Casey Murray is a cellist who fiddles on the cello! They also play fiddle, banjo, guitar, and mandolin. They teach and perform in the Boston area with the band Corner House, play contra dances, and collaborate with a wide range of folk and trad musicians. Hear how the cello, an unusual instrument in folk music, became Casey's voice and passion and what it was like to study folk music at the Berklee School of Music.
Casey's website
Casey's instagram
Album After the Sky Weeps
The tune this week is Caribou Party, a tune by Casey Murray from their album After the Sky Weeps with Molly Tucker.
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Casey Murray is a cellist who fiddles on the cello! They also play fiddle, banjo, guitar, and mandolin. They teach and perform in the Boston area with the band Corner House, play contra dances, and collaborate with a wide range of folk and trad musicians. Hear how the cello, an unusual instrument in folk music, became Casey's voice and passion and what it was like to study folk music at the Berklee School of Music.
Casey's website
Casey's instagram
Album After the Sky Weeps
The tune this week is Caribou Party, a tune by Casey Murray from their album After the Sky Weeps with Molly Tucker.
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Welcome to the Fiddles Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Caribou Party from the album After the Sky Weeps from Casey Murray and Molly Tucker. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to the cellist and folk musician, Casey Murray. Casey Murray fiddles on the cello. Very exciting, our first guest to do this. Casey plays the cello. They also play guitar, mandolin, banjo, probably other instruments too. They write tunes and teach and perform in the Boston area and far beyond that. They went to the Berkelee School of Music where you can study cello and American roots music. We'll be hearing more about that and they perform with Molly Tucker and with Corner House, Calico. Lots of other bands I won't name them all. So, Casey, welcome. It's really great to have you here. Thanks for having me.
Meg Wobus Beller:I guess we'll start with a little bit about your journey just getting into music. All cards on the table. I know a little bit of this story because Casey and I go way back. How did you first get introduced to kind of string instruments and music when you were little?
Casey Murray:that was an impetus of my own. It kind of mostly sprung from my dad. Way back when I was, I think, probably about three, going on four, our local town had, I think, an advertisement column called the Penny Saver and there was an ad for introductory pre-twinkle violin classes to do parent-child kind of thing. And my dad signed us up and we did 10 weeks of classes together learning the open strings, how to hold a box cracker, jack violin with a little dowel stick. So that was my first instance of trying an instrument.
Meg Wobus Beller:So that was the Suzuki method. Yeah, you're not the only one we've talked to who started that way. What about after that?
Casey Murray:After that it kind of felt like a pretty natural progression of I really enjoyed it. It didn't feel like anything that I had to crumble about practicing or going to lessons or it was something that was enjoyable and I looked forward to doing whenever it was time to do it. So I think it was kind of almost like a positive snowball effect of rolling with going through the Suzuki method on violin and going to group classes and doing improv and fiddle classes and seeing different people in different ages of their own musical journeys, seeing other instruments and learning about how other instruments worked and being curious about them myself. The school of where we were at at the time kind of had this environment of curiosity and I think I was just very curious musically and I think that was a very positive setting for me to get my first bit of footing with music.
Meg Wobus Beller:Yeah, that curiosity makes sense, considering how many instruments and kind of styles you've explored since then. When I knew you back at the Kanack School, you were playing violin, like you're describing, but at some point you switched to cello. Mm-hmm, what was that?
Casey Murray:I think I was about six or seven, my younger brother played the cello and I was always mildly jealous about the fact that he could sit and play and also had a C string.
Meg Wobus Beller:It's always the sitting.
Casey Murray:I know yeah.
Meg Wobus Beller:Like relax.
Casey Murray:I pitched this idea to my parents of playing the cello and they were pretty hesitant about well, what about the violin? You've worked so hard, we don't want to put all of those years of practice to the side. So I was like well, I will make a deal, I'll practice both and work equally as hard at both, if I can start cell lessons. So I did that for about six years and then eventually decided that playing the violin was not exactly the thing I wanted to do long term. So let that one fall to the side a little bit.
Meg Wobus Beller:Do you still have a fiddle?
Casey Murray:I do Yep.
