Spotlight: Casey Driessen
photo credit: Arthur Driessen
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In September 2019, Casey Driessen packed up his fiddle, and his family, and embarked on what promised to be the journey of a lifetime. The plan was to hopscotch around the globe, meet up with open-minded musicians eager to experiment and document it all.
“[The plan was to put] out almost real-time videos, photos and journals, to share with people as we were on this adventure,” the Grammy-nominated musician says. “We would get together, share our traditions and see what happens when they come together.”
Driessen, his wife and their daughter touched down in six far-flung locales—India, Japan, Finland, Scotland, Spain and Ireland—during their nine months away. New friends were made, fascinating music was created and a 25-episode video series titled Otherlands: A Global Music Exploration was born. So, too—almost as an afterthought— was an audio companion piece, Otherlands:ONE, which was released in the spring of 2021.
The Driessens would have kept going but, by the spring of 2020, the world was rapidly becoming a very different place than it was when they first left their home in North Carolina.
“We were in India when the world found out about the coronavirus and we went to Japan during the time it was [spreading],” Driessen says. “We stayed there for three weeks and then decided that it was only a matter of time before things were going to be challenging. We thought we should probably expedite to our next destination, which was Europe. We made it to Finland 36 hours before they closed their borders and stayed there in a cabin for two months. Then, when nothing seemed like it was improving in any way, I said, ‘I think we’re done for now.’”
Fortunately, Driessen had accumulated enough music and video to be able to assemble his projects, which can now be accessed at caseydriessen.com/ otherlands. The videos, he says, “are really incredible. The one thing that kept coming back to me as I watched them—and I know it’s almost a cliché— was this idea that music is a universal language. You can sit down with people you’ve never met, in some cases literally across the world, and still play and talk to each other.”
The spontaneity built into the performances is contagious. Viewing the videos, one sees the true spirit of collaboration at work; musicians register surprise and elation in their faces and, at the end of some songs, there is laughter and excitement. “For me, it really was about the personal connection and the experience of sharing time,” Driessen says. “And, strangely enough, this was the last stuff that happened, essentially, before COVID. So it feels even more special that I got the chance to do this with all these amazing people. We didn’t have to worry about sitting two feet from each other, listening to each other’s instruments, laughing at each other—hugging and shaking and all this stuff that maybe we took for granted and now we miss so much.”
Driessen is adamant that recording an album along the way was “not a primary goal.”
“The goal was to share experiences,” he says.
But, once he returned home to the U.S. and listened back to the music, he knew that it needed to be made available as well: The 13-song Otherlands:ONE, produced by Driessen, is augmented by annotation. One track, “Kouon frouva,” is a traditional fiddle duet with Esko Järvelä, recorded in a cabin in a small town in Finland in April 2020. “Aye Nagari”—which was recorded in the West Bengal, India village of Paruldanga in January 2020—is described as a “lyrical prayer” and “a drone piece in the mystical Baul tradition.” It spotlights four musicians whose voices and traditional Indian instruments combine to weave a hypnotic spell.
“We were trying to find common ground,” Driessen says of the alliances. “I would always ask people, ‘What are you into right now? You got a tune that’s a favorite one? I know very little about your tradition; what’s the first tune that I should learn? Teach me something that you think I should know. Can we learn that one?’ [Sometimes] it would remind me of something I knew from my tradition— whether a little rhythm or a little melody—and then I would share that with them. Sometimes we would say, ‘Hey, let’s see if we can put these two things together.’ We were finding this intersection of where we were all coming from.
“None of us really knew what it was going to be,” he adds. “Some of these collaborations ended up being lessons or demonstrations, or little experiments. Some turned into full-blown arrangements. It was challenging for me and, hopefully, it’s fun and challenging for [the other musicians] too. Hopefully, we created something that none of us have ever done before.”
