Get ready for a musical joyride! In this episode, we’re hanging out with the one and only Jeremy Cohen—a violinist whose stories are as legendary as his solos.
Jeremy takes us on a whirlwind tour of his career, from sharing the stage with Frank Sinatra (yes, THE Frank Sinatra!) to dreaming up the whimsical music for Tom’s whiskers in the beloved cartoon Tom and Jerry. Ever wondered who brought those animated antics to life? Spoiler: it’s Jeremy!
But that’s not all—Jeremy’s heart beats to the tunes of both the Beatles and Bach. Whether he’s arranging a Paul Simon Tune or diving deep into a Bach sonata, his passion for music knows no bounds. He’ll share how these musical giants inspire his own creative journey and keep his performances fresh and fun.
Tune in for backstage laughs, cartoon capers, and a celebration of everything from pop to classical. This episode is as lively and playful as a Tom and Jerry chase—whiskers, Beatles, Bach, and all!
Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and tell us your favorite musical moment from the show. Let’s make some harmonious mischief together!
🎻 About Jeremy Cohen:
Jeremy Cohen’s electrifying violin performances have earned him nationwide accolades. Classically-trained and a student of Itzhak Perlman and Anne Crowden, Cohen’s eclectic style reflects his respect for a wide range of violinists from Perlman and Fritz Kreisler to Joe Venuti and Eddie South. Cohen has performed as soloist with numerous orchestras including the Virginia Symphony, the California Symphony, the Oakland East Bay Symphony, and the Reno Philharmonic. His recording credits include motion picture and television soundtracks including The Dukes of Hazzard and Jane Fonda’s Dollmaker, and as concertmaster on recordings with Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Aaron Neville, Howard Keel and Cleo Laine. He appeared on Carlos Santana’s Grammy-winning CD Supernatural, Santana’s Shaman, and the original Star Wars compilation CD with John Williams.
TIME STAMP CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction to Jeremy Cohen
01:37 Jeremy's Musical Journey
02:21 Blending Genres and Inspirations
03:38 Teaching and Learning Different Styles
05:25 Creating and Publishing Music
06:01 Stylistic Studies for Solo Violin
07:17 The Retake Samba
09:06 Passion for Playing the Violin
12:18 Playing with Frank Sinatra
13:51 Meeting Celebrities in LA
14:30 Touring and Performing
15:16 The Importance of Audience Connection
19:47 Challenges in Music Publishing
20:47 Founding Violin Jazz Publishing
TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Cohen Podcast episode
[00:00:00] Do you wanna know what it's like to play with Frank Sinatra? What about refusing to see the walls between genres? And do you also wanna stay and play in your musical sandbox all day long? Find out about this and much more on the next music on Text with Jeremy Cohen.
Welcome Jeremy Cohen to music, untucked Hailing from Oakland, California. First violinist of the Grammy Nominated Quartet, San Francisco Violinist, composer, all types of genres you perform and composing. I just love your style, the compositions that you have available, having. Interacted with [00:01:00] you at conferences at the Chamber of Music America Conference, way back and most recently at the Asta Conference.
It's just been so much fun. All the people that I, I present your, your Chamber of Music to and myself, we have such a good time. I thought you're the perfect guest for music on text because the, the, the, you, you, you incorporate. Classical pop country, blues, tango, swing, you do it all. I'm very excited to have you here.
Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Michael. So I'd like to know first off about the combination of genres you that you. Combine in all of the compositions that you have. Before we go back, 'cause I'm sure we'll want to hear about your history and how you came to be who you are today, but the music [00:02:00] that you have, what do you consider it?
Is it classical music? Is it pop music? Is it multi genre? Well, really, I just consider myself a violinist. That refuses to see walls between genres, so mm-hmm. If I love it and I wanna play it, it's fair game. Of course, the training I received was more traditional based and mostly steeped in classical music and tra all of the Etudes and sonatas concertos and exercise books that most typical classical trained musicians used.
I went through all of that, but. While I was doing that, I was also listening to records. There were records that when I was growing up. Yeah. And I was fascinated with not only music that had string playing on it, like there were popular bands like Elec, ELO, electric Light Orchestra, and. [00:03:00] There was a band called, it's a Beautiful Day, which had David Laflamme Fiddle Player and Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks were bands that were popular in the 1970s.
I was very young in the late 1960s and coming of age in the 1970s. Every band that I heard that had a violin or a string playing on it, I would put on those records and emulate them at home. It wasn't where my training was, but I was so intrigued and. Motivated to play those other styles of music. That in a way I sort of took that on on my own while I was receiving classical training.
