Digital Interviews: Tell us how you first developed an interest in music.

Mike Marshall: I took lessons from a guy down the street, the typical thing, when I was 10 years old. My mother sent me for guitar lessons. This was back in Pennsylvania. I took lessons for a couple of years. I didn’t really learn much with that teacher, but then moved to Florida and ended up hooking up with a fellow who worked at the local music store. I was really fortunate early on to get hooked up with him, and opened my head up to all kinds of stuff. I learned the theory, and reading music, and the fundamentals, but also he would form a bluegrass band with some of his students -- play by ear, learn to jam and improvise.

DI: Who were some of the bluegrass players you got turned onto?

MM: Well, we had our little bluegrass band, our Winnebago with our name painted on the side, and our polyester, matching, double-knit suits in the Florida sun. We started going around to all these festivals, ‘73 to ’78 -- somewhere in there. It was just a different period. Ricky Skaggs was playing with Ralph Stanley. He was like 17 or something. [laughs] Doc Watson was there with Merle [Watson]; the Earl Scruggs Revue was around; J.D. Crowe’s band was with Tony Rice, this was a year later. Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, just an unbelievable assortment of musicians, you know. I mean, when I think back, that was an amazing period. I just got way into mandolin playing, especially, and the whole bluegrass tradition -- primarily the young modern guys I was real interested in.

DI: How did you hook up with the David Grisman Quintet?

MM: Well, I had met Tony Rice at these festivals, when he was with J.D., and knew his brother -- he was from Florida. They knew that I was playing mandolin and I was okay. I was a big fan of that band. The first record, the first Quintet record, changed the molecular structure of acoustic music in America. [laughs] It just totally blew the top of my head off. I was ripe for it. I was a big fan of Sam Bush and the whole “Newgrass” revival thing, and this was something like that, but even broader, musically. Tony said, “Hey, there’s this kid in Florida. If we need another mandolin player in the band, he’d be great.” I went out to California on a vacation one summer and just called him up. He said, “Yeah, come on over.” We ended up jamming. Here was this punk from Florida who knew all their tunes; I’d already learned all the stuff off the record. David really appreciates when people know his music -- saves a lot of rehearsal time. [laughs]

DI: Tell us about the dynamic you have with Darol Anger.

MM: That was just an immediate connection. It happened the first five minutes that we met. He’d actually learned one of my tunes that I’d sent him, which is a nice way to say hello, too. We ended up becoming neighbors. We lived two houses away from each other all through the period that we were in David’s band. When we weren’t touring with David, we were spending a lot of time on our own music together, almost living together, really. We had a band called Sahib, which was kind of an original music situation. David Balakrishnan was in that band. He actually named it.

DI: How did the Montreux Band get together?

MM: That kind of grew out of Sahib. Darol and Barbara Higbie had made a record for Windham Hill. Will Ackerman, who owned the label at that time, was a big fan of the Grisman Quintet, and a big fan of ours. Then, Darol and I did a record, and then, eventually Montreux. It became a group after we played the Montreux Jazz Festival with Barbara and Michael Manring.

DI: You’ve also had the Modern Mandolin Quartet.

MM: That was also a situation with Windham Hill. Darol and I were both interested in string quartets. No matter what musical situation we’re in, we always are branching off and trying other things outside of that. We always try and keep our hands in a couple of pies at once. He started a jazz string quartet, the Turtle Island String Quartet, and at the same time, I fell in love with the whole mandolin family of instruments. Playing with Grisman, you know, there were things like mandolas and mandocellos around. So, I wanted to do classical music on these instruments. I thought, you could become a string quartet, because the tuning is the same - a mandola is just like a viola, and a mandocello is just like a cello. There were some new builders building instruments at that time, sort of pushing the envelope, in terms of what you could get color-wise out of the instruments, particularly the low end on the mandocello. It was a chance for me, also, to study this music. The French Impressionist stuff -- Bach, Mendelssohn; we would just do anything that we thought might work for those instruments. I had a couple of great arrangers in the group, Paul Binkley and John Imholz. They were the kind of guys who could take an orchestral score and filter it down to a mandolin quartet.

DI: Do you lend some of that classical backbone to a group like Comotion?

MM: I think that, musically, you are what you eat, you know. [laughs] That’s always been my philosophy. I’ve fallen in love with all these different styles of music -- whether it was bluegrass as a teenager, or Dawg music, or bebop, or Brazilian music that I fell in love with.

DI: You traveled to Brazil?

