Anyone who’s seen David Grisman’s Quartet in the last seven years or so will remember Joe Craven as the guy surrounded by all the different instruments, playing fiddle, mandolin, and generating percussion with all his extremities, his mouth, his chest, and even his skull. Few musicians are as adept at as many different instruments as Craven, who has recently branched out on his own as a recording artist and bandleader while still holding down his post with Grisman. Craven’s new album, Camptown, is a virtuoso effort on which he playfully tweaks traditional fiddle tunes by putting them into new, often unexpected, tempos and musical settings. For all his current acoustic eclecticism, Craven started his musical career conventionally enough, playing electric guitar (and listening to the likes of Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and Jimmy Page) in his native Georgia. In Atlanta, he and REM guitarist Peter Buck were bandmates for a brief time. During college, Craven picked up the mandolin.

“I started taking an interest in playing the mandolin, not because I was attracted to a particular style or cultural heritage, but because it was something different. I remember walking into a music store, looking around, seeing these little eight stringed wonders hanging up, and messing around on them, just sort of becoming enchanted with the instrument itself. I bought a harmony mandolin, spending like 90 bucks, and approached it like a guitar player. I was introduced to bluegrass and old time music when I was attending school at the University of South Carolina. I would be playing my mandolin out on the lawn, and professors and students would pass by who were pickers. We would strike up conversations and I really had very little knowledge of traditional string band music. I was aware of bluegrass but had little knowledge beyond that. I went to some pickin’ parties and jam sessions, although I didn’t take to the music right away. At the time, I was getting more into fusion. I had become interested in what Jean Luc Ponty was doing on the violin, and more abstract players like Alan Holdsworth.

“I was at an old-time music pot luck. We were sitting around eating, and this guy put on a record he had just gotten that day. I distinctly remember I was sitting talking to somebody and the minute I heard the first cut, I excused myself from the conversation, went over and isolated myself from the party, and just sat and listened to the first side, then the other side. By the end of the evening, the guy had given me the record, because he was so disappointed in it. He had bought it because of the still life photo of instruments on the cover: a guitar, stand-up bass, violin, and two mandolins. That was, of course the first David Grisman Quintet album. That music was something I felt I could really connect with. Other musicians who were putting stuff out at the same time led me to what I felt I should do on the mandolin, which was this sort of jazzy, warm sophisticated treatment of a string band instrumentation. I eventually sort of embraced bluegrass, and really got into it, but that was years later.”

After college, Craven moved to Davis, California, forming what was to become a regionally beloved trio, Way Out West, which also included singer Tracy Walton and guitarist Bill Edwards. “Way Out West was the first group in which there was some real growth and exploration that really opened me up to playing creatively and professionally. It was a very rewarding project.”

During his eight years with Way Out West, Craven also took up the violin. “We wanted a fiddle player and I decided that it was really a great opportunity to get a handle on playing the violin, which I had been playing a bit in some bluegrass bands.”

While still in Way Out West, Craven also took a formative role in another popular Davis area band, world beat-roots-dance band Mumbo Gumbo. “I actually joined that group before it became Mumbo Gumbo. It started out more as an R&B cover band. I came on board at a time when the band was experiencing real growth. It was a great time; I was involved with the group during about the first two years of its existence. I quit mainly because I was getting very busy with other projects, notably David, but also Way Out West, although that project was beginning to wind down. That band had been together for about eight years.

Craven’s musical opportunities continued to snowball when he met long-time idol David Grisman. “I was introduced to David through a mutual interest we have in collecting vintage instruments. He’s quite a collector and trader, and has pursued a couple of projects (Tone Poems I and II) reflecting that interest. There was a time when more of those instruments were in my reach financially, and I had one instrument for sale that he caught wind of. We spoke over the telephone, and it led to my being invited out to his house. I brought a couple of instruments — he wanted to look at a mandocello that I had. He found out that not only was I a collector but also a player. It started out as a friendship, and over time we kept that relationship active, and played together on an informal basis until one day a couple of the guys left David’s Quintet. He invited me to do a couple of gigs, sort of on spec, to be honest.”

The band for those shows also included guitarist John Carlini, bass player Jim Kerwin, and fiddler Mark O’Connor. “I was sort of a utility man, playing mandolin, some mandocello, and percussion. I didn’t play fiddle, because Mark was holding down that post. The performances were very well received, and that led to a formal invitation to join the band. That was seven-plus years ago.”

After he joined Grisman, Craven eventually had to cut back on his other musical activities. “In the final years, it was tough, because I had started with Grisman, and was doing Mumbo Gumbo, so it was getting really crazy. Way Out West had run a great course in terms of a group and what it did for us individually. The singer, Tracy Walton, went on to join Mumbo Gumbo where she remains to this day. I’m glad that Mumbo Gumbo has kept going, and they’re doing well, especially as a dance band.” One other project he found time for was Psychograss, a collaboration with Darol Anger, Mike Marshall, Todd Phillips, and Tony Trischka that produced one album and a handful of gigs a few years back. The group was recently reactivated, recording a second album, but Craven has retired from active participation.

Around the time he joined Grisman, Craven was immersed in a systematic study of global rhythms. “Percussion came as the third thing, and that was developing at the time I joined David. That was one of the things that intrigued David — here was a person who could play percussion, mandolin, and strings, that sort of versatility appealed to him.”

