience appreciation they deserve. These are people who’ve practiced their 10,000 hours, who come from the best music schools, who have a unique personality as artists, and yet they are all put in the same clothing and they all play the same music at the same time, so the audience never gets to know anything about them or who they are.”

Every time Eckl or Roudman would meet an impressive and interesting new cellist or violinist, they would find themselves thinking, “That person is amazing. I’d like to get to know them.” After accumulating a large collection of friends who were accomplished string players, they started talking about ways they could all do something together. “We thought, ‘We need to find a place for them to shine, something to kind of unleash all that amazing ability they have, and just let the world hear how awesome they are in a setting where they are going to be cheered for and clapped for, somewhere there will be yelling and dancing, and where they can get some individual attention.’”

That was the inspiration for the Renegade Orchestra, a flexibly sized, touring rock ensemble made up some of the Bay Area’s best and (arguably) weirdest classical musicians, playing instrumental versions of the greatest rock songs ever written. The ensemble was formed in 2021, during the trickier part of the pandemic, so the first performances were all held outdoors. Today, with a strong following and four years of experience, the group has established a routine. They convene twice a year to plan out and rehearse their music for the next six months and then spend half a year traveling about as much as possible in between symphony gigs and Dirty Cello engagements.

“The hard part of booking the Renegade Orchestra is convincing a venue to bring us in,” Eckl admits. “We approach a lot of rock venues, saying, ‘Give us a call. We’re an orchestra that rocks,’ and then we never hear back from them. The word ‘orchestra’ scares people. We end up in venues willing to take a chance on something new.”

Not surprisingly, some of their shows take place in theaters better known for musicals and stage plays. “They tend to have an audience that demands something original, and they tend to have a stage big enough for all of us,” he says, noting that they can put together a show with as few as eight players or as many as 21. “A lot of normal music venues don’t have room for us. That’s the other challenge. The one downside to a theater is that often there’s no room to dance. When people hear us, trust me, they want to dance, so there’s another way that doing what we do is not always easy to pull off.”

And then, of course, there’s the matter of arranging a well-known rock tune for 21 musicians, most of them string players. It takes a lot of work, and that takes a lot of time, which is why the Renegade Orchestra only adds a few new tunes to its repertoire every season. “There’s a joke I always make during a live show,” Eckl says, laughing again. “We are a band that does take requests—but you won’t hear them for six months to a year from now.”