Strings

"When I teach students jazz I always encourage them to learn from other musicians in their ensembles, or give them suggestions for records to listen to and solos to transcribe, or encourage them to play with different instruments. That's how I learned. That's what worked for me. I try not to overwhelm them with harmonic concepts at first but instead help them build a solid foundation and understanding of what the music is all about."

“We have students coming from a classical music background who are interested in playing various vernacular styles—jazz and fiddle music, blues, pop—and then we also have fiddle players who learned by ear or through various traditional routes and who are interested in expanding their theoretical knowledge. That’s two very different approaches, although after a couple of years it all evens out. Usually they wind up expanding their taste buds a little bit, so they’re interested in more styles. There’s a string style for every country, usually four or five.”

"There is a big, all-inclusive, alternative strings styles movement, and I represent one corner of that movement, which is this idea that we should be able to play, go toe to toe, with any jazz instrumentalist. The violin is a frontline instrument; it can fit right in. The more of us that learn how to do that, the less it's going to be considered a fringe element. Hopefully, what I teach transcends the idea of playing jazz on the violin specifically. To paraphrase something Jean-Luc Ponty said years ago, I've always thought of myself as a jazz musician who plays strings as opposed to a string player who plays jazz. I'm trying to put a universal jazz vocabulary onto string instruments."