📰 Inside CDN 05/04/26

From the editor’s desk: Work long enough as a journalist, and chances are you’ll experience one of the rare side benefits: occasional brushes with greatness.

City editor: "Does anyone want to go to the fairgrounds to interview Johnny Cash?" Well, I'm sort of busy here, but ... OK. And so on. Like any person with a brain, I have tried to take advantage of those chances as often as possible.

While sadly not an interview occasion, my column in Cascadia Daily News took a decidedly different turn this past week when I wrote about watching Yo-Yo Ma perform on April 26 at the Mount Baker Theatre.

The amazing sellout performance, surely an arts-world highlight for our hometown, made my mind zoom back a couple decades when I wound up hanging out in Nashville with another string-music prodigy, violinist Mark O’Connor, reporting a profile piece for Pacific NW Magazine in The Seattle Times.

O’Connor, a Mountlake Terrace native, then did (and still does) things with a violin that few other humans can do. Not unlike Yo-Yo Ma, whose grace and fluidity with his own instrument are perhaps unmatched. As an obsessive fan — but by absolutely no means practitioner — of many musical genres, both subjects fascinated me for reasons I suspect draw readers to them as well.

It’s basically the nature of genius.

How does a person who is better at something than anyone else on the planet come to be that? And how does it shape the person they become, in “ordinary life?” (My favorite movie as a young punk was “Amadeus.” It sort of still is.) I’ve always found those questions fascinating, and they shaped much of my previous work as a feature writer.

That time spent with O’Connor came with its own bonus: many introductions to a string of iconic musicians. It’s not every day one gets to have a drink with Sam Bush, sit down by a warm fire on Nashville's Music Row and pick the brain of the late Chet Atkins, or run into — and explore possible familial ties with — The Judds at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.

At the time in the 1990s, O’Connor was shifting from one of Nashville’s most-sought sessions players in a variety of genres to a composer, crafting his own violin concerto, which he later performed with various symphony orchestras. He also was beginning a successful strings collaboration with other accomplished string players, including bassist Edgar Meyer, dobro master Jerry Douglas and … wait for it: Yo-Yo Ma. That collaboration created its own magic, evident on recordings such as the 1996 “Appalachia Waltz” and “Appalachian Journey” in 2000.

Given that, a small personal circle felt somehow complete for me a week ago Sunday when the latter of those four geniuses stepped on stage at the hallowed MBT. It was an amazing coup for the Bellingham Symphony Orchestra. If you missed it, you can read my thoughts here.

Bham was abuzz, of course, with tales by ordinary folks with Yo-Yo encounters. One passed along to me by conductor and BSO Music Director Yaniv Attar: Before the concert, Ma was backstage in a group of members of the symphony chorus in a pre-performance ritual of dropping sentiments on slips of paper into a bowl. Yo-Yo, wanting to participate, handed his cello to the nearest person: his driver for the day.

Attar, noting the driver holding the instrument sort of casually, asked him: “You know that’s a $5 million cello, right?”

He wasn't really exaggerating. Attar doesn’t think it was the fabled 1712 "Davidov" Stradivarius cello that Ma often plays in baroque music concerts and recordings. (That priceless instrument was famously left in a New York City cab one day in 1999, only to be safely returned.) But any instrument in the virtuoso's collection is likely to be of extremely high value not only for its provenance, but for the fact that he’s simply played it.

The driver handed it back safely, likely to the relief of everyone's insurance brokers.

Color me unsurprised that the results of last week’s Inside CDN Highly Unscientific Poll showed what similar polls likely would have shown here for the past 30 years.

Bellingham folks, given choices about what they’d like to see in the long-long-long-promised central waterfront redevelopment, keep saying the same thing: “grass, trees, saltwater access.”

That choice was the overwhelming winner in the poll, with trailing votes for more light industry, a back-9 for the putt-putt golf course, and a rooftop bar with more than five seats. Thanks to all who voted. And keep sticking to your guns, folks.

Don't forget to check out our enterprise series on waterfront developments around the Northwest, Sea Change, by reporter Annie Todd and visual journalist Santiago Ochoa. It launched last week at cascadiadaily.com and in our Friday print edition.

Thanks for supporting your independent local free press. It matters!

Washington State Standard: "Democrats renew calls for US Supreme Court overhaul after voting rights decision," by Jonathan Shorman. It has come to this with the SCOTUS.

TheBreaker.news: "Welcome back, FIFA: A natural fit with Vancouver." Natural in a decidedly not good way, says veteran Van pot-stirrer Mackin, who covered the FIFA Congress this past week alongside CDN's own World Cup correspondent, Elliott Almond.

Sony Classical: "Appalachia Waltz," (1996, CD); see above. It seemed timely to hear this trio of greats whiz through some original compositions and do things with a simple Irish jig that really shouldn't be possible.