HOLLIS TAYLOR
by James McQuillen
Re-published with permission of Open Spaces, www.open-spaces.com

By her own admission, Hollis Taylor was not cut out to be a straight classical musician; even the titles of her two recordings, Twisted Fiddle and Unsquare Dances, seem to underscore that point. Perhaps few musicians are suited to the regularity and rigidity of the classical musician's world, but fewer still can claim to have blazed a trail through music the way she has, and with such spectacular and unpredictable results. From classical to country to jazz and beyond, the performer, teacher, composer, and writer has become intimately acquainted with more music than most of us are likely to hear in a lifetime, and has become in the process one of the most original talents in contemporary music.

She started playing piano at age six, and violin at age nine. Her prodigious talent was early in evidence: during her college years in Portland (a game of musical chairs, with one year each at Lewis and Clark, Reed, and Portland State University) she played in the Oregon Symphony as the orchestra's youngest member. The summer after her freshman year, she was concertmaster and soloist of the young adult group at Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, in the renowned festival's inaugural year. Later, she would play in the Oakland Symphony and the California Bach Society. But she also spent thirteen months fly-fishing around the country, and she once went a year without playing. "I didn't touch it. At the time, I didn't lock my door—I wouldn't even have noticed if it had disappeared from the case."

Her transition from violinist to fiddler took place rather suddenly when she was in her late twenties. She and Penny Mead, a guitarist who was later to provide accompaniment on her first three cassettes, had planned to attend the National Oldtime Fiddler's Contest in Weiser, just across the Snake River in Idaho; Mead suggested that Taylor go to compete, not just to listen. "It's cheaper if you're playing," she told her, "but if you're going to play at Weiser, you should play at State," the Oregon state competition held the month before the national event. Taylor wasn't sure: "It was her idea, and I just drug my feet." At the time, she knew seven fiddle tunes; the state contest would call for six. She went, and she won. That was in 1982, and in the years that followed Taylor would become a prominent player in the fiddling world. She put together bands: the Hollis Taylor Band and, less formally, a regular gathering called Fiddle Summit, with top local fiddlers representing a variety of styles. She appeared throughout North America and Europe, often with Grammy- and Emmy-winning guitarist Mason Williams. She authored three fiddling instruction books (and recorded accompanying cassettes), as well as reviews and correspondence for Fiddle and Strings magazines. At the behest of the Oregon Arts Commission, she composed and performed Symphony for String Band, and Gus Van Sant tapped her talents for My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Meanwhile, she discovered jazz.

Twisted Fiddle's unlikely achievement was to marry two musical worlds that appear more likely to collide, unharmoniously. Not that jazz is inimical to the currents of country, old-time, and bluegrass; far from it. At a fundamental level, jazz—the quick-thinking, free-flowing bending and extending of harmonies and rhythms—is a sort of musical ecumenism, a faith in the expansive potential of the musical idea, whatever its pedigree. But where jazz is urbane, complex and cool, quick in the mind even when it sings the blues, the country ethos is about folksiness, honesty and simplicity, the heart-on-the-sleeve expression of emotions high and low. The raw power of a tune such as Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," the anthem of country loneliness and despair, will vanish with the slightest whiff of insincerity.

Taylor's ensemble pulls off that tune—and hits from Patsy Cline and the Sons of the Pioneers, and a wealth of traditional instrumentals—by inhabiting a middle ground between folk and jazz, with tight musicianship, fierce creativity, great humor, and soul. Taylor's fiddle swings and sashays through wayward chord progressions with an ease and dancelike energy reminiscent of Stephane Grapelli, as she folds Charlie Parker's "Ornithology" into the "Irish Washerwoman" jig, and jazz composer Oliver Nelson's "Hoedown" into "Turkey in the Straw" (with an effect she calls "Bebop goes hee-haw"). She has since maintained that Twisted Fiddle is just a country album, but in its tiny sub-genre it is much more; it casually brings together an amalgam of great American rural traditions—country, western swing, bluegrass—with jazz, the great urban one, creating a unique picture of the American musical landscape.

Her path through that landscape was unusual and decidedly unlinear (much in the same way that a conversation with her tends to be—"My mind serpentines," she says). It was soon to take another significant turn, eastward: in 1993, she left for Europe. Over the course of a three-year residency first at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, and then later in Budapest, she performed extensively, studied African drumming, wrote articles and a fourth book (Tricks from the Devil's Box, a collection of trick tunes and fancy fiddling), and learned French. She also began making forays, in music shops, clubs, and countrysides, into the folk traditions of Europe and North Africa, focusing on tunes with uneven rhythms, tunes that she would adapt into her next recording a collection of violin duos entitled Unsquare Dances.

The music we grow up with tends toward utter rhythmic simplicity, mostly based on four beats to the measure ("common time," with a signature of 4/4) or three ("waltz time," 3/4); sure, we all know examples of metrical diversity, but to say that we're familiar with compound meter because we can groove on Paul Desmond's "Take Five" is like saying we're conversant in Malay because we use the word "bamboo." The music Taylor collected was in time signatures that would defy most musicians' ability to count and play at the same time: 11/8, 7/16, 9/4, 21/8. Yet these are not mathematical exercises—they're dances, which is part of what made them compelling for her; she says of her musical explorations in general, "I was determined to seek out the danceability in things."

Though some of the music that provided the basis for Unsquare Dances came from Western Europe (Brittany, Portugal, the Basque Country), the Balkan influence is predominant. "A typical rhythm in Bulgaria is anything but business-as-usual for the rest of the world," Taylor says in her notes, and the same can be said of most of the region. Like Bartok, another collector and adapter of folk music who is one of her three favorite composers (with Bach and Thelonius Monk), she used the basic tunes as a framework in compositions that were to be very much her own; as she writes in the notes to "Bosniana," "These duos are not meant to be scholarly studies but creative forays." In "Hommage à Zoltan Kodaly," she adapts a tune collected by the Hungarian composer by "slowly twisting the theme, combining it with several accompanying Afro-pop-like riffs."

The result is an awe-inspiring combination of simple melodies, wild compound meter and polyrhythms, and fiddling pyrotechnics. BeauSoleil's Michael Doucet commented on hearing it, "Wow! What's that—Bartok on acid?" Based in folk, and filtered through a mind that has already fused myriad disparate traditions, it is a combination that defies classification. "The progression went from classical, to fiddling, to jazz. And then, when I was in Europe, I reached a point when there was no longer any distinction for me—in my mind, in my ear, in my imagination."