I was lucky enough to have teachers that, some might have discouraged it a little bit, but my key teachers, I would say Ann Crowden in particular, used to tell me. When I was in high school and college, you know, I don't mind if you play that other stuff. As long as you show up to your lessons in good shape with your attitudes and your scales in tip top [00:04:00] condition, or I'm shutting you down, you can't, or I'm not gonna let you play that stuff.
And so I was very careful to preserve that part of this music that I love. That wasn't in the bucket of where my training was because that was all traditional classical literature. Playing along with friends and finding a friend that played the guitar and learning some folk songs and some bluegrass tunes.
'cause I love doing it. It was a little bit of an upstream uphill, not, not uphill battle, but an uphill swim to navigate these other styles because there was no teaching for it. And still today there's very little teaching in it, but at one point I just decided. Good. Music is good music, good technique on your instrument is good technique.
Good intonation is good. Intonation, good fundamental skills matter, right? And we should be able to play the music we love. What better way to stay [00:05:00] motivated with your instrument than to be playing things that have you excited to be playing? And I feel quite lucky, you know, at my age and after years of playing.
To still be really happy to open up the case and play, whether it's a job I've accepted or something I'm personally pursuing on my own, like a style thing, or I do a lot of arranging. I've been working on a bunch of Stevie Wonder Tunes and Motown Tunes, and this morning was working on an arrangement of a Paul Simon tune because I love it and I wanna play it, and there's not enough of it out there that's printed.
For intermediate to advanced string playing, so I create a lot of it. And my violin, jazz publishing Boutique M publisher, I publish music and other genres outside of classical so people can. Learn how to play a samba, learn how to play blues. Learn how to play [00:06:00] tango. That brings, I have a question about your Aude book, or I think you would call it.
Yeah, it's the stylistic studies for solo violin. I actually have it right here. You do? Yeah, I do. Right on the screen. Stylistic studies for solo violin. So yeah, there's also duets. You have a lot of duets, but in this book, do you think of that as a replacement for. Some of the old, no, not at all. Oddly enough, it started as somebody teaching a violin class, a Boeing class.
I was in a conversation with her. She was also a student of my late teacher. She said, Jeremy, I'm working with kids and I'm, we're doing Boeing class in the morning before school at the crowd and school in Berkeley. You should look that up. Crowd and school. Two hours of music in the morning, academic school during the day, and chamber music after school and orchestra.
Kids get souled, they get choir and it's a full fourth to [00:07:00] eighth grade. I think they've expanded now to more grades, but it's music school for primarily for string playing and. She said, I'm working with the Boeing kids and I'm having trouble teaching them to do retakes where short bows in one location at the frog.
And I said, well, Lisa, why don't I write you a. Retake samba. That way the kids can be motivated to play this Brazilian style piece of music, and at the same time, without even knowing it, they would be learning some of the techniques of how to do a retake because it makes the piece work. It's sort of a reverse psychology.
So the retake is basically this,
this series of up bows up, up, up, up, up, up, up. And they're all coming from the same spot in the bow. So I wrote this retake samba. I'm gonna play it slightly faster than it. Probably typically should be played.[00:08:00]
So it's sort of a Brazilian charro or a, you know, a's Latin American style piece. The kids are getting it because the music demands it, and that sort of [00:09:00] reinforces. The learning of the technique without it just being a technical study. It's so much fun. It always seems like with you, Jeremy, you love playing the violin.
I think there's this passion in your playing. You could be playing two notes and you're gonna make 'em fun somehow. Well, thanks. It is something that I have learned over years to consciously preserve. What's special about it? Why is music special to us? It's because it's not only a form of socialization, a way you and I are talking to each other, but it's also an expressive language.
It's like if I were to speak Italian or French, it has its own. Cadence. It has its own set of rhythms. It has its own inflections. It's like an accent or a language. It's a form of communication. For me, that form of [00:10:00] communication is to a certain degree, a good share of it in expression of joy. Life can be hard.
Work is sometimes not fun, but when we're making music, we can exist once we learn a certain amount of technique. We can be constantly expressive, so why not? I wanna stay in my fun spot of my musical sandbox. Quick fun note that violin was the concert master of MGMs, and it was from 1939 to 1969. His first job was the Wizard of Oz. It also performed all the plucked whiskers on Tom and Jerry.
I think it's very appropriate that you have that violin. Yeah, it found a great home with you. It had Big LA Legacy. I played it for some years on Dukes of Hazard. I was on the four, four seasons of that and a lot of other recording stuff while I was there. Wow. [00:11:00] That's Dukes of H you played on the Dukes of Hazard?
