Strings Faculty

"One of the things that I’m interested in exploring with my students is the concept and implementation of group practice sessions. Like improvising chord changes, but instead of a backing track, improvising with someone else who is working on bass lines, and combining all the different components of music so that people can practice together and make practicing itself a social experience. There’s a lot of technical practice that you need to learn how to do in order to learn to play an instrument, and when you’re playing, a lot of these styles, you need to learn how to improvise over chord progressions.  There’s a certain abstraction that happens, where you’re not playing any specific piece of music, but you’re practicing something very focused. The musician, student or professional, generally exists by yourself in a room working on something, and I think there are ways to actually get more out of practice sessions in certain contexts if you have somebody to practice with."

"String players have a reputation for having a lousy sense of rhythm. But the players I have met at Berklee are different because they love rhythm and are looking for a way to express that. They come here because they love playing rock, jazz, or Celtic music. The orchestra expands their rhythmic palette by exposing them to odd meters and the discipline for playing in a large ensemble."

"I’ve played classical repertoire since I was little. Some think that if you play something often enough, it could become boring or repetitive. But every time I play a concerto, I find something new. And I ask myself, ‘How can I relate to this audience? How can I play this part differently?’ If I do that, then the audience will respond."

"Many string players come to Berklee with a strong background in classical music, but few improvisational skills. They read pretty well but interpret everything through a classical music lens. I help them work on the new skills they need to become strong improvisers and to develop a unique musical voice. Playing over changes, as well as hearing and expressing the subtleties that make one genre different from another, are core issues for me."

"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."

"I was the first mandolin student at Berklee in 2003. There were no mandolin teachers here at the time I applied. But I wanted to come to Berklee to have someone show me all the ways I should be thinking about music—even if I ended up studying with a saxophone teacher. You can learn a lot from any instrument. That attitude is present in the String Department, where you find a mandolin player studying with a fiddle player or a cello player."