A Journey of Discovery: A Conversation with Fearless Fiddler Darol Anger

By Greg Cahill | From the September/October 2025 issue of Strings

“Violinists think of me as a fiddler, and the fiddlers think of me as a violinist. I have one foot in various roots traditions and the other on a banana peel,” says eclectic string player Darol Anger, 72, when asked to define what kind of violinist he is. “I am an improvising violinist using the American blues, jazz, and bluegrass languages, and I’m trying to blur the edges of whatever additional styles I’m playing around with, using the common elements of music to express my own emotional viewpoint.”

Anger has parlayed that pursuit into a successful and critically acclaimed career as an adventurous musician, recording and performing everything from bluegrass and film scores to jazz and symphonic works. From 1975 until 1984, the San Francisco–born violinist was a member of the groundbreaking David Grisman Quintet, headed by mandolinist extraordinaire David “Dawg” Grisman (once heralded by the New York Times as “the Paganini of the mandolin”) and also featuring Mark O’Connor on guitar and Rob Wasserman on double bass. He was a founding member of the Grammy-winning Turtle Island String Quartet (along with violinist David Balakrishnan, violist Laurie Moore, and cellist Mark Summer), which helped pave the way for string players blending classical, jazz, and rock. From 1993 until 2005, he further stretched the boundaries of chamber music with Psychograss, a supergroup that featured mandolinist Mike Marshall and double bassist Todd Phillips, among other heavyweights. The short-lived, 2003 Grammy-nominated Fiddlers 4—Anger, Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet of BeauSoleil, old-time fiddler Bruce Molsky, and gonzo cellist Rushad Eggleston—took genre leaping to new heights. 

As an educator he has taught at the Berklee School of Music (he currently holds the position of professor emeritus at the prestigious Boston institution) and nurtured generations of fiddle kids at various music camps throughout the United States. Many of his students are alumni of his ongoing Republic of Strings ensemble, and some of them can be heard on his latest album, Diary of a Fiddler, No. 2, on the Adhyâropa Records label.

Strings asked Anger about the new album, his winding career path, the treasure trove of fiddle-camp alumni, and his legacy.

What were your goals when you first set out as a professional musician?

I was lucky to latch onto some volcanically creative musical geniuses early on and learn to ride their wave. I’m talking about David Grisman, Tony Rice, Richard Greene, Bill Keith, and a little later, Stéphane Grappelli, Mark O’Connor, and Mike Marshall.

How did your career evolve into bluegrass and jazz and beyond?

I was already ruined for traditional music or any kind of stylistic purity by the Beatles, which woke me up to the idea of playing music myself. I started with guitar, but the guitar I had wasn’t physically playable for a smaller person like myself. A friend of the family gave us her violin, and I switched to that because it seemed easier. A few years of classical violin lessons followed, which gave me a decent set of technical skills. A renewed interest in electric rock guitar and my discovery of fiddling through my personal gateway artist Richard Greene occurred in high school. [Editor’s note: Greene was a member of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, the inventor of the “chop” fiddle technique, and the first string player to use an electric violin in rock music.] In the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’60s, you could hear any kind of music curated by the cultural geniuses who had disc-jockey jobs on FM radio there.

And then you met David “Dawg” Grisman—who created an eclectic style of chamber music—to whom you dedicate the new album?

The opportunity to contribute to any part of the world of music is an incredible privilege. David handed me that opportunity. Here’s to the guy who 50 years ago helped me get my advanced degree in Dawgology and gave me a priceless opportunity to play music all over the world while learning the most immediate and crucial lessons possible from the greatest fiddlers and other string players of the 20th century. David’s commitment to my musical development and education was strong, steady, incredibly generous. It inspired an equal commitment from me to his music and to a higher goal of bringing valuable and worthwhile music into this world. David set an indelible example for me not only in the department of self-guided education and always pursuing excellence but in embracing and enjoying musicians and music: Don’t be intimidated by musicians who appear to be “ahead” of you in various areas of technique or conception. One of the greatest things David ever said to me was, “Hey, man—I’m scared of being scared!” Don’t be scared. Life is way too short not to accept the challenge to learn while creating your own means of expression. His sense of the world-as-library and his interesting mix of academic and business outlook that’s totally embedded into a volcanically emotional, expressive, and productive artistic lifestyle still makes more sense to me than anything else. 