Yeah, for three and a half or four years of the seven years of the show. I'm speechless. That stuff was trial by fire. Those were incredible studio musicians, people that played that stuff. Yeah. Crazy. Really good. You have so many stories. I'm sure. I got a boatload of Earl Hagen conducted one of the years, and he is most famous for writing and whistling this.
He also wrote Harlem NOC Turn,[00:12:00]
Earl Hagan. Oh, yeah. I got a ton of stories here. I'll, I'll share this one with you.
Oh, wow. I'm that old. I, I played with Sinatra. I played one gig with Frank Sinatra. What was that like? Crazy. Sinatra was, when was it? What year? It would have to be about 1980. I'm not sure what year he died, but I was in LA from an 80 to 86, so 85 or 86 a, A universal amphitheater. Mm-hmm. He was still extraordinary storyteller.
His voice was not in a top condition, but you could hear a pin drop. He knew how to tell the story of the song. And he knew how to absolutely command an audience like nobody else. Seeing [00:13:00] him was experiential for the audience, not just 'cause he was a great singer, but because he as an actor, he sang songs that had great lyrics that he loved and he knew how to tell them as an actor.
Mm-hmm. Other than that, pretty impatient with the band. Pretty impatient with the sound man. One microphone, squeaked. At the soundcheck, he stopped. Everybody walked up to the edge of the stage and he said, you've been doing this for very long. So this young sound guy, wow. Oh no, Frank Sinatra. He would always remind me of my grandfather.
Actually, what you just said reminded me of my grandfather. Very tough, very demanding, but it was a very cool experience. I was on the elevator at the Universal Amphitheater on the Sinatra gig. And took the elevator down from a hotel room or something, and John Travolta was, oh wow. Elevator. And there was a group of adults and [00:14:00] one little girl who was eight or 10 years old looking at John Travolta all the way, was a long elevator ride.
And just before the elevator opened up, she looked at him. She said, has anybody ever told you, you look just like John Travolta? And looked down at her and he said. Really, the elevator doors opened and we all walked off and all the adults were like, he went right up in her face and he said, really? Yeah.
And he didn't say anything. We all just left it. We were all cracking up. He was very funny. Wow. I lived in la I met a lot of celebs and I traveled for years with the best little whorehouse in Texas with a great movie actress Alexis Smith. I was on the first national tour. That's how I quit Perlman's class and went on the road fullest doors.
Yeah. And was it worth it? I, I ask you sitting here now, I think it was. Uh, what's not the love? Just want to have fun. Just wanna stay in our sandbox. Yeah. And have fun playing music and we're lucky. Yep. Exactly. 'Cause you're a touring [00:15:00] musician or, and not a typical violinist. That's funny 'cause I feel like what I can do, anyone can do. I don't feel like the extraordinary. One language will always fall short of describing my music because everybody has an idea in their head. When you try to use words, it falls short of the experience of what you feel when you hear me play the trance mission of a feeling through me directly to you.
So to answer your questions. The easiest part for me is playing it for an audience because I don't have to use words. They will feel it. And I think that different genres all feel like something. And when we play these pieces, whether it be a jazz piece or a tango piece, we feel differently. Like when we play each piece and we convey that feeling to our listeners and they feel good when [00:16:00] they hear it.
It's a really hard thing to sell, but it sells itself when you're in the room. Marketing and promotion have always been tricky fields. I try to encourage people to study up and learn about getting your music to as many ears as possible because I, I say to my group, ears are our currency. Wow. Ears are our currency.
Yes, that's true. How true is that? Yeah. Yeah. I can make better print ads and I can use better colors and I can hire a fancier artist. Mm-hmm. You know, or whatever, right? But until you hear it and feel it, and if I'm playing it from an honest place of loving it, you're gonna feel that love. And if I talk about it too much, you're gonna do it your own construct of it in your head.
Listen [00:17:00] and put stuff together through the experience in your own brain. So if you haven't experienced this as a new, fresh experience. That's where it moves forward. Like when you talk to your students and say, Hey, I found this music. It's really fun to play. It just so turns out that it comes from that place that was written by somebody who wants to have a ton of fun playing.
So not only written by Jeremy Cohen in my whole pedagogical approach, you're a major player and if you become No thank you. When you mentioned it seems like all roads lead to you. Because it was funny you mentioned the crowd in school that I should look it up and become familiar and our audience definitely should.
Well, I was, for the retreat to France that I led a couple months ago, one of the participants was from the Bay Area. Mm-hmm. And when she saw Jeremy Cohen's piece that I submitted in the repertoire. Mm-hmm. [00:18:00] Because we did one of your cortets, we did the coral babo. And then we also did a few of the duos and then she read your bio and she said, wait a sec, I can't believe it.
