Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer

One of the features of life in Maryland that I enjoy is my proximity to large urban centers in which fascinating musical acts perform frequently. Whereas in Mississippi I was ecstatic if once a year an act I enjoyed made it to Jackson, in Washington D.C. there are more exciting concerts than I have time and money to attend.

I recently had the privilege of seeing Chris Thile (formerly of Nickel Creek) and Edgar Meyer (the undisputed world's greatest virtuoso on upright or "double" bass). This was possibly the most amazing musical performance I have ever seen, and I decided afterward that I wanted to try to capture in written words what I experienced at the Center for the Arts of George Mason University. Here is the "concert review" I came up with:

When Chris Thile straps on a mandolin, several things tend to happen: Jaws drop, infants cease their crying, mountains crumble and players of acoustic instruments feel at once speechlessly awed and painfully inadequate. Given my prior experiences at Nickel Creek concerts, I expected to see a similar phenomenon when I went to see Thile perform with renowned double bassist Edgar Meyer in one of a short series of nine concerts. Fortunately, my expectations proved to be naïve.

Allow me to explain. Before the show, I was thinking in terms of mathematical addition. I knew from word-of-mouth that Meyer is to the bass roughly what Chris is to the mandolin (its daddy). So I was thinking: take Chris Thile, the mandolin prodigy, and add something similar to him, Edgar Meyer the bass virtuoso. One plus one equals two. My math was simple, but it was wrong.

The concert began quickly when Thile in his gray suit and Meyer in his black suspenders and yellow necktie jaunted happily onto the stage. As they played through the first piece, I was duly awed, but not too surprised. Thile bobbed around like a small tree in hurricane force winds, cradling his mandolin, while Meyer more or less stood there and accompanied the mandolin. The music was impressive and technically faultless but it remained within the horizon of my expectations.

It was in the second song that I began to realize the criminal inadequacy of my earlier mental math. Thile began playing a brisk rendition of Bridal Veil Falls (from his Not All Who Wander Are Lost album on which Meyer is a guest), at first carrying the melody on mandolin. But when Thile stopped playing the melody and Meyer picked it up on bass, I began to worry. “No, that’s not going to work,” I thought. “That melody was written for the tiny scale of a mandolin and cannot possibly be played on a double bass. The scale is too long.”

This mounting tension in my mind promptly shattered as Meyer not only performed the melody with ease, but also began moving his body around the bass in a most unusual manner. It was as if he was dancing with it, or perhaps making love to this large wooden projector of sound. He reached for notes in the range of a violin and slid up and down that 41-inch scale as if the bass and bow were extensions of his body. It was music to the eyes as much as to the ears.

I understand now what I could not have known before: what Edgar Meyer does with a bow and his fretless double bass cannot really be compared to what anyone does with any other physical object. It is a phenomenon all its own. My mental formula was wrong. This was not addition; it was exponential explosion. Chris Thile plus Edgar Meyer equals something much larger and more magical than merely the sum of their parts. Their collaboration is like a musical Titanic setting sail—it is an expansion of what was previously thought possible. Let the music world hope that this too brief Thile/Meyer tour cultivates a long and consistent musical friendship.