Randy Sabien
Randy Sabien (; born September 26, 1956) is an American jazz violinist, composer, and music educator known for his live performances and numerous recordings, many of them on Flying Fish Records and Red House Records. At the age of 21 he founded and chaired the Jazz Strings department at Boston's Berklee College of Music and since 2009 has been the chair of the Strings department of McNally Smith College of Music. Life and career. Sabien was born in North Carolina while his father was in the US Army as a dentist. After his tour of duty, the family  settled in Rockford, Illinois. Sabien, originally a drummer, took up the violin to fill a gap in his local youth orchestra and developed his love for jazz after hearing the jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli. Sabien studied classical music at the University of Illinois combined with performing as a country/rock fiddler before enrolling at Berklee College of Music in 1977. The following year, at age 21, he founded and chaired Berklee's Jazz Strings department. He left Berklee after three years to record and tour, eventually settling in Hayward, Wisconsin. In the early 1980s he performed with and produced three  albums for folk singer-songwriter, Jim Post and founded the Randy Sabien Jazz Quintet. He went on to provide violin, mandolin, guitar and piano accompaniment for many other American singer/songwriters as well as recording his own albums. His first solo album with the Randy Sabien Jazz Quintet, "In a Fog", was released in 1983 on Flying Fish Records, and later re-released on Fiddlehead Music, the label he founded in 1989. His most recent solo album "Rhythm and Bows" was released in late 2007. May 1980 marked the first of Sabien's several appearances over the next 25 years  on Garrison Keillor's radio series "A Prairie Home Companion" where he played in the show's The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band. His concert with the Fiddlehead Band at the Grand Theater in Wausau, Wisconsin was broadcast on Wisconsin Public Television in 2012 as was a thirty-minute background feature, "On the Road: Randy Sabien & Mike Dowling" with Sabien and Dowling performing "Long Tall Mama" in an "impromptu acoustic jam". Since the 1980s Sabien has combined performing and composing with conducting workshops for schools, music camps, and youth orchestras. His educational video and jazz clinic "Jazz: What it  is" was released in 1990. He has also co-authored with Bob Philips, the text book and teachers' manual series "Jazz Philharmonic: Making jazz easy in the string orchestra". (Alfred Publishing Co., 2000). In 2009 he was appointed chair of the Strings department of McNally Smith College of Music. He continues to perform both as a guest soloist and with his Fiddlehead Band.