Why is it important to honor that relationship at this time?

We’re experiencing the 50th anniversary of the creation of the David Grisman Quintet (DGQ). David turned 80 years old this year, and while he’s no longer touring, he’s creating music all the time, composing, and recording at home. He was my primary musical mentor and set the bar for everything I’ve tried to do subsequently. A very short time after [bluegrass guitarist] Tony Rice came out to California and we jammed for the first time, David had his 30th birthday. I was 21. Fifty years ago. David was having his moment of decision. It looked like we were going to put everything we had into this band. And we did. To be part of that moment, that setting off on a journey of discovery, has given my life reason and shape. I was inspired by his example to eventually strike out on my own as a teacher and sharer of musical culture and a facilitator of new musical ideas with younger brilliant players. It is a sacred trust. 

What was the impetus for the new recording?

Though I hope to record more projects for many years, I consider this project, Diary of a Fiddler, No. 2, to be the clearest expression of any musical legacy I might leave to society. And if it happens to be the last thing I release, I think I can consider my work on this earth complete. The first volume, produced in 1999, featured me accompanying a wide range of brilliant contemporary fiddlers in many styles that were exploding into popularity at the turn of the new century, demonstrating fiddling’s deep relevance to just about every style of music. The duet format enabled me and my chosen partners to demonstrate a set of musical and fiddling skills that might have been unfamiliar to much of the music world prior to that release. If Diary No. 1 was an expression of the recent coalescing of an international multi-stylistic fiddling community, Diary No. 2 is a celebration of my particular connection to that community and a shared musical ethos within the acoustic string world. 

This second volume, made some 25 years after the first, celebrates the brilliance of at least three generations of spectacularly skilled fiddlers with whom I’ve been privileged to work. This phenomenal bloom of talent shows no sign of slowing down and is directly attributable to the ongoing effect of fiddle camps created by Jay Ungar, Alasdair Fraser, Mark O’Connor, and others. Each of my duet partners in Diary No. 2 is a former student or someone with whom I have worked at some level of mentorship. I feel a deep connection and admiration for all of the players on this recording. In every instructional situation, my prime directive has been not to encourage copying or to cultivate a particular style, but to amplify the joy of music and encourage deep, joyful engagement with the physical-emotional act of music making, and especially improvising together. 

When did you begin the planning process for the new album?

It took a few different kicks to set this rather sizable document in motion. The first was probably my ten-year tenure [2007–17] as a professor in the string department at Berklee College of Music. The second was the long hiatus from everything during the 2020 pandemic, when I started the massive overdub project involving 25 fiddlers whom I’d mentored in some way. Third was my move to Nashville in early 2022, where so many of these young players are now working and tearing up the world’s fiddle landscape. I could just get people in my living room with a couple of mics and play for three hours. But if we really think back, the original inspiration for Diary No. 2 was the recording of Diary No. 1, which celebrated the “Big Bang” moment of a momentous coalescence of the world fiddling community, instigated by fiddle camp directors O’Connor, Fraser, and Ungar.

How did you prepare for this project?

This is undoubtedly something I have prepared for since I picked up a violin for the first time in 1966. But on a micro level, I think that I first had to relearn the pieces I had written that were used on the recording, often in the role of accompanist, since I wanted to feature the duet partners as much as possible. Ultimately, I sent around charts and recordings of the original versions of the tunes and let us either make up an arrangement on the spot or plan to play a specific arrangement that always included space for soloing and improvisation. With some folks whom I share an extremely intuitive musicality—such as Trent Freeman, Tristan Clarridge, and Alex Hargreaves (coincidentally or not, all West Coast/Cascadia musicians)—we just started playing around with the tune and tried ideas that occurred to us on the spot. 

My coproducer, fiddler Brittany Haas, whom I credit with dragging me through this entire thing, is an example of someone with whom I share such a deep musical connection that we were able to completely restructure a tune written for a totally different type of band. Every tune was a different process. On “The Unbearable Gift,” with John Mailander and Ella Jordan, I wanted them because of their fantastic ability to improvise together and convey a certain elegiac mood and their enormous reading skills. I had to rethink and chart out some of the larger choral parts for that and, between the three of us, we were able to realize something wonderful. For the tunes with Jenna Moynihan, Enion Pelta, Kathleen Parks, and Avery Merritt, I mostly just let them fire off their controlled explosions throughout and tried to hang on and react appropriately.

