After five years playing for Sedona at all the usual venues and some very unexpected ones as well, Sedona violinist Tyler Carson is gearing up for a special anniversary performance at the Posse Grounds Pavilion at the Barbara Antonsen Memorial Park on Tuesday, June 11, following on to his ongoing concert show at the park every week since September and his weekend performances at the Sedona Airport Lookout.
At his show on Thursday, May 30, at the Posse Grounds Hub, Carson observed that he has spent the last few years refining his act to better express his own voice spontaneously while also sharing classic tunes that listeners love. The process has been physical as well as artistic; Carson developed spasmodic dystonia in his early 20s that resulted in the loss of his singing voice, which he has slowly been working — with success — to recover, a process that has also affected how he plays the violin by enabling him to develop greater control over and understanding of his nervous system.
Carson opened the May 30 show with an audience favorite, his variations on themes from “Pirates of the Caribbean.” He began by building layers of sound with his looping pedals and Stroh violin, an antique instrument originally designed for recording, creating a haunting Highland feel. The Stroh has a great capacity to give the impression that the sound it produces is coming from a far distance, which seems to increase the space around the audience in performance and the depth of the performance itself. By layering the standard violin with the Stroh, Carson was able to create a mandolin-like effect as he worked gradually, minimalistically, into the main musical ideas of the films with smooth transitions and effective pizzicato.
The result of his efforts wasn’t merely a fun performance that could get listeners riled up, it was also a musical accomplishment far more interesting than the original material. “Pirates” composer Hans Zimmer, though possessed of a great melodic gift, cannot orchestrate to save his life — Carson can. Zimmer wrote a few melodies, but he did not write the concerto that could have been wrapped around them. Carson, in a sense, has. He showed how the ideas with which he began can be woven into an exciting and beautiful whole in which strings replace and surpass synthesizers, and when he finally launched into the main theme, it pulled his audience away with them like no electronic music can.
Appropriately, Carson followed the “Pirates” material with a composition of his own, “The Leap” from his album “Time and Tide.” Played as a “straight” violin work without the special effects of the Stroh, this was the most string quartet-like piece of the evening, intimate and elegant, yet beachy. The looping added a distinctly tropical feel. It offered quite the combination of moods: Relaxation on the playa, and yet at the same time we’re obviously about to go out and loot the British fleet. Dark rum floater, please. Carson’s background in Irish fiddle was especially on display here with blistering bowing and fingering.
From the shores of the Caribbean Carson shifted to contemporary pop for his next medley, a combination of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” and “A Whole New World” from the Disney film “Aladdin,” using the Stroh to produce silvery, yearning tones over the sweeter voice of the standard instrument behind it. By looping the two, he was in effect able to have a conversation with himself in two parts — which expanded to three when he kicked in another layer of harmonies and an additional voice joined the conversation. The initial yearning yielded to a wistful but optimistic and warm finish. The subsequent “Work In Wonder,” another of Carson’s own compositions, began with an intimate pizzicato, one of his signature techniques, before exhibiting a great degree of complexity and contrast between the layers.
“The thing that I always loved about fiddle music, unlike playing with the symphony and the classical stuff, was that you get to do what you want,” Carson said, and forthwith launched into the Glasgow Reel, accompanied by a poem about separation from one’s island home. A shrill hint of banshee was followed by hard, chiseling chords, and when Carson picked up the Stroh, the distances opened up again, taking his hearers on a mad rush over mist-shrouded hills before he returned to the regular violin for a touching, emotive passage. He ended the song with more charging chords, though, and left the audience fired up.
“I lost my voice and became a rock ’n’ roll fiddle player,” Carson commented in response to the cheers.
Next, Carson began a sweet and very largo “Amazing Grace” with bluegrass influence that, in a novel stylistic choice, he shaded into “House of the Rising Sun” before returning to the original tune for a reprise all too brief. He used his looping effects especially well in the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watch Tower” that followed, to which he added a subtle, loving plucking and cascades of lyrical glissandos. For the big finish, he took the Stroh all the way to the upper end of its range, flogging its steel frame until the audience screamed.
But what of the lions? One of Carson’s signature medleys at his airport shows is his combination of The Tokens’ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and Elton John’s “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” and he did not disappoint the audience. Quietly strumming his fiddle like a guitar at first, he was able to create the whole atmospheric feel of “The Lion Sleeps” with ease, and with exuberant, immediate joy through his delicious variations, sliding easily across the decades that separated the two works as he moved between them. The former tune is also a song that, in the current state of Sedona, makes a significant sociopolitical statement, especially when the audience began to sing along: “In the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight …” At the end, Carson even made the Stroh somehow honk like a tuba — an aural representation of a bigger lion to frighten off the marauder who threatens the peaceful village.
From the upbeat liveliness of the lions, Carson moved to the shadowy drama of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” first building up a series of deep, long, oceanic pulses, then laying shrill high notes atop them and woodsy color from the instrument’s middle register, setting the scene. Singing the lyrics as he played, he made his instrument into a disturbing, detailed accompaniment to the story, evoking an ominous night — and it was into this mood that he again atypically decided to drop a set of variations on “Over the Rainbow,” their tonal color like topaz. These echoed and transformed into jamming chords, with Carson’s fingering like the blows of daggers as he rocked out to finish the show