MM: A couple of times. I actually went down with the Turtle Island String Quartet, just as the soundman/tour manager, to come along and have fun on the trip, and went crazy for Brazilian music, particularly Choro music, which is a style that uses mandolin quite a bit. A lot of these melodies were written around that instrument. I couldn’t believe that there was this whole mandolin tradition in Brazil that people up here just don’t even know about. I brought back piles of CDs and a ton of music, and just started learning. For two years, all I did was play Choros. It’s hard to know how that stuff filters back out into the things you do, but I’m sure it does. If I’m writing or arranging, I can’t really think about it consciously, but it must make its way in, somehow. You know, just to have heard those melodies and those harmonies and chord changes and different kinds of rhythmic feels that these styles of music have in them -- I hope it makes it in. But, Comotion is a particular thing, you know. All of the musical situations that I’m involved in are based around the personalities. It’s really about the individual players and what they bring to the thing. It’s never a conscious effort to try and form something into something that the people aren’t, you know? [laughs] Rather, you pick the people based on what they bring. The two drummers are real different. Jeff [Sipe] is coming from a particularly American jazz and rock background -- unbelievable chops, can play anything in any meter. Aaron [Johnston] has a lot of that in his playing, but less of the rock background, more of the Cuban percussion and Brazilian percussion background. We thought they would complement each other beautifully. It was a finger-crossing situation in a way, because they’d never played together. For the first rehearsal, there we are with the two drum sets, and that could have been a nightmare. It’s important that those guys get along. [laughs] It’s been wonderful to see them. They’re just like two brothers, just loving each other’s playing. They have this wonderful relationship.

DI: Is one of the keys simply being friends?

MM: Absolutely. The key to any group is you actually have to like hanging out together. That’s the bottom line. From there, you take what everybody has to offer. [Michael] Kang has this beautiful thing he does with the electric mando, and he has a whole color thing, the distortion -- if you want to go to outer space, I mean, he’s right there. Darol’s fiddle playing is remarkable. And Paul [McCandless] -- I mean, I was a fan of Oregon. In 1975, I was buying those records, and got to see him play at the Music Hall the first year I moved to California. I just can’t believe I get to stand next to the guy every night, really. He’s one of the heaviest cats in music today, and he’s just remarkable. I’m finding myself being more of the guitar player and “accordo” guy in this situation. There’s three other melody players.

DI: It’s refreshing to see a musician who’s played with a lot of people still be excited by playing with new people.

MM: That’s the key. The more I do this, it’s sort of getting broader and broader. The last few years have been unbelievable. It’s not like I’m in “a” band, but I’ve done stuff with Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck -- we did a trio thing. Stuff with Josh Bell and Sam Bush, which is a whole other trip. [laughs]

DI: What are you looking forward to in the future?

MM: Edgar and I are doing some duo shows together, just the two of us. That’s really exciting, because that represents this whole other side of my musicality. It’s all about whispering at each other. We play acoustically in these little churches and things, so dynamically, it’s a whole other spectrum. I’m playing a lot more mandolin in that thing, and mandocello, and switching around. Musically, we can go to a lot of places. We can play a Bach duet. We can play some Brazilian stuff, or some original music. It’s very challenging, technically, usually -- there’s stuff that’s impossible to play, but we try to get through.

DI: We like to ask everybody what words of advice they would give to a young musician.

MM: Well, there’s the obvious stuff of “just follow your heart.” You know, just do what you truly believe in musically, whether there’s a bin for it in the music store, or a record company that exists that would put it out, or even a bunch of musicians who do it. None of that stuff really matters. I think it’s the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome in music; to me, the music comes first, the radio format comes later, and the record companies come later still. This is important to remember, because I think the thing gets turned on its head often, and people try to play music that will fit into a format. So, I’m a real strong believer in that. On top of that, I’m a strong believer in studying music. That can’t be stressed enough. There are places to study classical music, obviously, if you come through that tradition. You grow up, there’s repertoire, there’s schools, there’s teachers -- and now, in the last 10 years, there’s ways to study jazz. It’s available now in universities. But all of this other music that we’re playing that fits in the cracks, there’s no real place to learn it. That’s kind of a shame. It’s sort of catch-as-catch-can for a lot of young kids. You learn it off records, you hang out. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you live in a town where there’s a great player, but there’s only a few people doing this. I look forward to the day when it can be studied a little more systematically, with a real focus. But, I say, study before you go form a band and make a record and go touring. I see a lot of that, where, you know, you get done with college and it’s time to go on the road. You’re either going to have to go on the road, or you’re going to have to get a real job. It’s kind of a shame, because a lot of people aren’t ready. They don’t really have the skills yet. It would be nice to just bring something there. That’s one thing that the classical and the jazz world had. You just don’t get in the club without a certain level of chops. You’re not going to get the gigs. The music business is changing so fast, that it’s actually kind of an exciting time. We get to be really creative now in how the people can find out about this music. It’s nice to see the big companies confused and coming apart at the seams around the whole thing. To me, that’s a real “hats off” to the fact that the artists should own the music. That’s where it should live. That’s where it’s born and that’s where it should stay.