ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, mandolinist Peter Ostroushko experienced an epiphany while
playing his repertoire of traditional American music at a Minneapolis
coffeehouse. "I was going through stuff like 'Blue Ridge Mountain Blues,'"
Ostroushko explains. "Suddenly I thought, 'You know, I've been to the Blue
Ridge Mountains, but this music isn't me.'" So he changed tracks and finished
his set by playing music that really meant something to him--Ukrainian songs
that his mother had taught him years earlier--and his career was altered
forever.
Ostroushko, 43, has since continued to blaze his own musical trails. He has
recorded and performed with such diverse collaborators as Bob Dylan, Sir Neville
Marriner, Willie Nelson, Garrison Keillor, Bobby McFerrin, Emmylou Harris, Taj
Mahal, and Chet Atkins, and has performed on "A Prairie Home Companion," "David
Letterman," and even "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood." His own recordings have
embraced swing, classical, contemporary acoustic, and Ukrainian-flavored
styles.
Born into a music-filled family
Ostroushko was almost, but not quite, born with a mandolin in his arms. His
mother and father, members of the sizeable Ukrainian-American community of
northeast Minneapolis, often hosted musical parties. "Growing up seeing people
come over to our house for those big jam sessions was incredible," he recalls.
"Watching the adults in my life have fun with music made it seem like a natural
thing to do to just go and pick up an instrument and have fun playing it. My dad
played the mandolin, so it didn't seem like an odd instrument to me. People in
the Ukrainian community played it, and there were little mandolin orchestras in
the churches. It made perfect sense for me to play mandolin."
Like a lot of American kids of the 1960s, he spent time playing the acoustic and
electric guitar, and he also became a very skilled fiddler. "Somewhere back
around the mid-1970s the things I was doing on guitar and violin somehow made
more sense to me on the mandolin. Now I do all my writing, whether it's for the
fiddle or cello or anything else, on the mandolin," he says. "For some reason
the music lays out in front of me on the mandolin Ñ I can look at the fingerboard
and visualize everything, even what I want other instruments to do. Mostly I
think of myself as a mandolin player. I do other things, but my love really is
playing the mandolin."
He believes his musicianship improved dramatically from 1980 to 1986, when he
served as a music director and regular performer on public radio's "A Prairie
Home Companion" show. Host Garrison Keillor insisted that all of the show's
regulars tap their creativity as much as possible. "He felt that since he had to
write new comedy material for the show every week -- he couldn't use the same
jokes over and over -- then we as musicians couldn't rely on playing the same
standards that we play all the time. He challenged us to write new material. It
was a great exercise -- and I got paid for it! -- to sit down every week and come
up with some new music. That was probably the biggest musical change for me,
figuring out that I had things to say and that I could say them."
Songwriting remains important to Ostroushko, and his most recent recording,
"Heart of the Heartland," is full of his original music. An all-instrumental
album on the Red House Records label, it uses the landscape as its theme. "When
I go out and drive around, inevitably I get struck with musical images of where I
am," Ostroushko says. Some pieces -- "Montana" and "Seattle" -- evoke specific
places, while others, including the title tune and music he originally wrote for
a public TV program on the U.S.-Dakota Conflict, are more nebulous.
The result is an album that certainly evokes little of, say, the Blue Ridge
Mountains. "There are even some blatant string things," Ostroushko says, "things
that kind of sound like string quartets."
Of Ostroushko's other recordings, he is reluctant to identify a favorite. He
considers "Duo," recorded with his longtime musical partner, guitarist Dean
Magraw, a success. "I liked the concept -- going into the studio with Dean and
doing all the music live." "Buddies of Swing" and "Blue Mesa" allowed him to play
with such mentors and idols as Norman Blake, Nancy Blake, Jethro Burns, and
Johnny Gimble. "'Down the Streets of My Old Neighborhood' was my Ukrainian
coming-out party," he laughs. (The album includes "Hey Good Looking" sung in
Ukrainian and a musical recipe for borscht.) And then, of course, there is "The
Mando Boys."
"The Mando Boys," which featured Ostroushko as a member of a sunglasses-wearing
and fez-capped mandolin quartet, is the album that many mandolin aficionados
remember best. Unlike the Modern Mandolin Quartet, whose serious approach to
classical music risks easy dismissal as a weird novelty by mainstream classical
music fans, Ostroushko's quartet took another road. "People said, 'You're
playing classical music -- you should get it on some classical radio stations,'"
Ostroushko remembers. "But I thought we'd always be viewed as a novelty. So we
decided to really make it a novelty act." Alas, the Mando Boys split up several
years ago.
