Fiddler Patrick Ross Begins Town Hall Tour
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- Created on Wednesday, 30 September 2015 17:59
- Written by Tim Laroche
Patrick Ross's fingers dance along the nylon strings of his fiddle.
His bow-hand sways as though he is conducting some unseen orchestra, but only the smooth, slow whine of his fiddle echoes across the empty Alexander Twilight Theatre.
With virtuosic placement and without any apparent sign of difficulty, Ross flicks his bow along the strings and series of shrill stutters escapes from his instrument.
"I try to maximize the acoustic quality of the instrument because it's almost too easy to just add another amp, or just add another foot pedal or just add another electronic filter," Ross said in an interview before his show with comedian Rusty Dewees during Lyndon State College's alumni weekend. "Can I function on a desert island with just my fiddle? What would I do?"
Ross's deep understanding of the acoustic qualities of the fiddle plays a central role in his music, he says. The traditional French-Canadian styles of fiddling, as well as an amalgamation of other techniques, genres and styles form the vast repertoire that Ross will showcase when he embarks on his Vermont Town Hall Tour, which opens at the Danville Town Hall on October 3.
But Ross considers himself more than just a fiddler, he says. In recent years, the Canaan native has expanded his musical styling to include such instruments as slide guitars and drums. And, he says, he is bringing vocals into his sets – territory which, he says, is less familiar to him.
"I'm just trying to catch my voice up to the years of practice I have with my instrument," Ross said. "I don't even want to sing words, I want to sing tones. I want people to fill in the words by the tones I'm singing, by the shapes that I'm singing."
For his Vermont Town Hall Tour though, Ross said, his fiddle will be accompanied not only by his voice, but also by a sense of history that he says is inherent to the town halls in which he will perform.
"Ninety-nine percent of the town halls I'll be playing in will be historic town halls, so they were designed in the 1700s and the 1800s for projection because there was no electricity," Ross said. "To play an instrument that was built in the 1800s in a building that was built in the 1800s playing the music – though not all of it will be music from the 1800s -- its really me coming back to my roots, in an adult way. The stuff I was doing since I was a kid has been me just digesting the stuff that people said I should be doing. But now, I'm latching onto the stuff that I really want to do."
Even the fiddle that Ross plays has an underlying history. A crack bisects the body of Ross's fiddle, and the varnish bubbles in places where it survived a fire. The instrument, which is from 1854, once belonged to Ross's father, Arthur, before he gave it Ross as his first fiddle.
"He found it when he was fourteen years old when he was delivering newspapers," Ross said. "He put it in his pouch filled with rolled up newspapers and somebody had given up on it and left it on the curbside in a pile of junk because it was in shambles. Its analogous to a human being, because we all go through a lot."
But behind Ross's quiet and reserved demeanor, he has his own story as well.
Ross is the descendant of a lineage of fiddlers. He grew up listening to his father play traditional folk songs, he says, and spent much of his early life immersed in music starting to play music when he was four years old.
"My father played fiddle, my grandfather played fiddle, my great grandfather, and my great-great grandfather," he said. "And so it was a tradition passed on."
The younger of two brothers, Ross watched as his father tried to teach his older brother to play the fiddle to no avail. Motivated in part by sibling rivalry and in part by an opportunity to spend more time with his father, Ross says, he took up the family trade himself.
"I witnessed my father encouraging my brother to take up the fiddle," Ross said. "I wanted to do everything that my brother did. When my brother decided that he didn't want to fiddle, it was my opportunity to jump in and do something that he couldn't."
A video uploaded to Ross's Facebook page shows an old interview that aired on New Hampshire Public Television with the young Ross and his father, after the duo performed for an audience at the Stark Old-Time Fiddler's Contest in 1993.
"We'd been coming out here for a number of generations, my father played out here when it first started," Ross's father said to the interviewer. "My father's passed away now, but we've got somebody to take over."
When Ross was 11 years old, he says, he found his father dead from a heart attack.
"That was traumatic, very," Ross said. "Because we were just getting going. Things were just picking up. He was teaching me by ear, which was the traditional method. He'd play a couple of notes and I'd have to play it back. He taught me maybe 20 or 30 fiddle tunes that way over the course of four or five years, and I was just getting going on that and he's gone. Fast forward 20 years now, and it's definitely a lifeline to the memories I have with my father."
In the years since his father's death, Ross became more involved with playing fiddle, he says.
"My family rallied after my dad died because they knew, obviously, that I was picking up the fiddle and was a natural at it mand I picked it up pretty quickly," Ross said. "My big French-Canadian, Catholic family, they got a spaghetti fundraiser and a couple different events to raise money to send me to Nashville, Tennessee where I studied at a music camp for one week every summer for about six years."
At the Mark O'Connor Fiddle Camp, Ross says, he was taught by some of the best instructors from around the world and was exposed to a variety of genres and techniques.
"I was influenced at a young age by the best from each continent in their respective styles and that showed me that there wasn't just my father's way of playing the fiddle," Ross said. "There were many other ways, and so it sort of stretched my ears."
When Ross was 19, he left home to play with a band called "Smokin' Grass," with which he toured across the country before moving to Nashville to play with a few bands and then working as a ski lift operator in Colorado, before undergoing a backpacking trip across Europe.
But despite his myriad worldly experiences, Ross moved to Newbury in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, only a short trip from his hometown, where he has since started a life with his wife, Cindy.
Last year, Ross's first daughter, Ophelia, was born. Even at such a young age, Ross says, she has already shown interest in music.
"She'll have the ukulele around her neck and the harmonica in one hand and the other hand on the piano, and she'll be tapping her foot while singing," he said. "Its just always around her especially since I'm with her during the week until my wife comes home. A fish doesn't notice the water that's around it, it just swims in it."
With an infant at home and music in his blood, Ross says, he has no shortage of inspiration for his work. With his Vermont Town Hall Tour though, he says, he wants to break down the barriers that separate the crowd from the performer and extend that inspiration to his audience.
"I want to inspire people, that's what I want to do," Ross said. "I want to show people that taking on a challenge is a good thing, because when you look back and you've stuck with a challenge, and after "x" amount of time, there is that feeling of accomplishment that can be shared with other people."
Patrick Ross's Vermont Town Hall Tour will begin on October 3 at 7:30 p.m. at the Danville Town Hall. On October 9, he will perform at 7:30 p.m. at the Hardwick Town Hall; November 6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Chelsea Town Hall; November 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the West Rutland Town Hall; November 13 at 7:30 p.m. at the Maidstone Town Hall; November 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Sheffield Town Hall; November 20 at the Shelburne Town Hall; November 21 at 7:30 p.m. at the Hartland Town Hall. Tickets cost $15, and can be purchased at the door or online at patrickrossmusic.com.