That's where I go and take chamber music. And she was coming to France with us. The funny thing, crowd Ambo, which was written for Ann Crowden, when it's a mambo, was a combination of Ann Crowd and Mambo. More importantly, I attribute that piece. It's nugget of inspiration to Carlos Santana. 'cause I grew up listening to Amva.
Yeah. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, KBA, to me is like a string quartet expression of a Carlos Santana tune. And why? Because it's in my bones. It's the music that I dug and listened to when I wasn't practicing my Mozart Sonata or doing the scales. I was listening to the Santana album and playing along with it, or making up my own part, or just listening.
And the [00:19:00] few times. I was not too shy to dance at a high school party. We were dancing to that stuff, right? It's part of my life experience and I really want the music that we play, the collectively you, me, and people that we teach and that we're exposed to, to play the music of our lifetimes. And no disrespect for the iconic, fantastic inspirational composers who came before us, but that's not the music of our time.
This is the music of our time. Why isn't there more literature in our stuff? You know, an out string repertoire. Yeah. In good string repertoire. Not just educational low level stuff. Right. Problem is publishers only like to publish stuff that makes them money. Mm-hmm. So they're not out publishing pieces 'cause they're great stuff that high end string players are gonna love and run and buy off the shelves anymore.
[00:20:00] You know, it's tricky to make money in those areas. And so like not a lot of publishers publish high-end stuff. So you were saying about the high-end publishers. Well, it's hard. I used to go to music stores all the time and go through stats of music to see what there was. That was fun because I was looking for non-traditional stuff to play, and there's precious little of it.
The reason for that is that publishers can't make a lot of money. Publishing ultra hip stuff because the audience for it is much smaller. It's growing, but it's much smaller than the big publishers are willing to invest. Mm-hmm. In just a business. It's a weird business. Did you start your own publishing?
Is it violin, jazz? I did. I started violin jazz publishing. You can look us up on the web@violinjazz.com. And I published primarily music for string players. Why? 'cause I wanna play it [00:21:00] and if I can play it, I want other string players to be able to find it and play it. I do have plans. As soon as I can find the means to do it, to publish everything Quartet San Francisco has played.
Mm-hmm. In all of our albums. And make it available because I searched for years for anything, and really that ultimately forced my hand to become an arranger and composer because if I couldn't find it, I had to write it. Right. Luckily, I was working for San Francisco Symphony in their education department.
When I wasn't subbing in the orchestra, I could do school concerts for them, and I was putting together sets of music. And the more I did it, the more I arranged and composed stuff for us to do. The thing that really started Quartet San Francisco was I had made an arrangement of the Pink Panther and Blue Ronal tur.
Mm. Started with the Pink Panther 'cause there was a Pink [00:22:00] Panther cartoon on tv and the kids knew the theme song, right? So we would play classical music, the Mozart Fugue, and a bit of Beethoven, and then we would play Pink Panther. The kids, you could see them vibrating on the floor when they heard Pink Panther.
This was music that was theirs from their lifetime. They loved the Mozart in our performance, but they had no. Brain space for it. It wasn't what they knew. They knew Pink Panther and I saw them resonating on their seats on the floor, and I looked around the room and I said, wow, that's really interesting.
Look at the difference between the response to it. And I realized that it was because they owned it. It was music that was theirs. And it just started me thinking, where's the music of my life? Where's the music that really has me buzzing to play it when I was a little kid? My parents would play music by Dave Brubeck, and so that was part of my childhood life experience [00:23:00] growing up, listening to Blue Ronda Wallah Turk and Take Five by Dave Brubeck.
Well, I went and I went ahead and I arranged Blue Ronda Walla Turk and we played the heck out of it. It was on our first albums and it was stuff that I could completely dive into and play as if I was speaking a language. Not this, not just that I had learned in school how to play and play appropriately, but I could play it as if I was singing it that gave birth to Quartet San Francisco.
Because we've never recorded a classical work on any of our albums. We don't perform them. Mm-hmm. And we don't play them. We're all fully capable of playing them, but there's 200,000 other quartets out there that only play that material that want to play it. Right. We wanna play it. We are more in our space playing.
Anything from Leonard Bernstein to Stevie Wonder to Earth, wind and Fire to the Beatles, to Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. But the music of [00:24:00] our lifetimes is the music that is easy for me to play with a full invested passion and love. Never having a dull moment with a violin in my hand because I'm translating stuff that's in my guts.
