Beats and Jams
Tracy Silverman feat. Toby Beats

Album Notes:

I hope that people will listen to this record as if they’ve never heard a violin before. No expectations. No preconceptions of what it’s supposed to sound like. No baggage.

I recognize that I had the good fortune and opportunity to be prepared from a young age to get into Juilliard. And I also recognize that there are a hell of a lot of accomplished and really creative musicians who never set foot in a conservatory. Many of the greatest musical achievements of the 20th century come not from trained composers but from songwriters and popular musicians.

String playing divorced itself from popular music about 100 years ago at the dawn of the jazz era. Strings became identified primarily with European refinement and increasingly antiquated styles and lost touch with its vernacular roots. I deeply love classical music, but it disturbs me that strings have become a symbol of class division. I believe it’s time that string playing re-entered the popular mainstream that reaches all people, not just those fortunate enough to afford things like symphony tickets. If strings don’t evolve, they will become extinct.

I hope that people will listen who never have heard a violin before. I hope to create music that will make kids ask their parents to get them an electric violin the way rock made kids ask their parents to get them a guitar. I hope to clear a rough path for some of those kids to take string playing deeper into the popular musical culture than I have—kids whose ears are uncolored by the preconceptions of what strings sound like in conservatories and instead are tuned into what they could sound like on a record.

Every track on this album is a collaboration with a young beat producer out of Nashville, TN named Toby Beats who has a small bedroom studio just down the hall from my home studio. So, I poked my head in there one day and said, “Enough with the video games. Finish your homework.” And he said, “Can I just finish this beat first?” I figured that was a segment of some racing game, like a heat. Turns out he’d amassed quite a collection of beats using some free software he found online. He kept asking for this software called Fruity Loops, so for Christmas I got it for him, along with a couple of decent speakers.

I started listening to the 300 or so beats he’d come up with. I didn’t know my boom bap from my trap, but what caught my ear was the experimental spirit of it. I didn’t end up going with some of the crazier stuff, but I loved the avant garde approach, even if he was just trying out techniques that he’d picked up from YouTube tutorials.

The inspirations that originally drove me beyond classical music were mostly rock and roll and jazz, but these very contemporary sounds and grooves seemed to free me from my past. No preconceptions or expectations. No one I was trying to sound like. Just playing from my heart as if I had never heard a violin before.

Nashville, TN, June 2020