Research

An unusual jazz ensemble. Mark O'Connor is an American violinist trained classically and in Flamenco. His hot swing trio is a tribute to his great friend and mentor the late french jazz master Stephan Grappelli and includes Frank Vignola and Julian Lage both on guitar. The genre is acoustic string jazz.

Mark brings American history to life using his violin. The word to describe his musical style is 'Americana'.

O'Connor has been following the sound of American music and finding his own ways of adding to the expression of that sound.

His journey began with classical guitar lessons while he was growing up in Seattle, but when O'Connor went to compete in a classical guitar contest, he decided to play a flamenco piece, a genre he'd been learning on the side. O'Connor doesn't remember if he placed first or second in the contest, but in the top two, anyway. The other musicians were all college students; O'Connor was 10 years old.

By the time he graduated from high school, he had recorded four albums for Rounder. These were mainly traditional American folk music, but as Mark says, "I got way into jazz when I was 13 and 14."

He auditioned as a guitarist to join the David Grisman Quintet to fill the place left by Tony Rice, one of O'Connor's own guitar heroes. Grisman's acoustic mix of bluegrass with Gypsy jazz was, and still is, a unique and groundbreaking style, one that was especially hot at the time O'Connor auditioned, a few months after his high school graduation in 1979.

When it came time to move on, O'Connor joined the jazz-rock fusion group Dixie Dregs and moved to Atlanta. He has appeared in the credits of hundreds of country recording projects.

Mark says, "it's a very natural thing for me to combine music and styles to create American music. The way I kind of look at it is, I have three pillars of musical influence and training," he said.  "The pillars are western classical music, American folk music, and jazz."

Since ending his session career he's recorded two folk and country albums, two children's records, more than half a dozen classical records, several soundtracks, as well as composed work for choral groups and string ensembles, all the while maintaining a touring schedule with both Appalachia Waltz and Hot Swing ensembles of which Hot Swing Trio is one.

O'Connor has always approached classical music as American music, drawing on the forms and vocabulary in musical conversation with the sounds of the Mississippi Delta, the high lonesome echoes of bluegrass, and the intersections of the sounds of the borderlands with Mexico and Canada. "It's the harmony of the American landscape," he said.

Some of Mark's influences include bluegrass and country star Ricky Skaggs and folk fiddler and innovator Benny Thomasson who created the modern era of American fiddling in the 1940's.