The Final Frontier
Many tricks work for the entire string family. The instrument toss may not be one of them. Just ask the Rev. Horton Heat’s upright bass player, Jimbo Wallace. “You know man, I throw it in the air, too, and I’ve only missed once,” he reports. “My guitar cord caught on a mic stand or something, and the Rev said, ‘Man, you didn’t get to see it like I did, but it looked like a helicopter crashing.’”

The act of smashing your fiddle to pieces Jimi Hendrix-style—or like violinist Cameron Potts of the Australian rock band Baseball—may well be flash fiddle’s final frontier. However, there are less idiotic ways to be flashy. Just ask the Cape Breton fiddlers who break into spinning dance sequences while playing. Top that off with one of Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster’s Michael Jackson moonwalks, and everybody else on stage better get out of the way!

Dancing is a big part of the musical tour group Barrage. When Dean Marshall teamed up with co-music director Brian Hansen, it was only a matter of time before everybody else on stage got the chance to get in on the action. This show pulls out all the stops with everything from two fiddlers playing one fiddle to violinists bouncing on synchronized exercise balls.

Of course, violin solos aren’t usually thought of as a team sport. And though a backup beater instrument is probably a good idea for a few of these stunts, no matter how bad it feels to mess up in a concert, most people don’t have an instrument they’d ever want to break. Most people are more interested in playing well than playing wild anyway. Yet the art of flash fiddle endures from century to century, generation to generation, like the X Games of music, with more radical tricks, bigger air.

Who knows what’s next for the flash fiddlers of the world?