Fiddle | Grant Flick | Intermediate | Period 2 | Week 2 (July 14-19, 2024)
This course will be centered around playing music with people in real time. We’ll learn some tunes, attempt to play them with each other, explore strategies for both lead and backup in a jam or ensemble setting, etc. Each day will be a little different with various emphases including but not limited to improvisation, comping, playing with other fiddlers, listening, etc. As always, student interest and needs will steer the course in directions that best fit said interests and needs!
About the Instructor
Grant Flick is a performer, recording artist, composer, and educator currently based in Ann Arbor, MI. He plays many instruments including violin, mandolin, tenor guitar, nyckelharpa, tenor banjo, and viola. Primarily, his interests are new acoustic music, jazz manouche, jazz/swing, bluegrass, and American old-
time. His current original music projects, Westbound Situation, Warren & Flick, and Hannah O’Brien and Grant Flick, explore the fusion of chamber music with the influences listed above. In these groups, he writes pieces influenced from many styles that feature the collective spontaneity and imagination of the fellow improvisatory musicians with whom he collaborates. Examples of his writing can be heard on “Accord” (Westbound Situation), “Tomorrow Worries About Itself” (Grant Flick), “Windward” (Hannah O’Brien and Grant Flick), and “Waxwing” (Warren & Flick). Grant has received numerous music awards including the 2013 Daniel Pearl Memorial Violin. He was a finalist in the 2015 Walnut Valley Festival Fiddle Competition in Winfield, Kansas, as well as the 2017 Freshgrass Fiddle Competition in North Adams, Massachusetts. Additionally, several competitive collegiate awards and grants for improvisation, acoustic chamber music inventiveness, and music education have been presented to his original groups
in the past few years. Grant has been selected as a two-time participant (2015 and 2016) of the Acoustic Music Seminar held at the Savannah Music Festival in Savannah, Georgia. He has taught workshops at numerous camps throughout America including Augusta Bluegrass Week, Charm City Django Fest, the
Tenor Guitar Gathering, and River of the West Mandolin Camp. Grant also tours and performs regularly and has played at many music festivals including Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, ROMP Fest, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and the Savannah Music Festival. Frank Vignola, Mike Marshall, Julian Lage, and Darol Anger are just some of the notable musicians with whom Grant has appeared on stage. Grant recently completed a Master’s degree at University of Michigan in Improvisation.