Casey Driessen’s Red Shoe Stringjam (Saturday)

Casey Driessen has never taken the standard path in his music career. Described by Zac Brown as “a mad scientist with a five-string fiddle,” the GRAMMY-nominated fiddle player loves to experiment, collaborate, teach, travel, and expand boundaries.

Currently, that means pouring himself into “Otherlands: A Global Music Exploration.” Produced, performed, recorded and filmed by Driessen, “Otherlands” is a travelogue of on-location recordings, short films, and essays documenting musical collaborations through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, Finland, Italy, Slovakia, and Czechia. Driessen undertook this nearly year-long journey with his family, and the results are a 27-episode video series, a 13-song recording of collaborations titled Otherlands:ONE, stories from each encounter, and hundreds of photos.

In the fall of 2024, Driessen launched the Blue Ridge Fiddle Camp at the Brevard Music Center in Brevard, North Carolina. For fiddlers & violinists of all styles, this immersive four-day experience celebrates the crafting of one’s musical voice through the exploration of rhythm, technology, and style under the guidance of a world-class faculty. Embracing both tradition and innovation, the camp invites all adventurous and open-minded players of the instrument to come together and shape the future of bowed string playing.

Before setting off on his “Otherlands” adventure, Driessen spent four years as Program Director of the Contemporary Performance (Production Concentration) master’s degree at Berklee College of Music’s first international campus in Valencia, Spain. While working in Valencia, Casey released “The Chop Notation Project.” Created in partnership with Spanish violinist Oriol Saña, this free resource creates standardized music notation to read and write the percussive bowed string technique known as chopping.

Over the past 24 years, Driessen has released four solo records and toured as a one-man live looping show called “The Singularity”; collaborated with Béla Fleck, Bassekou Kouyate, Abigail Washburn, Raghu Dixit, Jerry Douglas, Steve Earle and others; produced and engineered records; teched, managed stages, tours, and merch; and travelled the world playing music in 22 countries on four continents and counting … all while wearing red shoes.