Minor 7th interviews Mark O'Connor

An interview with Mark O'Connor, April 9, 2021

by Patrick Ragains

Mark O'Connor gained worldwide attention in the 1970s as a prodigy on fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, playing in bluegrass circles and recording his first albums as a leader. Since then he's played with many artists, including David Grisman, Steve Morse's Dregs, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, his wife, violinist Maggie O'Connor, and James Taylor. He's in the top tier of contemporary musicians, but is known primarily as a violinist, rather than a guitarist. He's composed symphonic and other classical works and has authored a graded violin method that draws heavily upon bluegrass fiddle repertoire. Several circumstances, including a case of bursitis, led him to put down the guitar for extended periods, so Markology II comes as a wonderful surprise. O'Connor conceived the album as a sequel to his 1979 ensemble album, Markology. Yet Markology II is all O'Connor, performing a program of bluegrass guitar showcase pieces, traditional Americana, and originals, solo, on guitar and, on one track, mandocello. Its release is a major event in O'Connor's career and the world of acoustic guitar. I interviewed Mark O'Connor via email on April 9th, 2021, in conjunction with Minor 7th's review of Markology II. O'Connor looks forward to resuming in-person concerts and residencies in the second half of 2021; check his website for updates.

Pat Ragains: Good morning, Mark. Why did you decide to release a solo guitar album now?

Mark O'Connor: It was the time off during the pandemic that allowed me to further revisit the guitar around the house. I was already on my way back to guitar since 2017, after a 20-year layoff due to chronic bursitis in the right elbow. I actually never thought I would play guitar again, but I got reinterested to try, with my family members urging me within the context of our new family band. Forrest, my son and our guitarist Joe Smart had some great new guitars, the dreadnought style. I started to dink around on them, for about as long as my violin callouses allowed me - about five minutes!

This led to me playing an easy-going song in the set, all the way to "Slopes" about six months later, that epic guitar jam piece I wrote with Bela Fleck for our group, Strength In Numbers. In the meantime, I had one guitar at home that worked, and that was my old 1945 Herringbone Martin D-28. It had the same set of strings on it in 2017, that it had in 1997 when I put it up! I didn't have another set of guitar strings in the house, and I didn't want spook my idea of returning to guitar by going to the trouble of getting a new set. I just wasn't sure how much I was ready to commit. Playing instruments is such a psychological battle of will! Especially if they are from your childhood like the guitar was for me, since age six. The first thing I realized was the incredible tone on that old axe that I had missed all of these years. I remember remarking to my wife Maggie who played violin in the family band, "Listen to this thing, it sounds like a piano." After just a couple of months back on the instrument, I had to record a couple of things to document the guitar, the old strings etc., and those two cuts end up being the first tracks that went towards this album, Markology II.

Then I got my own customized Baxendale guitar made by the Colorado Guitar Company and I fell in love with that beast of a dreadnought. I realized I was back swimming around in the guitar tone of my teen years when I was really enthused about learning and playing the guitar. It was the sound of these dreadnoughts that took me back to my best days on guitar and to the sound of Tony Rice. He was my mentor and older guitar colleague by about 10 years. He helped me on my first guitar album, Markology, in 1978.

When the pandemic hit, I arranged "Goin' Home" for solo guitar, and I recorded it on the new guitar. Then that to led to more guitar pieces I arranged, recording them as I perfected each one. It was not until I had nine of ten pieces down on tape when Tony Rice passed away on Christmas Day, 2020. Then the memories came flooding through. I decided to record one more, made it an album to release and dedicated it to the memory of Tony.

PR: Did you pursue other musical projects during the pandemic?

MOC: Yes, I did. The first thing we got up and going was a weekly live streaming concert from home, called "Mondays with Mark and Maggie O'Connor" (ticketed events available at markoconnor.com and archived on O'Connor's YouTube channel). It took me a couple of months to assemble the equipment and figure out how to do it with the best sound and video I could figure out.