About a year ago, Craven had an opportunity to combine his diverse musical interests in a solo recording project, Camptown. “It kind of fell in my lap. I got together with Tony Elman, a friend of mine for many years who has a small record label, Acorn. He asked me, “If you were to do a solo album, what would it be like?” I told him about this interest I had in trying to marry the work I’d done as a percussionist with my fiddle and mandolin playing, taking string band music and twisting and turning it inside out. The idea of personalizing pre-existing material had also come out of my work with projects like Way Out West and Psychograss. I just took that and actually did some demo pieces with a local group that we go out and do dances with in Davis. A group that does a lot of tropical influenced music Afro Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Haitian. I played the tape for Tony and he got really excited, and made me an offer on the spot, so I did it. It was comfortable for me. I have known Tony for years, and got to know his brother Peter who helped me with production work.”

The most striking thing about Camptown are the adventurous, sometimes humorous, sometimes strikingly beautiful arrangements of the fourteen traditional pieces on the CD, which include such curiosities as the Brazilian setting of the title tune and an Indian arrangement of “Old Joe Clark.” “It was a great process and I enjoyed trying things in different capacities. It was a great trial and error process trying different melodies with various rhythms and finding what for me were just the right combinations. Some of it didn’t work, but that was part of the fun of piecing it together.”

As a follow-up to the recording project, Craven has assembled an extremely versatile band, Joe Craven’s Camptown, that has done a few gigs as time allows. The group’s Sunday afternoon gig at the Strawberry in spring of 1996 was one of the festival’s highlights. “We’re doing some performing, which is something I’ve really looked forward to. I haven’t had too many opportunities to do it, because the Grisman Quintet has really had a banner year. We have a couple of different drummer/percussionists. Aaron Johnston is from the Bay Area. He’s a great drummer, very knowledgeable. Kendrick Freeman is from Petaluma, and his passion is Haitian drumming, but he’s a wonderful trap drummer, and very adept in a wide variety of Latin rhythms. The keyboard player is John Rosenberg, who has done work with a variety of people, from Phil Collins to, just lately, doing a lot of duet work with Maria Muldaur. A young, great bass player named Derek Jones, who will go on to do great things. He’s currently holding down the post with Pete Escovedo. All these players are very versatile, they’re interested in a wide variety of music. One thing that’s exciting to me is to take the readings of the pieces on the record and do very fresh, different interpretations of them live as a quartet.”

Craven has his second solo project well underway, and it represents quite a stylistic departure from Camptown. “I’m real interested in the blues, and it’s going to be a blues project, very different than the first album. The blues is interesting to me for several reasons. First, its documentation on the fiddle and mandolin is somewhat limited. Its history in early blues is somewhat richer on those instruments. What I’m interested in doing is exploring a bunch of different styles. I’ve got a bunch of strange half-sized electric guitars and mandocasters. The plan is to try to do something diverse, and show how the blues has an influence on almost every kind of American roots music. There’ll be vocals on it too, so it will be very different from the last project in that regard. It’ll be out in the spring of ‘97.”

Although he is excited about his solo career, Craven remains committed to working in the David Grisman Quintet. “We have a life of our own, but it’s also great for David because, with the versatility of that group, we can do material from other parts of his catalog. We’ve been doing pieces from Songs for Our Fathers and he’ll be doing some touring with Andy Statman. I really enjoy working for David; he’s a really good band leader. He’s been a huge influence on me, and I’ve learned a great deal about music from him.”

Another interesting avenue that his association with Grisman opened for Craven was his tenure in the Jerry Garcia-David Grisman band, and his participation on the duo’s recordings, three of which have been released to date. Craven wasn’t too well versed in Garcia’s pervasive musical influence when they started working together. “I was never a Deadhead. It wasn’t out of choice, I just didn’t get exposed much to the music of the Grateful Dead. I do remember hearing a little of their music early on, and it didn’t grab me at the time. So when I finally met Jerry, my connection with him was more as a folkie, which of course was where his roots were. An album that had made a huge impression on me was the Old and In The Way project that they did. One of the things that really stood out at the time was the work of Vassar Clements. I, and a lot of people, I think, hadn’t heard anything like that before, and I still worship the Vassar altar, as Darol Anger and I jokingly refer to it. I was thinking of Jerry as a banjo player, so it was neat to meet him and actually play music with him that was very much related to this relationship he had initially had with David, and which they reunited on, which was this love of roots, old time music, bluegrass, and the like. I found him a delightful person. I was actually very impressed with how well read and articulate he was. He could talk on any number of interesting topics. One night we were there at David’s house and he just started talking about foreign film directors in this almost scholarly dissertation. Then there’d be these other incredible times in the studio when he’d be talking about what things were like back at various times, having known people like Janis Joplin and Hendrix. One of the great things is that David has a lot of these conversations preserved on tape. He’s got an incredible archive of material from those very memorable sessions. We’re getting a lot of young Deadheads out at the shows. They don’t know a lot about this, and David’s helping to expose them to the heritage of the music and also to the fact that this guy that they were so enamored of, Jerry, that’s where he comes from too. I mean, he was interested in clawhammer banjo before he got into bluegrass banjo.”