Yeah. Huh. No disrespect to classical music. I mean, Mozart, Beethoven, Brums, Heen, you name him, Jacque Schubert, are top of the heap of inspiration, beauty, and expressivity. I like playing it with my friends, but it's not what I pursue. I pursued the music of my lifetime, the whole concept of classical music.
That whole framework, like when you say some of the music that you're arranging and which is popular music, music of your lifetime. A lot of times it's written out and it's kind of like a classical style. It's just a, a word that we use that can be [00:25:00] very controversial. And I know when you're saying the Bach, Beethoven, Brahms people, it just feels like.
If we take little tidbits outta Bach or Brahms, it could be pop music. My arrangement of Eleanor Rigby, I'm walking down the street one day listening and I'm thinking in my head,
wait a minute, Bach and Paul McCartney lives side by side, right?
They live side by side. [00:26:00] Yeah. Inside of this. Skull. Right? I don't separate them anymore. I don't acknowledge that one is this and the other is that And, and why should they be that? Because that's what society has done or what the culture dictated. Absolutely. Yeah. And in the world of classical music, maybe some of those teachers shun the student for trying to infuse pop or live in a pop reality because of some.
I think maybe it's fear because they're not good at playing it. I think there are probably awesome singers in the shower. Right. You know? Yeah. But they won't admit it when they're fully clothed amongst other people. Mm-hmm. But you know, like in the shower, everybody's like a famous right singer singing probably jazz or pop tunes or whatever.
Mm-hmm. Whatever. They love opera, right. But now we put walls between genres and that's unfortunate because classical music would experience much more of [00:27:00] growth if it were more embracing of. Other styles of music, the educational system, because there's grades, pass and fail, students with higher percentages and lower percentages.
We set up this whole grading system that makes the people that. Get the higher numbers better than the people that get the numbers below them. The whole way that system is set up is counter to people actually pursuing what they love while they're learning good fundamentals and technique to do it. The whole system needs a makeover.
That's what I think it is and, and I'm right there with you on that. It seems that professional musicians, once they get to a certain level, it takes them a while to break out of that system, and then they forge forward with breaking down the walls, provided they can learn the extra. Five to 10% of vocabulary that makes those other [00:28:00] genres of music speak authentically.
There are so many classical musicians who use all of their classical training to express their contemporary style playing, and it just doesn't sound right. If you play Eleanor Rigby, it doesn't sound or feel like Paul McCartney, which has a more rhythmic and maybe techniques.
Little twists, little turns, little gritty sounds that otherwise might be judged as negative within the context of classical music. Hopefully these players learning to branch out into other genres are also learning the affectations, the accents, the other language, because as classical musicians, I think we're all overtrained to do that.
I wrote a Tango A two, and.[00:29:00]
A lot of those sounds are coarse gritty. In Argentine tango, they call it mure, they call it dirt. Dirt belongs in the sound in certain places, whereas if you brought that into a classical lesson, some of those sounds would be immediately perceived as harsh, too rough. Not appropriate, but they are the things that make tango playing appropriate.
They make it speak its language. That's why I say there's a five to 10% of additional vocabulary that legitimizes other genres and makes our playing more appropriate within those genres. And that's the place I like to [00:30:00] live and teach in and free up people to do expressive gestures on their instruments.
First, I lean in my students to play with good posture, good intonation. I really drill down on the fundamentals, and once you've got a good set of fundamentals, then we can start exploring other genres and what makes them work. The technical things, the glisses and slides and slaps and chops, and all those other kinds of, uh, ent tango means to drag to a rest and drag the bow.
These bow speed changes. That are in tango. You see this a little, a lot of a tango band,
you know, slow to fast accelerations of the bow. And these are called re to drag. Keeps the rhythm. We keep the rhythm on the metronome and we do the [00:31:00] pre articulations and dragging of the bow and acceleration of the bow arm. I'm not going down on the string. I'm going across the surface of the string and increasing velocity the way a Bandon pulls air into the instrument, the button accordion of tango, we emulate what happens in other genres of music, on our string instruments to bring authenticity.
To our tango style. For example, if Tango's the thing we're working on, or blues or whatever it is, I just like to discover the gritty sounds that make it sound right. I wanna be able to play jazz. So jazz musicians appreciate it and I wanna play tango musicians to set tangos for tango musicians. So they go, ah, he gets it.
He knows the style. You understand the style with respect to the genre, I am a chameleon in that sense on the violin. [00:32:00] And you offer, like if people just want to come to you for a specific specialty, say, okay, I'm gonna learn. And this style, like what you were just doing, all those different tango things.
