Accomplished violinist breaks from tradition

By DON WILCOCK

TROY — The New York Times may have called Eileen Ivers the Jimi Hendrix of the violin, but this winner of nine all-Ireland fiddle championships wasn’t feeling all that special when she got a call from Sting’s producer 24 hours before the first rehearsal for a short promotional tour.

“Eileen, if you don’t mind playing exactly what’s on the recording,” he said, “that would be best.” The song in question was “Soul Cake,” which she will perform during her Christmas show Sunday at the Troy Music Hall.

“To play what somebody else interpreted and is kind of improvisational anyway was going so against my grain,” said the artist who wanted to bring her own “soul” to this “cake.”

“I love working with singers because I love playing off their phrasing,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time I was asked to (copy another’s improvisation), and it just felt so wrong.”

When she got into rehearsal, Sting kept going into the booth with his |producers after several recorded takes on the song, and the next morning he made subtle changes on the bass part and tweaked the percussion. Finally, he went over to Ivers and said, “You know what? Can you play more? Just play what you’re feeling.”

Ivers winked at him and told him she’d love to.

“I just played it completely differently, wove lines dynamically, listened so carefully to him, to the others,” she recalled. “You know yourself just organically what’s going on, living, breathing in this arrangement. And it was great! He came over to me. He gave me the biggest hug and said, ‘Guys, that’s it!’ ”

Ivers does a three-minute version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in her Christmas show that includes dancers from the local Boland School of Irish Dance and the Tri-City Christmas Ensemble Choir. She also does an interpretation of the relatively contemporary hit “Oh, Happy Day” and songs from her 2007 CD, “An Nollaig: An Irish Christmas.” The artist donates $2 from every sale of that album to the Salvation Army.

There are no rules in her performances, which are an energizing marriage of knowledge and emotion. She has a graduate degree in mathematics from Iona College and brings a cum laude intelligence to her playing, but emotion sometimes takes over.

“It’s great to have the knowledge,” she said. “Knowledge is obviously powerful. So, (it’s wonderful) to be able to technically drill stuff and to have that arsenal of stuff you can come at. You can be like B.B. King and bend a note for days until it hurts and goes over all the chords that it shouldn’t be going over and not fitting in. Then, when you release that, you’re like, ‘Aah!’ And you get that emotional thing you wanted to get, and bang, that wa-wa, the right move for that. That’s the thing that makes it so interesting because you never know what’s going to be the right call. It’s kind of exciting.”

Eileen loves the meaning and emotion of Christmas, but she also enjoys letting her emotions break with some of the same traditions she’s honoring in her music. She remembers a 1996 recording session with rocker Patti Smith that demanded an especially emotive style she calls “crunchy bow junk with a cry-like bow effect.”

“Everything you could do wrong on the instrument, I did. It just seemed to suit what that song was asking for and that, to me, was like some of the most rewarding musical moments — when you can just break the rules, especially with a singer/songwriter with what’s needed there. ‘

“I oftentimes think, ‘I wish I had the talent to sing because that’s powerful, but I look at the violin as my voice and try to use it in that way.’ ”

WHERE: Troy Music Hall

WHEN: 3 p.m. Sunday

TICKETS: $27, $32, $38, students and children $15. Call: (518) 273-0038.