Another project I was able to do was to re-release three old albums from my teen years that I acquired from Rounder Records. Two of them were out of print and not available, even digitally. I was able to remaster them and make them available digitally. Those are On The Rampage, Soppin' The Gravy and False Dawn, all from the late 70s (available at OMACRecords.com)

And then, finally, I decided to take this time to begin working on my autobiography in earnest. I actually had two other starts with co-writers over the last eight years, and I just felt like I could not invest enough time into my own history and fully featuring all of these amazing stories in music. So now with the extra time, with my scrap books, incredible amounts of photo and audio documentation, voluminous press articles about me since I was age 12 and a complete performance log… I can write this. It is going to be quite the book! I am about half way through it at this point. I spend many hours a day on it.

PR: Focusing on your development as a musician, which players, composers, and genres are your major musical touchstones or influences?

MOC: I have to state my greatest teachers first. For the breakdown fiddle it was Benny Thomasson and, for jazz violin, Stephane Grappelli. For guitar, I learned things right from the acoustic guitar masters even though I would not call them my regular teachers, but mentors that I played with a lot in my formative years. Those would include Tony Rice, Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Dan Crary. Clarence White was a big influence. Steve Morse of The Dregs had a big impact on my guitar playing too. When I was in The Dregs at age 19, we worked out on guitars, just the two of us, almost daily for a year!

Steve Morse's music I loved, and, when I was in the David Grisman Quintet, David certainly became a mentor. As a teen I loved studying and playing bluegrass and old-time music - Carter Family, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs; jazz violinists Eddie South, Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith, Ray Nance; the original guitar players in jazz, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, Tal Farlow, Eddie Lang… Robert Johnson I loved.

Then, classical music which I grew up learning on guitar. My favorite composers include Beethoven and Bartok. The American classical composers Copland and Gershwin, Ives, Bernstein were big influences on my style of composing for orchestras and chamber music. Paganini was a big influence. Segovia, if it were not for him, I would have never started guitar lessons. And then the flamenco, Manitas de Plata was my favorite. I took to that music also for years on the guitar. Later, I got into electric guitar as well. Of course growing up in Seattle in the 60s and 70s, the Jimi Hendrix impact was huge.

I recorded an album called Heroes that featured 14 of my childhood violin-playing heroes. That is one to check out on Warner Brothers Records.

PR: What kinds of music do you listen to now?

MOC: I like listening to music that my contemporaries release and the music of the younger generation, some of them I helped to influence! All genres.

PR: You're best known as a violinist. What role has the guitar played in your musical life, both privately and professionally?

MOC: After the David Grisman Quintet in 1979, the guitar became a distant second in my professional life. When I arrived in Nashville, Chet Atkins became another mentor to me at age 22, and he thought that I would make it in Nashville as a guitarist, believing that the fiddle was ushered out of the country music industry by then. And he had something to do with that too - with his signing Elvis Presley to RCA, and Nashville production ushering in the string sections replacing the fiddle for the Nashville Sound. So Chet and I played a lot of guitars together, and a few television appearances that can be seen on YouTube. But I wasn't that interested in "country guitar" in the way Nashville was utilizing acoustic guitar. I didn't want to sit there just to strum simple chords for multiple hours a day, when I could play lead acoustic guitar like I could. I felt that I should start from scratch on the fiddle in Nashville and introduce a new sound for that instrument in the studios. It eventually took off. I became the most in-demand session player in Nashville over a six-year period and that led to seven CMA awards.

I began solo concerts in the early 1990s, of which guitar was a key part, but a small part by comparison to the violin. And then I blew out my arm in 1997 from practicing and working too much. The guitar disappeared for 20 years, because I had to try to save my violin playing. So it was all violin from 1997 to 2017, entirely.

PR: Talk about your process in developing a solo performance of a well-known piece like Greensleeves or Shenandoah? Your "Greensleeves" is a pretty radical reinterpretation.