Meg Wobus Beller:I've seen you play it, so a lot of people might not be familiar with cello as an instrument in folk music. So you said you were doing improv and fiddle already in the school where you were learning. Did you dive into that with cello right away also?
Casey Murray:Yeah, I think the part of learning to play the cello in that kind of context was knowing the comfort I had on the fiddle with being able to fiddle and improvise and things like that. I kind of gave the cello another lens that felt more approachable and that it was okay to explore and kind of figure out what it was the sound I was looking for to come from the cello. So it didn't feel like a prescribed classical Suzuki square feeling of cello sound. I kind of had a way of exploring what I wanted the cello to sound like.
Meg Wobus Beller:So that curiosity what did cellos do when they play fiddle tunes in folk music? Do you play the tune? How does it fit on there? And if not, what else do you do?
Casey Murray:There are so many things you can do with the cello.
Casey Murray:Mostly a lot of melodies unfortunately don't fit super well on the cello.
Casey Murray:The lack of an E string makes that a little bit tricky, but there's some melodies that sit really nicely on the cello and switching octaves also works Some B parts or A parts depending on the tune. Swapping the octave can not be a nice arrangement choice too, even though we have to do it out of necessity and something that I love doing with the cellos. Backing up the tune as a guitarist might. There isn't like a ton of, I guess, background or history of cello and folk music. So my approach to what figuring out what to do with the fiddle tune on the cello is listening to a lot of what a guitar might do, or a bazookie, sometimes even a mandolin, and also listening to percussionists or drummers, kind of figuring out how they're supporting melodic ideas and figuring out how I can incorporate those sounds onto the cello to really as a backup player or not at all trying to distract or take away from a melody, but we're trying to uplift it and support it and highlight moments in them through how we're backing it up.
Meg Wobus Beller:Thank you for that. It's really interesting to think about listening to how other instruments are accompanying and then how you can do that with the instrument you have. But I know you also play some of those other instruments. When did you feel like I turned around and all of a sudden played a bunch of things, whereas before I only knew you as a fiddle and cello player, and did you get into the banjo and guitar and those other?
Casey Murray:guitar was, I think, something more. In high school I was starting to look at figuring out a way to play for a contra dance a little bit more and I started playing some cello for some dances and then soon very quickly figured out how physically exhausting it is to play for a contra dance, backing it up completely on the cello. There are thick strings and you can really only play two of them at the same time and it's quite physically taxing. So I was trying to find a way to approach playing for dance music that I wouldn't end the night in pain or exhausted completely. So I got my first little dinky e-bay guitar to start teaching myself a little bit on, just getting familiar with how the bottom two strings work because that's usually what I'm working with on the cello when I'm backing up a fiddle tune and kind of started there on the guitar. The banjo came a bit later. I started playing the banjo more seriously in college. I started taking lessons with Bruce Molsky and learning some old-time clawhammer banjo.
Meg Wobus Beller:You had such a unique college experience. I don't think I went to college in 1999, and Berkeley was just jazz. I think they hadn't started their roots music. It's so amazing to have that available now. How did you decide I mean such a commitment to spend your college years diving so deeply into the world of folk music? How did you decide to do that? And I don't know Then, what was it like? Was it what you expected?
Casey Murray:Yeah, I was applying to college was kind of a I didn't.
Casey Murray:It wasn't quite necessarily kicking and screaming because I didn't want to go, it was more of a concession to my parents who were like wondering if it was possible to have a successful music career without going to college. So I reached out to a couple mentors and got some opinions and advice. And at the time high school Casey was a little bit kind of shooting for the stars and figuring out what it is I wanted a little bit. So I sent an email to Natalie Haas asking for some advice on what she would recommend someone in my position who was gigging already, teaching a little bit already, and what kind of my options were looking forward to a career in music. And she responded and that was quite over the moon at the time, so exciting. And she she gave me some details on the Berklee American Roots Music Program. I decided to go for it. Berkelee was the only place I applied. I figured if there was one school that worked for me, this was probably it, and if I didn't get in, that's fine too. Hmm.
