“Celtic Indian” violinist and Cottonwood resident Arvel Bird filled in for fiddler Kate Rose on Tuesday, July 9, at her Wild Irish Fiddle show at Mooney’s Irish Pub. His performance followed his last-minute appearance as the featured performer for the Sedona City Council’s monthly Moment of Art and foreshadowed his return to the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Saturday, July 20, at which he performed his RMS Titanic Memorial Concert.
He was joined by guitarist Armond Ramirez of Flagstaff — “In Ireland, I’m known as O’Ramirez,” the latter clarified — and Karen Reedstrom, of the Cottonwood Community Band, on the bodhran.
One member of the audience, who hailed from south Yorkshire, wanted to know what the difference was between a fiddle and a violin.
“One has strings and one has strands,” Bird joked.
“And which one is that?” the Yorkshireman asked.
“It’s a hybrid,” Bird retorted.
After opening in reverse with “Farewell to Ireland,” Bird moved on to a pub medley he’d picked up at a pub called the Sherlock Holmes, explaining to the audience that a pub medley usually involves playing three songs three times each, followed by downing a pint. He polished off the sleuth with very clean bow work, then declared, “It’s time for me to drink that pint … of water.” More medleys followed.
For “Trip to Sligo,” “A Lark in the Morning” and “Toss the Feathers” — “which you can do after a few pints of Guinness if you’re not careful,” Bird warned — he gave the yearning moorland notes of the opening tune a clear and optimistic twist, while his interpretation of “Feathers” was both highly distinctive and Nashville-infused. Then he turned to Cooley’s Reel, “Drowsy Maggie” and the familiar “Star of Munster.”
“The funny thing is, ‘Drowsy Maggie’ is actually faster than ‘Sleepy Maggie,’” Bird pointed out, referring to another Scottish fiddle tune.
Bird also previewed his upcoming Titanic concert with two numbers from his Titanic album, “Distant Shore,” a piece incorporating the tin whistle and representing the hopes of those who boarded, which suggested a hint of the Greek composer Vangelis, and the Celtic rock-styled “Quest for Discovery,” inspired by Robert Ballard.
“He would have made a great pirate,” Ramirez said of Ballard.
The biggest hits of the evening turned out to be Bird’s rollicking rendition of “Hills of Connemara,” Sean McCarthy’s charming ballad about the efforts of hardworking Irishmen to evade the despised revenue collectors, and “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” a tune composed the morning after by a Metis fiddler in a vein of total non-repentance for the excesses of the previous evening. Bird also gave a beautiful performance of the classic “St. Anne’s Reel,” tweaking a couple of passages to put his own stamp on it.
Arvel Bird’s Background
Trained as a classical violinist, Bird described the move from classical to Celtic style as a “natural gravitation” given the similarity of technique between both styles.
“I started out learning classical music and learning to read, and I studied the violin with teachers through high school, up through college, before I realized, well, I know how to play the violin now; I just don’t know what music was or is, and so I decided to quit taking lessons and quit reading music and just discover music,” Bird said.
“I grew up in a family of four kids. I was the third child. My older brother was playing the accordion, and my older sister was playing piano, and my younger brother was playing piano, and I just became desperate to play something. I thought it was the trumpet I wanted to play, because trumpet’s loud and brassy, and I was a small, shy, quiet boy. But when I went to my mother and told her I wanted to play the trumpet, she frowned and said, ‘Arvel, we have a violin under the bed, you either play that or you don’t play anything. So I reluctantly went to the bedroom and pulled that dusty violin case out from under the bed, and basically I opened my future, because I fell in love with the violin at first sight. It was my grandmother’s violin, it was actually bigger than a full-size violin because the maker was a man with big hands, but I played it anyway and struggled with it and never gave up. My parents eventually got me a smaller violin and a violin teacher.”
While he attended Arizona State University for two years on a violin scholarship, Bird found the experience to be artistically counterproductive. “When I got to college, I had to see the counselor, and I told him about my dream, he said, ‘Yes, well, we don’t want you to play the violin, we want you to become a music teacher,’” Bird remembered. “He said only the top 5% of students can ever go on to become professional violinists, implying that I wasn’t good enough to do that. So I stayed with the music, although I was very discouraged and disappointed.”
He subsequently moved to Illinois to study under the influential violin teacher Paul Rolland, Ph.D., at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“He basically took me apart and put me back together as a violinist from the ground up … until I had that confidence to perform live that was closer to my actual potential, closer to 100% of how well I could actually play,” Bird said. “Before that, I was very intimidated about performing and I could probably only perform to about 50% of my ability.”