Some people come to me specifically because they play in a tango group and they want to get better at to the te the techniques now, sorry. Now you, you also, I know you mentioned him crowding as one of your teachers. You also list on your bio it Perlman. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It Perlman. He's an incredible, uh, musician and human being and.
Mentor. I did get a chance to study with him before I got to Juilliard. He taught at Brooklyn College for I think four or five years, and I was there for two of them. And he, here's another guy that loves other genres of music. Yeah. You know, he is got big ears. And I remember one day I called him to change a lesson [00:33:00] time and I called his house.
He had left a message on his machine that went like this.
Ah, there y'all This, here's the Perman residence. It floored me. I ended up trading extra lessons with him for working with him on some bluegrass tombs, and I got a little bit of extra time from him because I had been doing a lot of fiddling. Previous to getting into his class, and I knew a bunch of bluegrass tunes and I wrote 'em out and you know, brought them to him and he would read them and I'd harmonize with him.
He had already done a record with Oscar Peterson. By the time I studied with him, he played with Billy Joel and. He was fearless, and that's the nugget of all of this. People with classical training because of the fear of getting stuff wrong, live in a black or white reality where it's right or it's [00:34:00] wrong, and people who love other genres and want to learn and explore into them, you have to get over that sort of fear and and be fearless about.
Accepting and embracing of yourself even when mistakes are made, not to go to the bad place, shut the door, go back in the practice room and practice until you have it right, because that leaves classical musicians in a fear-based reality. We're afraid to get stuff wrong. Whereas jazzers are taught to play, the repetitions and fiddle players learn to play through the mistakes and eventually get better.
Nobody wants to make mistakes and you can practice on your own time to to develop your accuracy. But in classical violin, it's no bad go back to the practice room and get it right. Jazzers and fiddlers tend to continue the socialization process while they're learning. [00:35:00] And give up the fear much more easily of making mistakes.
I always tell Quartet San Francisco, before we go out on stage, please play as fearlessly as you imagine you can. We've gotta fly. Don't play hedging against mistakes. If I, if, you know, I'd rather you, I say stuff like, I'd rather you went down in flames than. That didn't put out your very best because of being afraid to make a mistake, so just go for it everybody.
We all make mistakes and we all have a lot of fun in the concerts because we don't invest much time in self torture about having missed a note, right? We always talk about the mistakes we made when we walk off stage. That's sort of built into all of us. We remember that more than we remember how much we invested in our fearless flying.
I've learned so much moving beyond my classical [00:36:00] persona by being with jazz musicians right now. I've been hanging out with this jazz singer for the past week and a half, and she just encourages me to go ahead and do that solo. I do feel that. Dialogue in the background. Sure. This is, you're really speaking to me right now.
I feel it. Any thought, cognitive thought, any idea or actual thing that you think that could be translated into language means you're not focused as intently and deeply as you can on the music. In other words, anything. How many times have we played a gig and thought, oh, I gotta pick up onions on the way home, or on the middle of playing something, another piece of music, you know, any cognitive thought like I need to turn right at the next corner.
Things that can be translated into text are impediments to [00:37:00] the zen flow of music through us and through our hands and through our instrument out into the world. Conscious thinking becomes not an enemy, but a, you know, an impediment to our purest intentions as of music coming through our instrument. So, yes, and you're an active touring musician with the Quartet and other groups.
The quartet goes and you play the same concert on tour. Those cognitive thoughts that come into play. While you've played something over and over again, I know this is a common question, but how do you keep it fresh when you're on tour? Playing your absolute best will take every bit of concentration that you have.
I'm not sure cognitive is the right word, but conscious thoughts of things outside of the music. I played forever, tango for 22 months. [00:38:00] All Argentine Orchestra 12 musicians by a, a strange set of circumstances. I ended up being the lead violinist in the show in San Francisco for 18 months. We had played jealousy in the beginning of the second act.
It was a big old violin solo, and it was with four Bandon. It was very dramatic. Beautiful. I think the recording is still out there on YouTube from Forever Tango. One day I was playing a show and. I had an argument with my wife, or you know, I was thinking I was, my mind was occupied in something. The band leader, who was the lead Bandon player, his name was Ro.
He lives in Buenos Aires, and he didn't speak a word of English and I didn't speak any Spanish. He came up to me at intermission, he put his hand on my shoulder and he looked at me and he said, Jeremy, where's Jeremy? I don't feel you. Where are you? And I looked at him and I thought, oh ha. You got me? Yeah.