Casey Murray:So my Berkelee, my Berkelee time was quite special. I feel like I learned a lot and grew a lot as a as a cellist and a musician. I Got to study with a lot of cool people. I was quite likely in the fact that Natalie was teaching at Berkelee the exact four years I was there, so I got to study with her the whole time, which was quite special, getting to study from musicians who weren't chalice too. And that's something that I really valued a lot at Berkelee was I had my weekly lessons with Natalie, but I could also have extra lessons with mandolin players, harpists, banjo players, little players, things like that. So it's very, very apt to the kind of music learning that I like to do. Which was curious about how a harpist might play a tuner, backup a tune and Incorporate their melodic sense of chords to back in fiddle tune and things like that.
Meg Wobus Beller:Yeah, so many ways to satisfy that curiosity we were talking about when you're going to college for a fiddling. Is it like you have a class in like old time from the Appalachian Mountains and then a class in like Irish from Donegal, like You're just learning all the things, or I'm just so curious because I never got to do it?
Casey Murray:Yeah, I think it varied from. It was always so dependent on what, like my schedule, was that semester. There is some, depending on the teachers. So I think my first year I did Greg List's 21st century string band, which was essentially an ensemble of a bunch of people who learned punch brother tunes or crooked still tunes and figured out how to incorporate those tunes from those recordings to the instrumentation of the ensemble. That was that class. And then the next semester I was in Celtic ensemble. We learned a bunch of Celtic tunes. And then there's old-time ensemble and what else was there? There is contemporary string quartet where we dove into like some Turtle Island string quartet stuff, and another 21st century string band that kind of more focused on playing things like Mike Marshall and Dawg and Daryl Anger and stuff like that. So there's kind of a whole world of things and that's just like the folk music side of it that doesn't even dive into the world, music from Greece or India or anything like that.
Meg Wobus Beller:Wow, casey, I was up to correct the transcription afterwards and there's gonna be so many names for me to look up the spelling off. Okay, so I know you. You write tunes, you compose tunes. The first tunes of yours that I heard were part of your project with your partner, Molly. The album that we have a tune from today, it gets called After the Sky Weeps. I'm curious when you started writing tunes and what the process was Creating the music for that album, which is so beautiful.
Casey Murray:Yeah, my tune writing, I think, started probably around high school. A lot of it I did mostly with Daphne Pickins. We kind of collaborated a lot and it happened mostly when I was learning to play the guitar. And this is kind of has been my approach to new instruments, is kind of my way of figuring out how an instrument works is writing on it, and I started with like writing chord progressions on the guitar and bring them to Daphne, just playing them a bunch, and she'd improvise and write a tune over it and that was kind of how that would start. Then that kind of continued playing cello, starting to play more melody on it, figuring out how the melodic fingerings and things worked on the cello and writing tunes. That way I wrote. I wrote a lot of banjo tunes.
Casey Murray:In college. I learned a new tuning from Bruce and trying to have to figure out where all the chords and intervals landed and I Would write a tune in that tuning just to figure out how it worked. So a lot of the tunes that Molly and I wrote for that record stem from a lot of tunes that I wrote as, I guess, homework assignments in college. Her tune writing also came from that same time. It was kind of early pandemic. We had a lot of free time and Writing tunes was the way we spent those, those spare nights without social plans.
Meg Wobus Beller:Fair enough. You know that's so funny. Noah says that he taught himself fiddle just by writing tunes. He said he'd get frustrated trying to learn a tune. He just write his own. I've been trying to learn the concertina and so I've never learned an instrument by trying to write tunes on it. But after hearing Noah say that and, honestly, after hearing you talk about it today, I've been trying it out. It's a pretty cool way to get to know an instrument, just with that curious bend to it, trying to find out more, like really getting to know it, like you might get to know a person asking it. So you wrote the music in college and, like you said at the beginning of lockdown, where did you guys record that album?
Casey Murray:We recorded it in some of the Massachusetts because it was kind of like deep pandemic we were trying to figure out we have all this time it seems like it could be possible to have this happen, but we weren't really quite sure how. So we kind of started throwing things at the ball and seeing what stuck and we reached out to Jenna Moynihan about producing it. She had never produced an album before, so we were her first album production project. She had told us that Yann Falquet was starting to create this home studio kind of thing and he had recorded some stuff for Hanneke Castle during lockdown and it seemed like the easiest solution that was right around the corner and make a little bubble and not have to go anywhere. And it was cold, cozy January and we could just pull up for a weekend track a record.
