LUCIA MICARELLI,
Lucia Micarelli brings a bit of every style with her on tour
Lucia Micarelli grew up in a classical music bubble. At age 3, Micarelli had already picked up the violin. Just into elementary school, she played with a symphony for the first time. Juilliard accepted her when she was 11. It wasn’t until she got to college — more violin studies at the Manhattan School of Music --that a friend introduced her to popular music. “He made me a mix CD with Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin,” Micarelli said ahead of her concert at the Wilbur on Wednesday. “When I first listened to John Coltrane play, I couldn’t understand what he was doing. It sounded like he was making it up as he went along, but that couldn’t be right. That idea was so foreign to me.” Wanting to learn how to improvise, Micarelli began booking gigs with jazz or rock acts around the city. Slowly, steadily, her improvisational chops improved, and by her early 20s, she had logged time with major pop acts from Josh Groban to Chris Botti to Jethro Tull. She even landed a gig as fiddle queen Annie Talarico on HBO’s “Treme.” “When I first started playing with local bands in New York for like $50 a gig, I had all this technique, but I hadn’t been taught to apply it to anything but classical music,” she said. “What’s the point of all this technique if you don’t have the freedom to apply it to whatever style you want?” Her work on “Treme,” a show about post-Katrina New Orleans, became a crash course in bouncing between styles. One week she would sit in with a Cajun band, the next she was guesting with swamp rockers the Radiators or dueting with roots king Steve Earle. “(Creator) David (Simon) put me in so many different situations right away,” she said. “Traditional jazz, folk fiddling, which I quickly learned wasn’t just one thing. I would say, ‘Oh, I know some fiddling,’ and play something. Then the band I was with would say, ‘That’s Irish fiddling. That’s not what we do.’ I had no idea bluegrass and old timey and Cajun fiddling all used different turns, different ornamentations and harmonies.” Micarelli takes a bit of everything she’s learned on tour with her. She does Earle’s “This City” and Gershwin standards and a lot of classical pieces. (If you love Ravel, this show is for you.) She knows her set list sometimes jumps. not only from decade to decade, but century to century. She’s confident audiences can handle the hard turns. “These solo shows started because a booker called up my management and asked to book me. I said I didn’t have a solo show, but the booker replied, ‘Do whatever you want. I’ll give you time to figure it out,’ ” she said. “I wanted to create a show that I would like. I still listen to mostly classical music, but I know the way people listen has changed. With streaming, anytime I ask someone what they listen to, they tell me a little bit of everything, jazz, opera, pop. So when people come to my shows, they are getting one of these modern playlists, which means a little bit of everything.”