Vassar Clements looks sturdy and functional, like a small-town mechanic who's never too busy to stop and chat while pumping your gas. A man with a strong Southern accent and the manner of a kindly grandpa, he uses expletives such as "dad gum it" and generally addresses women--even strangers--as "hon." All in all, he's the last person you'd think would come up with an entirely new way of playing the violin. But Clements, a man as plain and simple as a farm wife's apron, is indeed a musical innovator and developer of what he calls that "heelbelly jezz canned a thang."
That hillbilly jazz kind of thing is a fiddling style that involves swinging improvisation, unorthodox finger placement and bow techniques, and a strong jazz mentality expressed in a bluegrass setting. More than a half century after the 66-year-old Clements first stepped on a stage, this approach remains unbelievably fresh and unconventional. Even Clements has a hard time describing it. "I really didn't know what I was doing," he says. "You know, to this day, I still don't. I know that a lot of people have told me different things, like I came up with a whole new thing, but I really can't see how I did it. I guess I did. But the only thing I can tell you that made me different was that I had to teach myself."
Clements began playing guitar in the Thirties while in a band with his two older cousins, one of whom handled the violin. When this fiddler got married to a woman who insisted that he leave the group, Clements was forced to learn a new instrument. He wasn't very happy about it, either. "Back in Florida at that particular time, there weren't fiddle players like there are now," he recalls. "If there were, I didn't know them. I was from a little one-horse town called Kissimmee. It's on the map now because it's grown into a regular city, but back then you were almost ashamed to let anybody know you were trying to play string music.
"I thought they would look down at me, too, like I was an old hillbilly or something," Clements continues. "I don't know exactly how to say it, but you know how a kid thinks. I was embarrassed to let anybody know I was even trying to learn."
Nevertheless, Clements learned fast: At fourteen he was in Nashville working in Bill Monroe's bluegrass band. "I thought it was the greatest thing," he enthuses. "But I was scared to death. They almost had to carry me off the stage at the Opry. My knees wouldn't bend. My feet wouldn't move."
In the years that followed, Clements got over his stage fright. At last count, he'd participated in more than 2,000 recording sessions and jammed in the studio or live settings with an incredible list of well-known musicians. He concedes, however, that he still feels a rush of nervous energy before he faces an audience. "New crowds, especially," he goes on. "You want to keep doing better than you did before, and when you're playing from your heart and off the top of your head, you really don't know what you are going to do. You know the songs you are going to play, and you know how you are going to start them and how you're going to end them. But you don't know exactly what you yourself are going to do in the middle. I can't remember the way I might've played it before, so there's no use in even trying."
Although bluegrass is a genre that generally prefers tradition over new techniques, Clements has earned positive notices throughout his career. That's fortunate, since he says he's too set in his ways to consider changing his performing methods. "See, I couldn't do anything else. I don't know any other way. I don't know how to read music or anything. So it leaves a wide-open field to do as much as you can hear."
Still, Clements has never closed his ears to the music made by younger players, and he's amused that instrumentalists such as Bela Fleck and Mark O'Connor have earned raves for exploring sounds he first produced decades ago. "That's something I really think about," he admits. "I look over at Millie [his wife] and tell her, `Look at that, would you? They told me that was too far out when I did it.' Now they're accepting a lot of things. That's the only thing I think is kind of strange about it, because I remember doing all those things that they're doing now."
That's the price you pay for being a trendsetter, dad gum it.
Vassar Clements and Hillbilly Jazz. 8 p.m. Sunday, June 26, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th Street, Boulder, $15.75, 447-0095 or 290-