I'm sorry. [00:39:00] I, I was, you know, my head was not right. I wasn't clear, you know, and like I said, he barely spoke English. I barely spoke Spanish, but he looked at me and he said, where are you? I don't feel you. And it was profound. These Argentine musicians played for each other. If they weren't. Expressing themselves in their most passionate way in front of each other.
It was their whole reason for being in the moment they were performing. They performed the same show eight shows a week. If somebody wasn't feeling well, they would embrace them and they come on, join us. I understood that I was trained in school and in conservatory to play accurately, to not make mistakes, to be proficient, to have more technical ability than the next person.
That's our training, right? But their training was to get all that technique so they could [00:40:00] bear their souls to each other. The most artistic expression of their musicality was where their dignity was. Eight shows a week. Go figure. That's how that show became a hit, because everybody was there to ride the knife's edge of their artistry.
That music director carried that ball and led that band. I understood that my training as an American musician was more about accuracy and. Flexibility and being able to navigate genre to genre. I always wanna stay in my happy place. I wanna play from a place of joy so that that is what's transmitted, rather than I got to take my fiddle out and play this darn thing again.
Even when I teach my kids, I try to keep them in the creative. Space so that the violin or instrument can always be a safe haven for us to work on [00:41:00] ourselves and express joy no matter what our technical level is. When you're playing at the peak of what you're capable of, you're completely in it and it becomes who you are.
I've taught a lot of young kids who are struggling about who they are. They feel awkward, bullied or whatever. I want them to get as powerful as they can on their instrument, whether they become professionals or not. So they have a sense of who they are and a sense of purpose. And I would say in the, in the case of some kids, it, it, it saves them or it provides them a whole new pathway for their life, whether they become professional or not.
It becomes a place where they develop an understanding of themselves. Music lessons last a lifetime. Michael, you experience that all the time with the, oh, you're a big, you're teacher and a mentor to many. Well, ed, I'm being taught every day and I feel like I've learned so much here today. Just talking. No, [00:42:00] this is really this.
This is one of the joy of having this podcast by having guests like you on here. It's, and thanks. It's really, it's really wonderful. All the other questions I have, I think you've answered everything for me really well. Things like the community building thing that you were going to, what's your latest achievement?
Community building. But I think you, you've answered all these questions, but if you have one that you'd like to say. Please do. But I heard you're, you were arranging all these tunes this morning. I thought, wow, that's expanding community. That's giving opportunities, the opportunities that you give to musicians through your com compositions and your teaching.
But you answer the question, please if you want, if you have one, well, you know, this is maybe a little bit off. The main subject, and I don't mean to look for sympathy in this moment, but a recently lo, I'm the youngest of three boys and recently we lost our middle brother. Sorry. Thank you. [00:43:00] Part of my working through it was my brother was very much into crossover.
He attended the new Directions cello. Festival and he was a big fan of Turtle Island. He loved folk music when he was a kid. He slathered us when we were kids with Simon and Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell and Pentangle and all kinds of folk and acoustic music. Recently we're doing memorials for my brother in October and my brother's wife told me.
I had just recently seen a concert of Paul Simon. He came through San Francisco and my brother's widow, who I've known for many years, said one of his favorite tunes was, you can call me Al, the Paul Simon Tune. I thought, what a fitting tribute to my brother at his memorial. I'm gonna create a. Cello choir version of, you can call me Al.
Wow. So I started writing, you can call me Al for six [00:44:00] cellos. It's a way for me to communicate, you know, on go ongoing with my late brother to stay connected to. Mm-hmm. Then bring this p this. Music to his community because he lived in Ukiah and there's gonna be a lot of people that come to his memorial.
Music gives us all of that. Aside from being raised with and having a lifetime of experiences with a sibling, we also had music and the commonality. I realized that my brother was even more effective than me in gathering community around him. With the music at his base, he taught many cello students, coached chamber musicians, played concerts.
People came out, they wanted to be around him. He made truffles, chocolate truffles. Hmm. I have an opportunity for the experience of my brother's life to be carried on beyond his lifetime. Mm-hmm. I meant to bring this to a light place, not to a [00:45:00] dark place. I'm sad to have the loss. He had some. Physical me medical conditions caused his untimely death.
But he touched so many people and we can continue to have a relationship. They can remember him and feel the joy. He brought them by my offering this arrangement for a cello ensemble of a Paul Simon tune. Mm-hmm. Which is. Just a way of staying in touch with somebody's in spirit, whether they're there in person or not.
So music transcends, you know, it's not just this thing we do, it's becomes more about who we are and what matters to us and how we connect with each other by staying in touch with the memory of a lifetime with my brother by sharing more of him with a. Community that also loved him. I feel good about doing this [00:46:00] arrangement, and it feels like dedicating a work to him might live far beyond even my ears.
