COOKEVILLE, Tenn. (April 5, 2004) – Grammy award-winning and world-renowned composer, violinist and fiddler Mark O’Connor will be “jazzing things up” at Tennessee Tech University next week.

That’s because he and his Hot Swing Trio are scheduled to perform in the Wattenbarger Auditorium of the Bryan Fine Arts Building at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, April 13. A Center Stage event, the show is free and open to the public.

Described by the St. Petersburg Times as “one of the most glorious sounds found in jazz,” the Hot Swing Trio matches violinist O’Connor with bassist Jon Burr and guitar virtuoso Frank Vignola, who together perform both jazz standards and new compositions.

The Chicago Tribune called the group’s 2001 recording “one of the finest discs of O’Connor’s career and one of the greatest jazz violin albums ever.”

With a diverse repertoire and career, O’Connor is often recognized as one of the most gifted contemporary American composers and one of the brightest musical talents of his generation.

The New York Times describes him as “the only musician today who can reach so deeply first into the refined, then the vernacular, giving his listeners a complex, sophisticated piece of early-21st century classical music and then knocking them dead with the brown-dirt whine of a Texas fiddle.”

His first recording for the Sony Classical label — the Appalachia Waltz collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and double bassist Edgar Meyer — gained him worldwide recognition as a leading proponent of a new American musical idiom, and the trio’s follow-up release, Appalachian Journey, won a Grammy Award in 2001.

O’Connor has performed with such prominent ensembles as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra and has made appearances at the White House, Presidential Inauguration Celebration and Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Games.

He has been featured on major network television shows — including “CBS Sunday Morning,” PBS’s “Great Performances,” “The Kennedy Center Honors” and CBS’s American celebration of Israel’s 50th anniversary — and has contributed to the soundtracks of the six-part PBS documentary Liberty! about the American Revolution, the Civil War epic movie Gods and Generals and the Oscar-nominated score of The Patriot.

O’Connor is founder of the internationally recognized Mark O’Connor Fiddle Camp near Nashville and Mark O’Connor Strings Conference near San Diego.

--Tracey LeFevre
This information posted 7 April 2004