What do people need to know about these works?

These pieces were originally written for various sizes of bands, for various instrumentations ranging from electric jam bands to more “normal”—for me— combinations of acoustic stringed instruments. My duet partners’ extraordinary skills helped realize some of these pieces that may seem unlikely to work with just two violins. For instance, I knew the rock tune “Coulda Told U” would work with a brilliant rhythm player who has total command of the blues idiom, such as Brittany Haas. “U Noticed 2” has highly complex jazz harmony and could only be played by a fiddler who reads well and has total command of double-stops, such as Patrick M’Gonigle. 

Some of my more Celtic-inspired tunes were perfect for the super-creative and highly improvisatory fiddlers Kathleen Parks and Jenna Moynihan. Some folks chose their own tunes from my list: Enion Pelta, who has long explored Balkan and jazz-violin sounds, chose my proto–Middle Eastern tune “Ouditarus Rez,” which I wrote in 1995 for Mike Marshall’s fretless guitar-shaped object. I also used my five-string AES baritone violin on some cuts, which added some lower range. There are also two trios on the recording, which enrich the sound of the recording and highlight the beautiful improvisatorial interaction between these brilliant players. 

Talk about the relationship between your roles as fiddler, teacher, and composer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous remark that “there are no second acts in American lives” evidently didn’t take into account fiddlers—or anyone who wasn’t a dedicated partygoer. Plenty of fiddlers in that category, of course. I suppose my musical life could be said to fall into three relevant phases. The first phase was spent helping to create a whole new genre of music out of the powerful currents sweeping through the international folk-music world, which had already begun a huge intensification in its never-ending reabsorption of other styles: jazz, pop, Latin, and Western European art music. It makes sense to define this style, often referred to as the anti-label “Dawg Music” after David Grisman’s nickname, by the instruments that largely were being played in my world: acoustic stringed instruments, especially those mostly used in American bluegrass music. This “lifestyle choice” eventually expanded to include brilliant young players of piano, steel drums, electric bass, augmented guitars, and more within a creative community centered on the West Coast and mostly associated with the record label Windham Hill. This first phase also included a ten-year run of expanding the technical capabilities of the string quartet to include convincing adaptations of jazz, blues, pop, and Latin styles by my ensemble the Turtle Island String Quartet (TISQ). Further expression in the acoustic string style has included my original explorations with long-time musical companion Mike Marshall.

Phase No. 2, which was sparked by both jazz-oriented musical outreach with the TISQ and work at the fiddle camps, was made possible around 1995 by my maturation as a musician, producer, composer, and, most of all, educator. I began building musical relationships with other string educators and with many preternaturally talented younger players. This mentorship phase began to take form in my band the Republic of Strings, co-led by fellow educator and guitar genius Scott Nygaard and showcasing the incredible young talents Brittany Haas and Rushad Eggleston, among others. As a bandleader, I could offer well-arranged original and traditional material, shows and touring, and a platform for solos and improvisation. 

In 2007, I was offered a professorship at Berklee College of Music in Boston, working in the string department. This was an extraordinary opportunity that changed my life so radically as to be considered almost Phase No. 3 but actually transformed Phase No. 2 into a legitimate thing. The professorship, concurrent with my continued teaching at as many as eight music camps per year, really clarified my approach to mentorship, and I was fortunate to develop productive relationships with tremendous young string players on many different instruments. In this same time period, I was developing a fiddling curriculum at my own online fiddle school, administrated by the innovative ArtistWorks platform. 

After retiring from active professorship at Berklee, one could possibly say that my Phase No. 3 has begun: composing for various-sized ensembles; performances with Mr. Sun (my touring group), Bruce Molsky, and other dear musical friends; and getting back to working out creative things to do with stringed instruments on an ad hoc basis, right on up to impending civilizational collapse. I guess that I hope to fiddle while Rome burns.

But as with my tenure with the DGQ, this project feels like the thing I was born to do. This recording feels like a culminating moment and sufficient justification for my incredibly fortunate life on this planet.