Joshua Bell Makes Friends

Grammy Award winning-violinist Joshua Bell may play a Stradivarius that dates from the early 18th Century, but there’s a decidedly 21st-century vibe to his newest CD, At Home With Friends, in which he’s paired with Tony Award winners Kristin Chenoweth and Marvin Hamlisch, pop singers Sting and Regina Spektor, operatic heart throb Josh Groban, and jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, among other artists.

The selections on the disc are as diverse as the colleagues with whom Bell is performing. On Friends, Rodgers and Hart brush up against Rachmaninoff, George Gerswhin, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. For Bell, the source of the music he plays isn’t all that important: “There is high quality music and then there’s not,” he says, pointing to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story as an example of the former. “It’s called a musical but I think of it as an opera — a 20th-century version of opera. It’s just a matter of labeling.”

Bell credits Chenoweth, his one-time girlfriend, for some of his knowledge of musical theater. “We were dating for about a year back in 2001 and she brought me into her world.” The two performed “My Funny Valentine” for a television special — and as he was putting this album together, he decided to give it another shot. “I thought it would be a perfect place to put that song where we already had that collaboration,” he notes.

Bell’s personal musical tastes extend well beyond the realms of classical and Broadway music. “I didn’t listen to a lot of rock music growing up, but there certainly was the Beatles,” he notes. “I always loved them, so I included ‘Eleanor Rigby’.” In addition to the lads from Liverpool, the pop group Genesis is another Bell favorite. “They’re both so classical in their basis. It seemed like my language and that’s why I gravitated to them,” he notes.

Bell also explains how Regina Spektor came to be on Friends with her “Left Hand Song”: “She heard about the CD and said she’d like to be on there. We jumped into the studio and I made an arrangement.”

The process of making the disc has given Bell something of a new vocabulary when it comes to recording. “Obviously I learn from each of these people. It’s a different way of recording than what I’m used to,” he says. “I tend to know very precisely what I’m going to be doing when I walk into the studio. This was a lot more improvisational; it was sort of liberating.”

In many ways, he says that the arrangements for the pieces were “sort of works-in-progress.” For example, he points to the opening track on the disc, “I Loves You Porgy,” which he performs with Botti. “He always liked the Keith Jarrett version which I haven’t heard, and so we played with it and ended up changing it quite a bit. It ended up as an arrangement of an arrangement.”

Looking toward the future, Bell doesn’t count out the possibility of a second disc like Friends, mentioning that there are artists with whom he would still like to work, including Branford Marsalis, Paul McCartney, and Peter Gabriel. Bell also says that the collaborations from Friends may become part of future concerts, including one he’s giving as part of Live from Lincoln Center in January. “I’m trying to get as many of these people to come,” he says.