_“You want to know why I think Stuart Duncan is the most wonderful fiddle player in the world?” Lyle Lovett asks. We’re backstage at the Longbranch Club in Raleigh, North Carolina, following a show. He pushes the door shut behind him and continues, eyes locked on mine. “Stuart’s always thinking, always searching,” he says. “There’s nothing halfway in anything he does.” I nod back, every now and then chiming in, but our enthusiasm is so great it keeps us from articulating a more accurate measure of Stuart’s talent. I follow up with a question about the emotional content of Stuart’s accompaniment. “Oh yeah!” Lyle says. “He plays with such...” He gestures wildly. “He is just my favorite fiddle player in the world.”

Like most bluegrass fiddlers of the so-called third generation, I am extremely swayed by Stuart Duncan’s playing. His lyrical and driving tone, his sophisticated rhythmic sense, his tasteful absorption of every fiddle stylist preceding him (Byron Berline, Kenny Baker, and Benny Martin are a few that come to mind), and his super-sensitivity as an accompanist—all make him easily the most influential bluegrass fiddler of his era. And yet his steadfast unwillingness to play anything the same way twice makes him almost impossible to imitate. There isn’t the usual lexicon of signature licks and phrases to cop. If you want Duncan’s influence in your playing you have to proceed by feel, borrowing the odd pause or dissonance, the swooping approach to a note, or the unexpected syncopation.

Today’s concert with Lovett was for a party thrown by Tivoli Computers, celebrating its 1997 billion-dollar earnings. As Stuart and I wind our way out past the bar, there are still plenty of very happy Tivoli employees with bright balloons in hand. Outside, and moving at a surprisingly fast lope across the lot, Stuart fills me in on how his work with Lovett evolved. During Lovett’s more acoustic phase, Duncan’s two-time Grammy-winning group, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, went on the road with Lovett as the opening act. Duncan played on the Lovett sets as well. “A lot of what you heard today, those arrangements, we worked them out then, on the road, or in the studio. It’s not like we came up with them for the show today.”

I’ve long known of Duncan’s flexibility as a player, so I had not been too surprised, earlier, to hear him trade whirlwind rock solos, pizzicato, with electric guitarist Pat Bergeson, or stretch out on the occasional extended blues- and swing-influenced break. The extraordinary thing for me, as always, lay more in witnessing his musical sensitivity than his technical fluidity—his knack for hearing everything that goes on around him and fitting in with it perfectly, adjusting his phrases and attack to match Lovett’s various moods as a songwriter. Still, there’s no question in my mind that the place to hear Duncan cut loose—really hear him and not strain to pick him out over drums and bass and electric guitar (and drunken drones)—is with his band, live. Or on record, loud. Nothing compares with solid bluegrass as a medium for flat-out fiddling.

The rest of the afternoon we spend in Stuart’s room talking, polishing off beers. There’s none of the off-putting self-enthrallment or self-satisfaction you might expect from a player so accomplished and celebrated; and very quickly you realize that this is the point. This is what makes him so good: It’s music he’s dedicated to; not self-aggrandizement, not showing off, not making a billion dollars. Plenty of musicians have the technique to play anything imaginable and the brains to fit themselves within a variety of musical contexts. Not many such musicians have the heart and will and confidence to stand aside and let the music come first.

“I try to think of every song as being real special in its entirety,” he says. “A Texas folk song can be as orchestrated as a piece of classical music, depending on how things are constructed.”

From there he goes on at length describing what’s involved in playing with a group like Lovett’s—the many levels and layers of sound to which he’s constantly attentive. “In a loud stage mix like that, there’s a lot of stuff you just can’t hear. You’ve got so much drums and bass on top of the note, so you have to rely on eyesight a lot. You see somebody playing a note, but you’re not sure what note it is. So after a few gigs, or after asking them before the next show, you know what note they’re gonna play and you play either a note that’s the same note, that decays in the way their note decays, so it doesn’t draw attention or create harmonic disturbance—you know, the beats hitting each other—or you play above it. Or below. You use less vibrato with somebody that’s not gonna use vibrato, or if you’re playing with a cello you want to try to make your vibrato similar to his. And all at the same time you want to make sure that your notes don’t overlap the lead vocal so much that you miss the words. Really, it’s hard to describe the thoughts that go through your head and the amount of knowledge that you have on your instrument, the background that you have and everything you use to accomplish playing so-called tastefully. What does that mean, tastefully? Strictly an opinion. Tastefully means the lead singer isn’t offended by what you’re doing behind him. He doesn’t talk to you about it after the show.”

