First-Year Releases Bluegrass CD

After playing fiddle for the past nine years, Gabriel J. Jostrom '04 has released his first bluegrass CD this month--weaving various styles from Celtic and old-time fiddling to Texas contest tunes.

Jostrom--who has also competed in fiddle competitions--recorded the CD with a small Montana record label, Lost Dog Productions.

Jostrom comes from Kalispell, Mont., an idyllic ski-resort town only half an hour from Glacier National Park. The small town of 12,000 people has little discernable music scene.

Gabe was entranced by fiddling from an early age.

"I'd listen to old Vassar Clements records, and I just wanted to play the fiddle," he says.

"I'd play his 33 rpm records at the 45 speed, so that all the fast songs would be really fast," he says.

At the age of nine, Jostrom picked up a fiddle of his own. Within months, he was performing with a local 10-piece band, the Flathead Junior Fiddlers, and performing in the junior-junior division of fiddling contests.

Over the years, Jostrom continued to build a resume in other music styles. In high school, he played for local funk rock and blue-grass bands.

In his stint as the fiddler for Frank O'Brian's Spare Change Ensemble, he got the opportunity to perform for an audience of about 600 people at the Folk Life festival in Seattle this past Memorial Day weekend.

In high school, Jostrom branched out to classical music as well by joining his school's orchestra. This was not a painless introduction to classical music.

"I had never learned to read music, so I would try and figure out the songs by ear," he says. "It didn't work so well. Often times, I would end up playing my own part."

But as a fiddler, Jostrom had not taken the typical course to learning his instrument. He would pick up most music by ear, listening to both records and fiddle players he met.

The competitions offered some of the best opportunities to learn new music, he says. The fiddling contest scene is very popular in mid-west. "If I saw somebody playing a song that I liked, I would just go up to them and ask them to show it to me," he says.

The biggest of the contests--the annual weeklong National Old Time Fiddlers' Contest--allowed Jostrom to learn from the professionals.

At the festival, 20,000 spectators converge on Weezer, Idaho. During the day, fiddlers are graded based on their performance of strictly ordered contest tunes. But, it is after the sun sets that the fun begins, Jostrom says.

"There is a field full of campers and tents. At night, it turns into the biggest jam session. Everybody breaks out their instruments and plays late into the evening," he says.

On campus, Jostrom is continuing to play classical music as a member of the pops orchestra.

But he says he is making sure that he still gets the opportunity to play the improvisational rock and jazz that he enjoys. He recently practiced with Second Act, a Harvard student rock band, and plans to continue playing with the band in the future.