Wow, that's beautiful. I'm very sorry how it's coming out, but sometimes that's how beautiful things get born. Many times. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And it's all part of the process. He left us in a happy space, left us sad that he left us, but he also. Was very generous with his spirit and to not just his family, but mm-hmm.
To his community. So we get to celebrate that. That's really something to look forward to, you know? Yeah. Well, I'm sure it is gonna be wonderful. I'm sure it's gonna be a beautiful celebration and the arrangement is going to be incredible 'cause you, you're gonna be the arranger. Yeah, I know. Pretty cool.
Now, I don't want to appear in sensitive by my next question. Probably my last question for the day, because I know we've gone over time here and I, I love talking with you and thanks for being so generous with your time. But, and this may be a mundane [00:47:00] question, especially after hearing everything you've said.
And the crossover genres and everything, of all the pieces. The one piece that you'd like to take with you, if it's the last piece you can listen to, if it's the only piece you can listen to or perform, do you have one now all of a sudden, I have two answers to that question. There are pieces that I listen to if I'm really wound up.
There's a particular piece by Yvonne Linz. The Brazilian composer, singer, keyboard songwriter I love, it's by evil lens. It's called Chameleon. With him singing, it's a simple Brazilian Basa, chills me out for my brother's memorial. The piece that I chose that a community of people could play was p's Melody Melo in a Minor.
I love that. Simple. It is how much can be said with how few notes. Players at [00:48:00] all levels can play that piece because it's not terribly technically complicated, but it's a very passionate and heartfelt piece. It's simplistic, it's how simple can it be? But other than that, my answer to that question is, whatever piece I'm playing at the moment had darn well better be my favorite piece or else.
Yeah, everybody's in trouble. It's like, if I'm not giving it the, like every piece I play of Quartet San Francisco, they're all my babies. I have to care for and feed every piece that I play as if it's the most important. I love going to New York for concerts because when you go to the concert somewhere and you know, like I went to a concert in the, in an embassy somewhere in New York, and it was everybody in New York says, well, this piece is terribly important because it was found on.
Schumann's bookshelf after he died, and it was, it's [00:49:00] terribly important because A, B, C, and B, and our next piece, it's terribly important because this was first performed by a. Bach's 33rd cousin in Leipzig. In 17, you know, in, in, in 1813, the last known descendant, the Bach performed. This, this piece is so important.
Like everything's important. It's like the Incredibles. If everything's important, nothing's important, you know, so any piece that we play, if we're giving it all, we've got, it's the most important piece in the world. So I can't select one. Like the desert island, which one piece will you take? But I love Yvonne Lyon I love piazzolla There's so much Bach that's so beautiful and I love the Schubert C Major two cello quintet. We're gonna perform that on a brother's memorial. I just think it's cello centric and it's lush and gorgeous and [00:50:00] beautiful. But I, I change with the every day, like what peace moves me. I've just started building a list on my iTunes of pieces that at one time or another I just loved and felt some passion about.
I'm building separate playlists of some Steely Dan on there, some Stevie Wonders on there, some, you know, random things. Whip it by Devo is on there and you know, maybe Bohemian rhapsody's on there. And there are classical pieces too. I'm gonna build a classical list of. Similar pop things that I grew up listening to that were meaningful to me for any reason at any time in my life, are still really fun to listen to because they bring me to those various places.
So, I'm sorry, not one, not one bucket. Big bucket list, but not one individual piece. But I totally relate. I didn't have a, I would not be able to answer that question with one. It was gonna be [00:51:00] melodia and a minor for the final piece. And then my brother's wife said, yeah, you know, Joel really loved, you can call me out.
So we're gonna end up on an up note with the memorial. So I'm that malleable, like it's as we go with how we feel at any given time. And we have many wonderful options with music. Yeah, I had one, one teacher that actually was the inspiration for this podcast that I studied with. He passed away a couple Christmas Eves ago, but he a bass player, really rough.
He had the Mitchell Rough duo and I'd always hear him playing. He'd be up on stage and every once in a while he'd yell out to the audience, shoot me while I'm happy.
One of the things I do say about my brother is he left in a very good space. He was in love. He loved where he lived. He loved his community. Good time, you know, bad time to go. He was riding high. He felt like he had really arrived in many [00:52:00] ways in his life, especially when you're up on stage playing music that you love and you're doing something that you really love.
Things are good. Hey, this was great. I really enjoyed talking with you and hearing the demonstrations. . Thank you, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. Take care. You too, cia.
Bye-bye. Take.
