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R.E.M.’s Mills takes classical turn

He writes concerto for longtime friend who’s violinist

By Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
Published: November 12, 2016, 6:04am

“The most daunting musical project I’ve done?” Mike Mills says when discussing his latest post-R.E.M. endeavor. “Yes, I’d say so.”

This from a man who played bass, sang backing vocals and wrote some of the most indelible tunes in one of his generation’s most successful and acclaimed rock bands. The Georgia quartet’s 31-year run ended amicably enough in 2011, but each band member then faced a nagging question: Now what?

In the past five years, Mills has collaborated with several artists, including Joseph Arthur and Patterson Hood, and toured and recorded with the Baseball Project, which also includes R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and multi-instrumentalist sideman Scott McCaughey. But none of those projects has been quite as challenging as his latest, “Concerto for Violin, Rock Band and String Orchestra” with virtuoso classical violinist Robert McDuffie.

Though seemingly an unexpected detour for Mills, the concerto actually brings him full circle, back to his boyhood in Macon, Ga., where he met McDuffie in his church choir. The Mills and McDuffie families became close and used to regularly have dinner together on Sundays. The boys would hang out and “play football, watch TV and listen to J. Geils records,” Mills says.

Both of the boys had musical talent, but their paths diverged with McDuffie leaving high school to study classical violin at Juilliard while Mills played in rock bands with another high school buddy, future R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry. As R.E.M. rose from the underground to sell millions of albums, McDuffie became a coveted soloist with major orchestras internationally. The boyhood pals later collaborated on a chamber-pop version of one of Mills’ most memorable R.E.M. compositions, “Nightswimming.” But nothing prepared Mills for what McDuffie would ask of him in 2014 when the violinist came to the bassist’s home in Athens, Ga., for dinner.

“He started by saying that he was getting tired of playing the ‘dead white European’ classical repertoire, and wanted something new,” Mills says. “Then he asks me, ‘So can you try writing a concerto?’ It had never occurred to me to do something like that, so I did have to think about it a bit. It felt very daunting. But I was at a point where I had to decide what to do next, if anything, and Bobby came along with this wild idea. It was good timing.”

Mills laughs when reminded that he’s working in a tradition associated more with progressive rock bands such as Emerson Lake & Palmer than with the indie-rock scene that nurtured R.E.M. “I didn’t view it as a rock band project that would add orchestra later,” he says. “I wanted this to be a hybrid combination from the ground up. It was always in my mind to make this organic — it has to sound like these two things were meant to be together. Bobby feels the same way. We want to take away these arbitrary walls between genres of music.”

Mills enlisted composer David Mallamud to help him script parts for violin and string orchestra, but the bassist said he didn’t veer far from what he already knows: writing durable songs. He had a few reference points: a personal favorite, the Moody Blues, flirted with classical orchestrations, and as part of the big bands that would perform Big Star’s “Third” in various tribute concerts over the years, he saw how strings could be integrated into rock songs.

“But this felt a little more organic, a little more rock than anything I enjoyed in the past,” he says. “Bobby is indeed an accomplished musician who plays with symphony orchestras, but I never saw this as a classical piece. When writing parts for him, I tried to push him into places that would be more surprising and unexpected for him. There are a lot of things he does that you would never hear in a classical work.”

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