TM: What sort of musical background was there in your family?
DJ: My father was an amateur mandolin player, and his father was also a mandolin player. My grandfather played in a Jewish mandolin orchestra in New York City – there were a couple of them. Depending on how far left your politics were, that would dictate which one you would play in. He was in the one that was associated with the newspaper called the Morning Freiheit, which was a Yiddish newspaper. My father took mandolin lessons – he was quite a good player, had excellent technique, and enjoyed it a lot. My mother played piano, but not so much.
I started playing violin at school when I was in fourth grade. I later studied with Samuel Applebaum, father of Michael Tree. and a well-known pedagogue who wrote a lot of books on violin technique and literature. I started playing oboe a couple of years later, then started playing guitar, and moved through a lot of different instruments, picked up the five-string banjo, and played fiddle music on the violin, then started playing mandolin, and at some point dropped classical violin, played a lot of bluegrass music, and different kinds of music – rock, jazz… I played bass in a jazz band with a couple of saxophones and piano; I played in rock bands – lots of different kinds of things. Around eleventh grade I started composing, and also picked up the cello. I was taking a music appreciation class, and they were playing recordings of Mozart. I thought that the cello parts sounded pretty easy, so I asked if I could borrow a cello. They lent me one, and I went home and learned the cello parts. Then I started studying cello more seriously and was composing string quartets in high school. I was thinking of going to college as a cellist, applied and was accepted at various places, but instead decided to join a bluegrass band called “Bottle Hill” fulltime, and toured with them for a couple of years...