When cellist Mike Block gathers together some of the country’s top string players to teach a summer fiddle camp in Vero, it isn’t just the campers who benefit, nor is it the audience at Block’s free annual festival.
It is the musicians themselves, says Joe K. Walsh, a mandolinist arriving this weekend to teach his fourth Mike Block String Camp.
Summer camps like Vero’s, now in its seventh year, serve as a sort of test kitchen for musical “recipes.” as Walsh puts it. Not unlike the Monday gigs he has kept up for years in a Portland, Maine, pizza place, that regularly attract astonishing talent to join in, the instructors at fiddle camps across the country benefit from the connections they make and even the music they make together.
Not that his playing is limited to summer camps and pizza joints. Walsh, considered among the top mandolinists in the country, has performed at the Ryman Auditorium and the Kennedy Center. He has played with
Emmylou Harris, Bela Fleck, John Scofield (whom he cites as a major influence these days) and Ricky Skaggs, among many others.
He toured Europe in his four years with the Gibson Brothers, a multiple award-winning traditional bluegrass band; they parted ways in 2013. Walsh just released a debut album on Compass Records of a new band, Mr. Sun, founded with another Vero band camp veteran, Darol Anger. Walsh describes the new group as “my genre-inclusive omnivorous improvisatory string band.”
That unserious experimentation is wide open at string camps, evolving of the sort of unsupervised fooling around that roots seems born to. And Block, as host of the party, draws up a guest list of faculty that invariably includes musicians new to the room.
Music school is one way to forge the connections, Walsh says. “But honestly, camps are a big way. I go to Mike’s camp and I’ll spend time with people I know and some people I know a little less. Over the course of the week, we often find that opportunities arise to work together,” he says.
That just happened in a big way for Walsh. “Mike just hired me to play on his latest record,” he says.
Similarly, Walsh was hired for the camp through Anger, an icon in the fiddle world and among the best-known of the camp’s lineup. Anger has played with contemporary bluegrass and folk greats like Bela Fleck, David Grisman, Bill Frisell and Edgar Meyer. His Republic of Strings and Turtle Island String Quartet are among the best-known groups of the genre.
Anger has taught a number of times in Vero and returns this year. His fiddle-playing is on the theme song of the public radio show “Car Talk.” He was also violinist on the “Sim City” computer game series.
Both Anger and Block teach at Berklee College of Music, as does Walsh.
Walsh also plays with a trio that includes fellow Vero veteran Brittany Haas.
“As a musician, you need a portfolio of gigs that fulfill different needs,” says Walsh. “The gigs that pay well aren’t the gigs you’re going to mess around with and take the greatest risks. But if you never take the risks, you’re never evolving and growing. For me it’s a great place to take the risks.
“I’d be hard pressed to find music that interests me that doesn’t take great risks. The music that we respond to isn’t the music that’s playing it safe.”
Walsh was still a teenager when he set his mind to learning the mandolin. He learned other stringed instruments in high school in Minnesota. But by the time he entered Berklee College of Music in Boston, he was ready to declare the mandolin as his principal instrument – even though, at the time, there was no professor of mandolin.
Walsh, who in 2007 graduated as Berklee’s first-ever mandolin major, now teaches there. Two years ago, he inaugurated Berklee’s American Roots Music summer program.
All the while, he has been writing his own compositions and mustering musicians for his third solo recording. If it follows the lead of the first two, credits will read like a Mike Block String Camp faculty roster.
Block first came to Vero in 2009 at the invitation of Kathryn Johnston, a Vero attorney whose daughter had studied violin under Block at a summer program in another state. Staying at the Johnstons’ home, Block went to Vero Beach High School and gave a workshop for its orchestra students. The next summer, he gathered together some of his highly accomplished colleagues for the first Mike Block String Camp, taking over what is now the Prestige Hotel on the beach and attracting students young and old from as far away as Sweden, Africa and Australia.
The Vero Beach camp is for all levels and all ages. Block also leads another group at DePauw University in Indianapolis: the Global Musician Workshop, with a focus on world music for musicians 18 and over. That camp is under the auspices of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. Block has been a member of the Silk Road Ensemble since he was a student at Juilliard.
Anger and Walsh are part of the camp’s second week this year, which includes more advanced students as well as a new initiative, the Florida Band Incubator (or FBI, as the comic Block clearly enjoys calling it). Students in the FBI will each be in three faculty-led bands.
Other faculty for the second week are bluegrass fiddler Kimber Ludiker, world music player Jeremy Kittel, and banjoist and composer Jayme Stone. Along with Block, they will be joined by Hanneke Cassel, Alex Hargreaves and Loren Weisman, a drummer, music producer and author of “The Artist’s Guide to Success in the Music Business.”
The String Camp’s second-week faculty – including Walsh – will perform as part of the camp’s Vero Beach International Music Festival, Wednesday, July 13, at 7:30 p.m.
On Thursday and Friday, July 14 and 15, the advanced students join the faculty for two more performances. Both also start at 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, July 6, faculty for the first week of camp will perform. That too starts at 7:30 p.m. That will be followed by a student concert Saturday, July 9, at 3 p.m., with a barn dance following.
The concerts are all free, but a $20 donation is suggested for the camp’s scholarship program.