Meg Wobus Beller:Yeah, oh, it's a beautiful record, but where can people find it online if they want to check it out?
Casey Murray:You can buy it from us directly on Bandcamp. It's also on all the streaming services Spotify, apple Music, tidal, et cetera.
Meg Wobus Beller:So when you came to Baltimore I heard you play with a different band, with the band Corner House, at a house concert at Brad Kolodner's. It was so fun and I think you're on the road a lot with Corner House. Can you tell us about that band?
Casey Murray:Yeah, Corner House is a super fun project and I really enjoy playing with this band because it feels like it's such a wild melting pot of musicians. I haven't found another band that sounds quite like us, I think, because of the individuality of each person is so different. It's quite fun to explore the possibilities of that band, but they started out as a trio without me way back in 2017. And they went on tour in Scotland and realized that they wanted to chill us in the band full time and asked me to join. So we started digging around Boston a little bit, getting our footing, building some material together. Yeah, really cool to just grow musically together. My background stems from Celtic and contra dance music and Louise, our fiddler, is from Scotland, so she has very Scottish fiddle roots. And then Ethan and Ethan they're two of them have both like a more of an old-time bluegrass background and a little bit of jazz. So it's kind of cool to melt all of those things together and have this one crazy old-time bluegrass Celtic sound.
Meg Wobus Beller:It's a really unique sound. Any fun things you've guys have been up to lately.
Casey Murray:Recently we've been doing a lot of touring around the Northeast playing for some festivals. We had a really fun time at the Rochester Jazz Festival this past year Our first time we played two back-to-back completely sold-out shows. It was really. We haven't played to a room that full and not excited before. It was quite fun for us to be a part of.
Meg Wobus Beller:Casey, we're going to talk about ways that people can connect to you, but you teach in the Boston area, is that right? Yeah, you teach online also A little bit, yeah.
Casey Murray:Kind of have a few different ways in which I teach. I teach at a community music school in Wayland, teach a little bit at home and some on Zoom and if people want to find out more, how can they get in touch with you?
Meg Wobus Beller:Best way is through my website Caseymurraymusic.
Casey Murray:My email is also My Caseymurraymusic. gmail. com email is at gmailcom to out.
Meg Wobus Beller:Cool. Well, so everyone definitely check out Corner House and look for Casey's album with Molly. Our tune for today is called Caribou Party and we're going to hear Casey play it on the cello from the album After the Sky Weeps. This is I guess I quizzed Casey before we started it's Crooked Old Time Tune in C Minor. Is it your tune or is it traditional? Can you tell us about this tune?
Casey Murray:Yeah, it's one of mine. My last spring college, where everything went to Zoom, I was in a class called. It was an ensemble tune writing, and every week everybody wrote a tune. We played through everybody's tune. We all had so much fun during the semester and after we all graduated we decided to keep doing it throughout the summer. So we kept meeting every couple weeks on Zoom and sharing tunes through writing. This is, you know, deep summer 2020. This was a tune. Usually we had a prompt. I don't think I had a prompt for this tune, but I had never written a minor banjo tune before, so I decided to give it a go and this is the tune that fell out, and it also sits nicely on the cello because of the nice low C string the tune name came from, I think I was trying to remember or figure out what you refer to as a group of plural caribou, and so I came up with just probably just called the caribou party.
Meg Wobus Beller:I love that. Well, Casey Murray, thank you so much for joining us today.
Casey Murray:Thanks for having me.
Meg Wobus Beller:It's been quite a pleasure. Be sure to look at Casey's website, caseymurraymusic. com. Look Casey up on Instagram, where their kind of latest updates will be. I enjoy the corner house Instagram too. Sometimes you get to see the dog. What's your dog's name? Susie? Oh Susie, she's so sweet. I mean I also like seeing your updates. But okay, thank you everyone.