Sarah Collins, who moved to Harvard for sixth grade and graduated from Bromfield in 2010, is performing at Fivesparks, 7 Fairbank Street, Sunday, Jan. 14, from 3 to 4 p.m. Collins and fellow musician Jonathan Vocke will be playing Scottish, Irish, and old-time music, she on the fiddle and he on a five-string banjo, a pairing of instruments with an innovative sound. They will be in town from Baltimore, performing in the Boston Celtic Music Festival on Saturday, Jan. 13.
Collins and Vocke have been playing together for two years. In a phone conversation, Collins told the story of sitting next to Vocke at an old-time music campout in Pennsylvania in 2021. It was after the COVID-19 vaccine had become available and the first time people had been able to get together to play music since the pandemic started. Perhaps partly because of this “magical” time, Collins, who would more typically play with a guitarist, asked him if he had ever played Irish tunes. Despite his answer in the negative—Vocke more typically plays old-time music, an early kind of North American folk dance music—she said, “This is in the key of G, see what you can do.” It was a new sound that was “intriguing,” Collins said. They decided to put together a half hour of music to perform in Boston, but the next year the Celtic Music Festival was canceled.
Sarah Collins. (Courtesy photo)
Collins, who has a master’s degree in diplomacy from Tufts University Fletcher School, has a “day job,” but music is her passion and everything else she does is in support of it. She said she is grateful to her parents for their investment in her music education. She described being smitten with a violin at age 4½, when she heard the young daughter of her mom’s friend play. She received ear training with her classical violin instruction, and later that enabled her to easily pick up Scottish tunes during a year her family spent in Scotland for her father’s job. Both her parents are amateur musicians, her mom on fiddle and her dad guitar. Her dad is of Irish descent, so her affinity for Celtic music seemed natural.
Collins became serious about the fiddle the summer she was 11 years old and went with her mother to a fiddle camp on one of the islands in Boston Harbor. She returned every summer after that for six years and is still close to the teachers she worked with at the camp and the friends she made there. She has become very much a part of the Scottish music community, going to camps, fiddle weekends, and working at various music events. She said Celtic music is a “niche world” that is really special. She can travel almost anywhere and go into an Irish pub to find at least one person with whom she has “two degrees of separation.”
In talking more about the music she does with Vocke, Collins said she chooses the melodies and he creates “chordal arrangements.” He doesn’t follow her note for note but rather “sketches contours” and “weaves in and out of the melody.” She said Vocke describes what he does as “chasing me on the fiddle.” Collins picks music from various sources. One song is from the very first fiddle camp she went to; others are tunes she learned from different people.
A deep rhythm
Collins said the music she and Vocke make brings their styles together for a different sound from what each of them would typically make with other players. What really distinguishes their music and the effect it has on listeners is its groove, by which Collins means the deep rhythm they create. Rather than playing a tune a few times and moving on to another or having solos that feature one instrument at a time, they play everything together, focusing on one melody at a time, playing it over and over, really sinking into it, each time going deeper. Collins likened it to the sound and feeling one experiences on a train—the old fashioned kind. The repetitive sound of the wheels turning over and over draws the rider deeper and deeper into the rhythm they make—into a groove. But rather than sleep-inducing, theirs is a sound people can feel in their feet. “Both Jonathan and I are toe-tappers,” said Collins.
Collins has expanded her music involvement beyond playing. During the pandemic, she and some friends created the Ministry of Folk platform because so many musicians had no work. They created a directory where players could contact one another, and they provided virtual venues. They set up a service where a person could hire a musician to serenade someone on Valentine’s Day. Collins said it was her first taste of music organizing and she really liked it.
She continued using her organizational skills to create the Baltimore Folk Club. She works with musicians online to set up monthly concerts at different venues in the city. She’s had groups of Scottish, Irish, and old-time music players and a Brazilian duo, and she is working on the lineup for a spring series. “It feels productive,” she said, adding that she loves spreadsheets, tying up loose ends, and other organizational challenges.
Collins said Baltimore is growing as a music scene for Celtic and old-time music. She enjoys bringing in outside artists to perform and later hang out with local musicians, creating community. The city is a welcoming place for artistic talents—more affordable and collaborative and less competitive than other places such as Boston.
But Collins is happy to be coming back to Boston and to Harvard and hoping to see some familiar faces at Fivesparks on the 14th. The concert is $20 at the door.
