JAMMING WITH JJ
Fiddler finds new audience online
Q What does your life look like right now because of COVID-19?
A It's the preparation for adapting to the new normal, you could say. It's become different — it was very different when things first shut down — but now I've found a little bit of a groove. It's not totally the same as it was before
... now it's mostly online. So for me, now, a lot of the work is prep for the streaming jams I do, some of the teaching stuff I do online.
Q Tell me a little about your history with playing the fiddle. A I've been fiddling since I was seven. I played music in a family band with my two sisters. We're talking back in the '80s, when every little town had a sports day and there used to be fiddle competitions all over. We'd enter fiddle contests at sports days ... that was kind of my upbringing with the fiddle.
I started by ear. There was nobody around, really, giving fiddle or violin lessons where I grew up. People would give me tips and tricks, but I'd put in a cassette of fiddle players and try to mimic those tunes ... I've had these little peaks and crests of learning, and some lucky breaks, too. Probably the biggest thing in my career was I got hired to teach at Emma Lake Fiddle Camp. That was run by the Saskatchewan Cultural Exchange Society, but it grew into something huge ... I'd never heard fiddling like that. People were writing their own tunes, playing stuff they'd composed ... so that kind of opened my eyes to a whole new world and inspired me so much.
Q Where did the “Jamming with JJ” idea come from?
A When the pandemic hit I was actually on tour with Gordon Stobbe. We were out in Kelowna when things really started shutting down. It wasn't until I heard they were cancelling the hockey season I was like, “Oh, this is actually quite serious.”
When the pandemic hit and the lockdown was on, nobody was doing anything. There was no gigs anywhere. So my friend Cathy Sproule, who plays piano with me quite often, her and a woman from Port Alberni named Barbara Lehtonen, they both said to me, “You know, you should do an online jam session for players and all of your fans to join in and play along with you.' I was very skeptical at the beginning. I was thinking, who is going to join into this and play along with me playing tunes? But (Cathy) coaxed me and we set it up and we called it Jamming with JJ.
Q What's your favourite part of the livestreamed sessions? Why put in the effort to make weekly videos?
A For me, just knowing my friends — and even people I become friends with, doing the jam sessions — it's heartwarming, knowing they're there and playing along with you. Because I'm streaming and playing, I can't see all the comments as they're coming in. Cathy reads out a bunch of them live. But I go back every week and I read all the comments and emails and messages that I get. It makes me feel good.
Q A lot of your recent work has been duets. What attracts you to fiddle-playing collaborations?
A Well, the last number of years, my whole career has kind of been defined by Twin Fiddles — that's what Gordon Stobbe and I call our group.
We started at a fiddle camp we were teaching at in New Brunswick, and it rained for like five days straight when we were there. So there wasn't much for activities to do ... and we were sharing the same cabin, so we decided to write a fiddle tune.
We wrote a couple fiddle tunes together ... and we both found that we were fans of the twin fiddles style, which is not both fiddles playing the same thing, but one fiddle playing a harmony or some counter-melody, and the other fiddle playing the melody. We do a lot of work in the Northwest Territory and the Yukon, and in some of those isolated communities we just kept writing tunes together until we came up with the tunes for our first album ... I think there's an air of freshness to them as well.
Q After nearly a year of COVID-19 isolation in North America, do you think about your music and your career differently?
A Yes and no. I'm still looking to create different venues for how we perform, and a lot of them have been kind of online venues. Like, we've done some workshops and we did a little online concert that was a live stream this past fall. But I'm still producing music and playing music the same way. I guess the difference is, how to get the music out to people is quite a bit different.
Because the world is changing, I could definitely see (Jamming with JJ) continuing. It's been a way to connect with people over long distances ... it's connected fiddle groups that didn't know the other existed across Canada and North America. To be part of that connection has been a bit of a heartwarming experience, too.
JJ Guy’s livestreamed fiddle-playing
■ sessions Jamming with JJ take place every Sunday at 4 p.m. CST.