Born and raised in Southern California, Duncan relocated to the South in 1984, after joining up with Larry Sparks’s hard-hitting traditional bluegrass band, The Lonesome Ramblers. “I was there in Lexington then, in 1984, working with Sparks’s band, and Peter Rowan called me up one day to do a Station Inn show [Nashville’s main bluegrass club]. So I showed up, not knowing what I was get- ting into. It was Peter, Béla Fleck, Sam Bush, Roy Huskey, and Jerry Douglas. And I thought, Damn! Kick it off!”

Not long after, Duncan moved to Nashville and began his tenure with the NBB. “I suppose at first there were a certain amount of ‘I obviously don’t belong here in the South’ feelings that I went through and got over—like not being able to buy a really good avocado in the grocery store. But there are so many different cultures within each community now, not like it was twenty years ago. Half of Nashville’s from Los Angeles anyway, and the other half’s people from Canada and New York and songwriters from Alabama and everywhere else. Bluegrass isn’t just Southern music anymore. It’s international. It’s been years since it was exclusively Southern. If you go back far enough, its roots spread out all over again. The South is just where the music was collected for the last hundred years or so. Before that it came from Scotland, England, Jamaica, France, Africa, Ireland. Wherever. So I was playing Southern music long before I realized I wasn’t a Southerner. The music came first for me. And then I moved here because I couldn’t play the music in the West and make any money at it.”

Duncan’s own playing style derives from an intersection of roots and influences as culturally varied and diverse as bluegrass itself. “My style of playing? Somebody asked me that once...I would say, old-time fiddler meets jazz saxophonist. Eck Robertson meets Wayne Shorter.” Pause. “Eck who?” he asks, smiling wryly. “And I’ve been influenced by vocalists, too, as much as by instrumentalists. Billie Holiday, Ray Charles—I want to be able to create that with one note on the fiddle. It’s not gonna happen, but if I put everything I’ve got into it then maybe I can get across my feelings.” With all these outside influences, I ask if he still considers himself a traditional player. Instantly the question widens. What is “traditional” anyway? “Certainly, ‘traditional’ is a big part of what I play. But if you’re talking to an old-time player, I’m one of them progressive dudes.” He laughs. “I do a lot of stuff—Celtic, blues, Lovett, messing around with East Indian and Middle Eastern intervals at home. But when it comes down to it, when I get up onstage, I just love to play bluegrass. It’s probably the deepest passion for me. It’s the thing that has the most emotion and the most rhythm and the most chilling effect. Hairs standing up on your arms, when it’s just right—the way the harmony vocals fit together, the way the dynamics move in and out. And the fact that you don’t have something as loud as drums creating the effect of no dynamics.

“With bluegrass you get to hear a little bit of everything, all the time, because it starts quieter and it stays quieter. So there’s a kind of unity about it. It’s not as immediately expressive as jazz, not immediately as individual or exaggerated or flamboyant, but in a lot of respects it’s just as hard to play.”

In addition to his playing engagements and ongoing Nashville session obligations, Duncan is currently in the final stages of the latest NBB recording, and in the first stages of work on a new solo disc—his second with Rounder. “I’d like to sing a little more on this one and get a little more traditional. Go from Ireland to Appalachia in a few tunes— explore those similarities and differences.” He doesn’t exclude the possibility of taking his own solo show on the road one day, though it doesn’t seem a high priority right now. “I consider myself more of an ensemble player. Sure, I’d like to have some kind of repertoire I could call my own to take out on the road. Maybe not full-time, because I don’t consider myself a showman.”

About this time the phone rings—his wife and three kids checking in. “Time to be a dad,” he says. We head for the door and I ask if he’ll be at home, more or less, in the next few weeks, in case I need to call. “Sure,” he says, but then after a moment’s reflection, “No, actually. A lot less than more.”

In the hallway there’s the dully antiseptic smell of recycled hotel air—windowless walls and carpeting all disorientingly the same color, causing me to stumble as I turn away.

“Keep fiddling!” Stuart calls after me.

“Yeah,” I say. Then foolishly, “You too!”

I hear the door behind me swing almost shut and come open, and Stuart calls after me again, “I don’t have any choice!”