Jeremy Kittel, over the
course of his short wall-to-wall fiddle-filled life, has accomplished
quite an astonishing amount, musically speaking, becoming something
of a role model to numerous young fiddlers along the way. He has been
seen and heard on countless radio and TV shows: Prairie Home Companion,
Celtic Beat, Celtic Connections, and Alice's Restaurant,
among others. He has performed at multitudinous festivals–the Ann
Arbor Folk Festival in Michigan, the Bethlehem [Pennsylvania] Musikfest,
Celtic Fest Chicago, the Indiana Fiddlers' Gathering in Battle Ground.
He has appeared on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage in Washington,
DC. And he has served as a music instructor, including important stints
with Mark O'Connor's Fiddle Camps in Nashville and San Diego.
Kittel is just 20 years
old.
"I guess I've done
a lot in a short time," he admits with a laugh. "I've been
lucky, I guess, really fortunate."
Ah, luck had nothing to
do with it. Kittel is an amazing fiddler. Recently, he played a significant—if
rather short—solo on a live Naxos recording of a major new orchestral
piece by William Bolcom. Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing
the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (William Blake), the three-hour
megawork recorded at Hill Auditorium on the University of Michigan campus,
includes an expanded orchestra with electric guitars, electric bass
and organ, and a huge chorus with scads of solo singers. The recording
also features the University of Michigan School of Music Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Leonard Slatkin, with Kittel on fiddle—for about 60
seconds.
Kittel admits it's a short
appearance, but says he wouldn't have missed the critically acclaimed
concert. "I love being associated with this work, even for only
a minute," he says. "It's an amazing piece."
Not known for his work with
classical orchestras, Kittel has been concentrating on many different
types of music over the last 15 years. Classically trained starting
at the age of five, he discovered traditional music when, at the age
of eight, he attended the Scottish Highland Games, in Elma, Michigan
with his family. Watching the fiddling competition, the youthful Kittel
was transformed and requested immediate fiddling lessons, which his
parents granted. A year later, Kittel returned to the same festival,
this time as a remarkably skilled young fiddler, who wowed the players
with whom he brazenly asked to jam.
One thing led to another,
and Kittel went to more Scottish festivals, where he became a featured
performer, meeting and jamming with some of the greatest Scottish fiddlers
in the world. Not one to be star-struck, though he was constantly performing
with big names, he especially enjoyed hanging out and playing tunes
with other fiddlers his own age, all of whom loved the same kind of
music.
Kittel took it seriously.
As a high-school student, he traveled to Ireland a few times. A natural
tunesmith—he composed his first fiddle tune at the age of 12—Kittel
began to experiment with improvisation around that time, making up licks
inspired by the Scottish and Irish music he loved. "It was a blast,"
he recalls. "That kind of music just really grabbed me, I guess."
At the University of Michigan,
the young player, almost by accident, discovered jazz. It's a genre
that Kittel knew very little about before college, but his experiences
with Celtic music had left him seasoned and ready for a more rigorously
technical form of improvisational playing.
Jazz provided that.
"I thought jazz was
great," he says, "I didn't understand it all, technically,
at first—but I connected with it emotionally and I immediately
loved it."
Just like that, the Celtic-fiddling
phenomenon from Chicago was majoring in jazz studies. He graduated last
year.
"I got my degree,"
he says, "but rather than it representing the end of my jazz education,
I see it as representative of the beginning of my life-long education
in jazz."
Surprisingly, the jazz players
he cites as most influential are not violinists, but horn players. "For
me, that's where most of my jazz interests lie," he says, "in
the tradition that's mainly been held by horn players, the more mainstream
jazz tradition rather than that of notable string players like Stéphane
Grappelli and Joe Venuti. I've transcribed more saxophone solos in the
last four years than I've transcribed violin solos, because the horn
solos come from a different corner of the jazz world, and that's the
piece of it that really excites me.
"What I love about
jazz is not knowing what's about to happen," he continues. "If
I can get into that mode of searching for something while improvising,
that's when interesting things happen. When you find some melody that's
really moving, a melody you've never found there before, that's so completely
amazing to me, like finding a treasure chest you never knew was right
there in front of you.
"That's what I love
about jazz—that search for melody."
Kittel intends to spend
the next 20 years—and beyond—searching for those hidden melodies.
He expects to have fun doing it.
"That's what keeps
me going," he says. "The older I get the more fun I
have. I'm amazed to think of how much fun I'll be having a few years
from now.
"It really does just
keep on getting better."
Photo
by Fred Ellert
