I started playing music back east (Buffalo, NY) when I was about
eleven years old. (I played the trumpet and french horn all the way through elementary school, junior high, high school and music college). I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Education from VanderCook College of Music in Chicago, Ill., and am very familiar with teaching brass, strings and reeds.
My main focus in teaching is to get the student to enjoy the musical experience that they have taken on. Music, whether listening or playing, is a wonderful pastime and should be taken on with joy and enthusiasm.
I started playing the guitar when I was about 15 and got
into Bob Dylan and that whole folk revival scene in the early 60's, which started a long lifetime love of traditional folk music.
However, it wasn't until I moved to California in the early 70's that I got introduced to other kinds of traditional music such as celtic, old time fiddle music and bluegrass. I started playing the banjo in the late 70's and played it for a couple of years and through that got interested in old time fiddling. I developed a deep and lasting love for the old time fiddle styles as well as celtic fiddling and celtic music in general.
The development of
The Acme String Ensemble is a fairly lengthy one.
Evan Morgan, Steve Wharton and I met at a persons house who had alot of sessions in the late 70's but we were
all playing in separate bands. For the next ten years we would get together at party's or special
gigs which involved all our bands but never thought about playing together until one night after a
concert I had attended, a friend of mine asked me when I was
going to put a band together with Steve and Evan. Well, that started a long history of this band that is still going strong today.
We got together in 1988
and started playing straight traditional old time music. We lost Evan to various and sundry
bands, but picked up a great guitar player named Michael Harmon who is also a wonderful singer and celtic guitar player. Unfortunately, we eventually
lost Micheal due to a far away move and now are very happy to have in the band one of the stalwarts of Bay Area folk music, Ernie Noyes. With Ernie now doing the guitar chores and Sue Walters on bass, we have a renewed energy that should see us through for a few more years.
Here's some of the names of the bands we've been in: The Boothill Body Snatchers, Round Oak String
Band, Day Late And Dollar Short String Band, The New Blueridge Highballers, Crane Canyon Band, Highballers
From The Planet Hell, The SNAFU Bros, The Para Steves... You get the idea.
I have to credit
my friend John Pedersen, who owns Amazing Grace Music in Marin County, Ca., with teaching me how to
play the fiddle. (An interesting sidebar is the fact that I was able to be in a Hollywood movie because of my fiddle playing. My band "The Round Oak String Band" was in the movie The Howling.) John is also one of the finest stringed instrument repair techs in the
San Francisco Bay Area, as well as an expert Irish bagpipe maker,
and it was my good fortune to be his apprentice for four years. I'm now in Sonoma County, Ca.
as a repair tech and manager of a music store. But I digress...
As my interest in traditional American music grew so did my interest in
celtic music. I played alot of celtic fiddle early on (kevin Burke was a big influence)
but as the years went by I found my real interest was in the songs.
Andy Irvine, Paul Brady, Allan Burke (from Afterhours), Delores Keane, Cathy Jordon
(from Dervish), Stan Rogers, and especially Andy M. Stewart (from Silly Wizard) are just a few
of my influences. I love the way Andy Stewart can write a brand new song and make it sound ancient.
I try to acheive this in my own writing but it aint easy. At this point I'm steadily playing in both
these bands and loving every minute of it even it there aren't very many venues out here.
Hope you'll visit these pages often to see what we're up to.
Thanks, Chris