After spending 13 years on the road touring, playing from 150 to 175 shows a year, Bird settled in Cottonwood in 2017, where he had been performing annually, in order to start a spiritual healing group.
“It might seem unusual for a musician to become a reverend or a pastor, but it’s really not that unusual,” Bird said. “Most of the major religious movements have been started by musicians, or men and women that play instruments or are artisans.”
Musical Touring
Like all touring musicians these days, he is in the process of rebuilding his touring career following the COVID-19 pandemic response, and is particularly looking forward to getting back to Canada later this year.
“The aboriginals are very big on the fiddle,” Bird told his audience, in contrast to the U.S., where the drum takes pride of place at powwows. He attributed the primacy of the fiddle among Canadian First Nations to the influence of the French.
“They’re more like fiddle festivals,” Bird said of Canadian powwows. “I brought a band with me from the Menomonee Tribe in Wisconsin, and I was the only fiddle from America … It’s quite a spectacle. They all cook in a traditional fashion, on stone and open fires.”
“They still teach their children to practice a traditional way of life up there in the northwest,” Bird continued. “It’s a way of life that really make a person more aware of the resources they’re using.”
Paiute Heritage
His own upbringing, by contrast, did not reflect the Paiute side of his heritage.
“My mother was half-blood Southern Paiute, Shivwits [Band of Paiutes], and she grew up in an era where there was so much prejudice and hardship for Indian people, especially mixed-blood people … that she didn’t really want anything to do with Native American heritage or way of life,” Bird said. “She did eventually later on in life seek to enroll in the tribe, but she was rejected, as I was rejected, because of the inability to prove our direct connection through census rolls and tribal enrollment because my grandmother was adopted out of the tribe by a non-Indian Mormon family.”
Many years later, Bird recalled, his mother watched him play a concert at the site of the Phoenix Indian School, and she “made the remark that it was good to be among her people. I think she finally felt a contentment … most of her life she had denied half of her heritage.”
His own exploration of his Paiute ancestry came about as a result of his seeking a musical alternative to his classical training, a journey he described as both “rediscovery and healing.”
“I used to go in my practice room in Champaign, like I did every morning, and listen for music to come to me,” Bird said. “After a while I got bored and couldn’t hear anything except the traffic outside, so I picked up the violin and I began to play one note, and with the exploration of that one note, eventually a whole concerto came to me, an eight-movement concerto that I later recorded and became known as the ‘Tribal Music Suite: Journey of a Paiute.’ What was interesting about that experiment was that not only did I get the music, but I got a vision of the story that was behind the music, and it was a story of a mixed-blood Paiute child born somewhere around 1820s, 1830s, and how he went on his own hero’s journey … wound up as a man with a moccasin in two worlds.”
As part of his Mooney’s show, Bird played a selection from the final movement of the concerto, which was lively and toe-tapping with a blistering classical-style cadenza. Written for violin, native flute and orchestra, it was Bird’s first foray into fluting.
“I was recording my first ‘Animal Totems’ CD, and I wanted the Native American flute on it, that sound, that flavor,” Bird said. “But in middle Tennessee, I couldn’t find anybody that played Native American flute … So I went to a powwow and bought a Native American flute. Didn’t know anything about it, really, but I could find some notes that that flute played that were in harmony with some of the songs I had recorded earlier, so I put the flute on there myself. Of course then I discovered that that flute was not in tune with any other instrument in the orchestra. A lot of flutes are made so they play their own scale. So I started to upgrade my flutes and find flutes that played in concert pitch, letting the flute teach me how to play it.”
RMS Titanic
The concerto was also how Bird became interested in the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, through a friend of his who was a curator at the Titanic museum in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.
“He was describing the seventh movement of my ‘Tribal Music Suite,’ called ‘Celtic Connection,’ and how that one piece of music represented, for him, the entire saga of the Titanic,” Bird said. Through his show, he intends to “showcase the story, not only the tragic side of the story, but also the heroic side of the story. The people and the crew and the hopes and dreams they shared on this voyage.”
“Grief and sorrow are woven into the fabric of life,” Bird reflected. “In one way or another, we’re all survivors of the unthinkable … We have survived our parents, we have survived our children sometimes … That’s what this concert is about: Helping us heal and find our way back to joy.”