MOC: When I made my return to guitar, I wanted to document my progress, but also my new ideas for flatpick guitar. It turned out that I must have been storing up new ideas for guitar in my subconscious that entire time, with no outlet for the ideas. Some of these ideas could have taken place in the natural course of simply having more musical experiences to draw upon. But there is another factor. In my case, I had three of the most amazing younger guitarists on the scene in my Hot Swing ensembles; Frank Vignola, Julian Lage and Bryan Sutton. While I never thought I would play guitar again, I probably couldn't help but pick up some ideas from them as we played so much together across many years. I have three albums that feature Vignola; Hot Swing, In Full Swing and Live In New York, and with Sutton, the two-album set Thirty-Year Retrospective is a great showcase for him.

In other words, a lifetime of being creative with music, led to these new arrangements of classics on the new album. I wanted to put yet another stamp on well-known material, and demonstrate how I can use my career-long use of musical creativity to this end, but this time applied to my new-found guitar abilities.

PR: What's the state of steel-string acoustic guitar playing now, compared to the 1960s or 1970s?

MOC: Well, there are many more people today playing lead steel-string guitar and taking the pursuit seriously. I think that the guitar itself was really becoming mainstream in the 60s when I was learning. So there were some great early examples, but not enough of an industry for learning how to play.

But even today, I am still amazed at how many people play the steel-string guitar, but are unable to play many tunes on the guitar. As opposed to any amateur fiddler being able to play tunes. We often hear, and I think it is very much a misnomer, that the violin is the most difficult instrument to learn how to play, but I am not so sure about that. I would put lead steel-string guitar up there with the violin! That is why the young and remarkable steel-string guitar players like Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Jake Workman, Chris Eldridge, Jake Stargel, Cody Kilby, Jordan Tice and more, are so impressive today. It is an exciting scene in the bluegrass arena. It is great to be involved a little bit again in that arena!

I also should add that some steel string guitar players play with too light of a set up to sound good for lead guitar. I had resorted to the very same thing too in the past. But in key instances when the guitar made more of a difference for me, is when I made the tone a more important part of it. And for an acoustic guitar, that means getting the strings off the fingerboard, and get some heavier strings slapped on. Tone is really a big deal, and listeners get that. For Markology II, I use heavy gauge on the new dreadnought - .14 - .59 D'Addario strings.

PR: What advice would you give to a guitarist who wants to play as well as possible in ensemble and solo settings, but who's not necessarily aiming for a career in music?

MOC: Well, my lead playing ability comes directly out of being able to accompany in all kinds of different feels of music on the guitar, meaning numerous genres. So if a player is wanting to grow, learn to play accompaniment in a variety of styles. Learn to play a bluegrass feel in your accompaniment, a blues feel, and a swing or jazz style, and contemporary music styles, rock and pop feels in various types of songs. Then, the lead playing can develop from this.

What I demonstrate on Markology II is that I can incorporate rhythm or strumming guitar within the lead playing, to where it becomes seamless going back in and out of it. Some of this is achieved by the use of cross-picking as a transitional element. If I could give one best-advice scenario for steel-string playing, is to develop your cross-picking. But not just pattern playing. To be able to use it as improvised or interpretive arpeggiation both in accompaniment and lead. Achieving this halfway point, really begins to make the guitar music and ensemble come alive. I think there is a secret to unlock there for players. I feature that in all of the arrangements on the new album!

PR: What's on your musical horizon?

MOC: We have a big virtual string camp for violin, viola, cello and bass, July 26-30, 2021, the O'Connor Method String Camp. It features 20 faculty members, all teaching from my series of O'Connor Method books on American strings.

I just signed with Skyline Artists Agency and will go out on the road as the Mark O'Connor Duo, featuring my wife, Maggie. We do look forward to performing again in concert halls, hopefully just after the first of the year. It has been a long time away, but our Mondays series has really kept us in shape, and it has really developed our repertoire for concerts too. Diving back to old stuff, reaching forward to new stuff, we could play ten duo concerts now and not repeat a single tune or song! As artists always do, we are constantly making lemonade of the lemons thrown our way. I am so excited about the new guitar album, something I never predicted would have happened even six months ago.

Here's a partial discography for Mark O'Connor: