Stringing out a musical life

By GRAHAM REID

The call to his New York apartment catches Andy Stein breathless. He's just run from the subway so it's best to call back in 10 minutes when he's breathing better.

Good. It allows us to get our breath back too after considering this violinist/saxophonist's formidable credentials. Really, it's hard to know where to start.

Let's distil it to this and leave dozens of famous names in the margins of his 40-year playing career: he was classically trained on violin but headed off into hippie-friendly, stoner country-rock when he was a co-founder of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen in the late 60s (biggest single: Hot Rod Lincoln; best albums: Lost in the Ozone and Hot Licks, Cold Steel and Truckers Favourites).

He joined the legendary western-swing outfit Asleep at the Wheel, kept up his classical work, played with Emmylou Harris, for three weeks auditioned for Bob Dylan's late-70s tour which came here just before the Live at the Budokan album, did something with Dr John and Eric Clapton, toured China, appeared on Saturday Night Live and Letterman, and ...

No, it's too much to do in one breath. Maybe we'll skip the couple of decades after he won best country instrumental Grammy in '78 - even though the names Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, Itzhak Perlman, Wynton Marsalis and Ray Charles appear - and just say that until two years ago he led the house band for 13 years on Garrison Keillor's acclaimed Prairie Home Companion radio show.

But if we skip ahead we miss mentioning his soundtrack work (a National Lampoon film and some Roger Corman B-grade flicks included alongside Francis Ford Coppola's Cotton Club), and all those years from '80 recreating the sound of 20s jazz violinist Joe Venuti.

No, let's give up on that and just call back to see what he's been up to today.

"Actually I was just doing a recording session for some pharmaceutical company. They needed some violins. I get to be Kenny G on the violin for a few minutes. Some people do anything for money, right?"

Despite his credentials, Stein still has to find the fast-turn-around paying gigs but he juggles such things with a career where he sits in with orchestras, writes his own music or arrangements to order, and works with his Blue Five band playing the music of his idol Venuti.

"That's my first love and something I definitely don't do for money. I'm in the process of trying to launch that as a viable touring entity. What appeals to me about that music is that it swings - and I love to swing.

"What Venuti had that was unique and is worth reinventing or reviving was such a beautiful sound and purity. He also had a direct approach which was irresistibly in your face.

"It was the early days of jazz but steeped in the classical traditions it was breaking away from. The jazz musicians of that era were trained classically and never really gave up the sound.

"Jimmy Dorsey was a classical virtuoso, Benny Goodman played Mozart with my aunt [violinist Lillian Fuchs] and her string quartet. Then later in the 30s and 40s the jazz musicians didn't have that background. Some did, Coleman Hawkins had nothing but string quartets in his house apparently, but Venuti's music was of that transitional period."

Stein, 58, came along at a transitional period, the late 60s when the lines between rock, country and jazz were blurring. He grew up in a musical family - his father was a pianist who would organise family members into chamber music groups. Stein was trained as a violinist (he's also a proficient saxophonist and pianist), then started playing bluegrass fiddle at age 12.

He took up jazz bass as a teenager and in '69 co-founded Commander Cody in San Francisco.

"We were part of the rock'n'roll circuit but played a different kind of music for that audience. The eclectic repertoire kept it interesting.

"We played blues, gospel, pure country, western swing ...

"It was a unique aggravation, as we say, of eight people with diverse backgrounds. Three came from legitimate Chicago blues bands, [singer] Bill Kirchen was a rockabilly guy and then there was me."

After the band broke up in the mid-70s he spent a short time with the western-swing outfit Asleep at the Wheel ("Very important in reviving western-swing, there wasn't any other band of our generation that was as prominent and touring as much") but then returned to New York and worked on his violin skills.

"Then I got called to do a job - on saxophone. Whaddya gonna do?"

The call was for Dylan's band but after three weeks' rehearsal and getting his papers ready to tour he was replaced by the great Steve Douglas. "I didn't feel bad being replaced by him."

Stein has a wealth of good stories about his life as a session player. You just throw him a name. Like Mariah Carey.

"It was for that Diva television series and this was a tribute to Aretha Franklin. I was hired to play in a small string section but I get there and there are no charts. The string parts had already been recorded with a synthesiser and we had to kind of lip-synch the part with the synthesiser player standing right behind us.

"Anyway I heard the piece and started playing it and they start saying, 'That was really good'. Like, 'Hey real strings sound better than this stupid synthesiser'. That was the day before recording so I wrote out the arrangements for everyone. So I can say I played with Mariah Carey and wrote string arrangements for her. What can I tell you?"

What about Michael Jackson?

"That was a string section overdub on to an album and nobody knew he was in the studio until someone said, 'Let's see how Michael feels about it'. We thought he was in some helicopter hovering overhead. But I wanted to go the bathroom and some big bodyguard said, 'Excuse me, Mr Jackson's in there, you'll have to wait'. I mean, there's like five stalls in there.

"But I waited and sure enough there was the back of his head going down the hall. It was hardly me and Michael jamming, but it was almost an intimate moment."

Stein's longest-running gig was as band leader and first fiddle player on Garrison Keillor's gently mocking and homely radio show, A Prairie Home Companion which on radio sounds relaxed and informal.

He explains how the band rehearse with guests, Keillor cuts things back, and then half an hour before they go live there will be other changes.

"There's lots of improvising and suddenly you'll be told Garrison just got this letter from a truck driver and he wants to read it on air, so can you play some fiddle behind it. It was a lot of work but there was no reason to panic."

These days Stein returns as a guest after deciding two years ago to pursue other options, notably Venuti's music with Blue Five, the band he is bringing to Auckland and which has won critical acclaim for their appearances at Michael's Pub (where Woody Allen plays) in New York.

He tells of working with Placido Domingo, a convoluted tale of how he came to write the string arrangement for Junk, the first track on Paul McCartney's Working Classical album, of writing the score for one of National Lampoon's lesser films ... And much more. "Oh yeah, it's been a fun life - so far."

Performance

* Who: Andy Stein and the Blue Five

* Where: Montana International Jazz and Blues Festival

* When: Waiheke Theatre (with Leroy Jones and the Spirit of New Orleans), Friday, April 9; Auckland Town Hall (with Leroy Jones and the Spirit of New Orleans, and David Paquette), Saturday, April 10