Fiddle Fever stood out as one of string band music’s most varied ensembles. Fronted by the fiddling of Matt Glaser, Evan Stover, and Jay Unger, the group also featured Russ Barenberg’s precise acoustic flatpicking and Molly Mason’s upright bass lines, weaving together bluegrass, older folk traditions, Cajun two-steps, and Western swing. Their final release, Waltz of the Wind, even contained the atmospheric instrumental “Icelandic Hymn,” built around a theme by Icelandic composer Thorkell Sigurbjornsson.
The five musicians first assembled in New York’s Greenwich Village, where they formed a collective of leading contemporary bluegrass performers. Unger, who played fiddle and mandolin, and Stover, who handled fiddle and viola, had both appeared in David Bromberg’s band during the late 1970s. Glaser, equally fluent on fiddle and piano in both Bill Monroe-style bluegrass and Django Reinhardt-inspired swing, had performed with the Central Park Sheiks. Barenberg, credited with guitar, fiddle, percussion, and mandolin, had previously worked with Country Cooking and had already collaborated with Glaser in the New York All-Stars and Breakfast Special. In 1977, Barenberg and Glaser joined banjoist Tony Trischka to launch the short-lived newgrass outfit Heartlands.
Although promising, Fiddle Fever lasted only four years before dissolving soon after Barenberg relocated to Nashville. Glaser later took the post of chairman of the string department at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Unger and Mason, who eventually married, kept performing together as a duo.
Seven years after the band’s breakup, Fiddle Fever reached its widest audience when the recording of Unger’s instrumental “Ashokan Farewell,” originally cut for their second album Waltz of the Wind, served as the theme for Ken Burns’s 1991 PBS series The Civil War. Unger had drawn the melody from the fiddle and dance workshops the members led at the Ashokan camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