Making inroads in the classical world
But the end of the Mando Boys by no means spelled the end of Ostroushko's
involvement with classical music. In 1994, for example, he took a gig with the
Minnesota Orchestra to play a week of performances of Mahler's Seventh Symphony.
He had to sit on stage for nearly two hours for a mere ten or 15 minutes of
playing mandolin in the fourth movement. "Every night I would sit through the
first three movements trying not to make a sound," he says. "Then I'd play my
movement, and then there would be another one." He liked Mahler's writing for
the mandolin. "There were places where the mandolin is definitely the lead
instrument. Sometimes there isn't a whole lot there, and it isn't that difficult
to play, but it was actually perfect for the instrument. I just figured Mahler
had a brother-in-law who played mandolin and needed some work."
Sitting among the orchestra players, Ostroushko increased his appreciation for
their skills. "I was very amazed at their technical proficiency," he says. "Some
of this music is very difficult to play, some of it isn't, but in a couple of
rehearsals they just nail it. But what I've learned from bringing my own music
into an orchestra setting is that what orchestras can't do is groove. They can't
find a rhythmic pulse and play it. Unless the conductor gets it, no one does.
But these people aren't trained to do that -- they're trained to read what's in
front of them."
Ostroushko greatly enjoyed his April 1995 performances with the Saint Paul
Chamber Orchestra of the 18th-century mandolin concerto by Giovanni Paisiello.
"Even before I knew these concerts were going to happen I started learning the
piece," he says. "I love it so much, I would always have it running in my car
[stereo] when I was going down the road." The Paisiello concerto offers
"techniques that I haven't had to use before," he adds. "I've gotten charged,
and I've noticed that my playing has gotten better since I started working on
this one piece."
In May 1997, Ostroushko returns to the classical concert stage, joining the Saint
Paul Chamber Orchestra in performances of Vivaldi's mandolin concerto and
concerto for viola d'amore and mandola. The orchestra will also play
Ostroushko's own "Prairie Suite."
Building his own instrument
Up until about five years ago, Ostroushko exclusively played old Gibson A-style
mandolins, which he preferred over F-style models because of the darkness and
roundness of their tone. "I had a really nice one that I liked," he says. "But
I got concerned because it is an old instrument, and I was literally wearing it
out playing it so much. I was going to have to bring it into the repair shop for
three or four weeks, which I just couldn't afford to do."
So he began looking for a replacement. "Years ago I met a man named Peter White,
who teaches folklore at the University of New Mexico but also builds violins,
violas and cellos that he sells to orchestral musicians around the world. His
real love, though, is old-time fiddle music. I had him make me four- and
five-string fiddles, and I was in Albuquerque just as he had made some A-model
mandolins, copies of the Gibson. I played some and thought they were very nice.
He told me, 'Well, if you want to come down here in the summertime to spend a
week and do a lot of the grunt work, I will make one for you and you can have it.
If you like it, play it. If you don't, do a Jimi Hendrix on stage with
it.'"
Ostroushko liked it, saving himself from having to splinter a mandolin in public.
He had never before helped anyone build an instrument. Much of the instrument's
great sound, he says, was the result of one of the final processes of
construction. "As a violin maker, Peter uses varnish, not stain or lacquer,"
Ostroushko says. "It's a secret recipe he guards with his life."
A lucky mandolinist
The birth of Ostroushko's daughter, Anna, six years ago refocused his career, he
says. (His wife, Marge, is a producer for Public Radio International.) "Now
that Anna's at the jealous stage, as soon as I pick up the instrument she's right
on me, saying, 'Tato [Ukrainian for 'papa'], hold me.' I know that if I have to
practice something or write some music on a deadline, I only have an hour or two
here and there to do it, and those hours are being used to good purpose -- I'm
not diddling around."
Over the years, through the tough times and nightmarish touring schedules,
Ostroushko has occasionally become discouraged about continuing his career as a
musician. When that happens, he thinks about gigs like one he once played with
Dean Magraw in a small town in Montana. "There were maybe 150 people listening
to us there," he says. "But they were standing up and giving us ovations in the
middle of songs. There's nothing better than that, to be able to go on stage,
to play the music you've written. I think of all the things I could do in life
to make a living, but nothing else is going to move people the way playing music
does. This is what I'm supposed to do, so I do it -- even if it means suffering
through some hard times. I just thank my lucky stars that I can make a living
playing the mandolin."
Jack El-Hai, founder of the Minnesota Mandolin Orchestra, is a freelance journalist who has written for Woman's Day, American Heritage, Westways, Minnesota Monthly, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and many other national and regional publications.
This article originally appeared in Mandolin Quarterly.
Copyright 1996 Jack El-Hai