Featuring a Special Conversation with Craig Havighurst on Musicality for Modern Humans
Casey Driessen has spent twenty-five years proving that a fiddle can go anywhere. Twenty-two countries on four continents. A year traveling with his family through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, and Finland, recording with local masters in whatever room or field or cabin presented itself, documenting everything. Four solo albums. A one-man live looping show called The Singularity. Four years directing a master's program at Berklee College of Music's campus in Valencia. Collaborations with Béla Fleck, Steve Earle, Jerry Douglas, Abigail Washburn, Steve Martin and Martin Short. A GRAMMY nomination. A standardized notation system for the percussive bowing technique known as chopping, which he helped develop and then gave away for free so fiddlers around the world could share a common language. And always, always, the red shoes.
His Sunday Bazaar residency at Little Jumbo is exactly what its name suggests — a market of sound laid out across a single evening, where fiddle loops and global grooves and sonic experiments pile up like goods from distant ports. Driessen builds music in real time using pedals and loops, layering his five-string fiddle into orchestral architecture that can shift from Appalachian melody to Indian raga to Finnish folk tune within the span of a single piece. No two nights sound alike because the whole point is that they shouldn't.
This month, the Bazaar expands to include a conversation with Craig Havighurst, Nashville-based music journalist, broadcaster, and author of the new book Musicality for Modern Humans: How to Listen Like an Artist. Havighurst has spent more than twenty-five years covering the art, commerce, and culture of American music — as a reporter for NPR and the Wall Street Journal, as editorial director of WMOT Roots Radio, as host of the weekly interview show The String, and as the author of Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City. His new book, which Kirkus calls a "warm, wise guide to hearing music — and each other — with renewed clarity," argues that anyone can deepen their relationship with music by learning to listen actively rather than passively, by paying attention to tone, time, and timbre the way a musician does, by resisting the algorithm and rebuilding a musical diet from curiosity rather than habit.
It is, in other words, a book about doing exactly what Little Jumbo asks its audience to do every week — walk into a room, follow your ears, and discover something you weren't expecting. Driessen and Havighurst have known each other for years, and their conversation will move between the ideas in the book and the live demonstration of those ideas happening in real time on the Bazaar stage. What does it mean to listen like an artist? What happens when you sit down with musicians you've never met, in places you've never been, and try to find common ground through sound? How do you stay curious in an age designed to flatten your attention?
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Driessen has never taken the standard path in his music career. Described by Zac Brown as “a mad scientist with a five-string fiddle,” the GRAMMY-nominated fiddle player loves to experiment, collaborate, teach, travel, and push the boundaries of not only his instrument, but of what it means to be an independent working musician in the modern music industry. Currently, that means pouring himself into *[Otherlands: A Global Music Exploration](https://www.caseydriessen.com/otherlands)*. Produced, performed, recorded and filmed by Driessen, Otherlands is a travelogue of on-location recordings, short films, and essays documenting musical collaborations through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, Finland, Italy, Slovakia, and Czechia. Driessen undertook this nearly year-long journey with his family, and the results are a 27-episode video series, a 13-song recording of collaborations titled *[Otherlands:ONE](https://www.caseydriessen.com/otherlands-one)*, stories from each encounter, and hundreds of photos. In the fall of 2024, Driessen launched the annual *[Blue Ridge Fiddle Camp](https://www.blueridgefiddlecamp.com/)* at the Brevard Music Center in Brevard, North Carolina. For fiddlers & violinists of all styles, this immersive four-day experience celebrates individual voice through the exploration of style, rhythm, and technology under the guidance of a world-class faculty. Embracing both tradition and innovation, the camp invites all adventurous and open-minded players of the instrument to come together and shape the future of bowed string playing. Before setting off on his Otherlands adventure, Driessen spent four years as Program Director of the [Contemporary Performance (Production Concentration)](https://valencia.berklee.edu/academic-programs/master-degrees/master-of-music-in-contemporary-studio-performance-2/) master’s degree at Berklee College of Music’s first international campus in Valencia, Spain. While working in Valencia, Casey released *[The Chop Notation Project](http://www.worldofchop.com/)*. Created in partnership with Spanish violinist Oriol Saña, this free resource creates standardized music notation to read and write the percussive bowed string technique known as chopping. Over the past 25 years, Driessen has released four solo records and toured as a one-man live looping show called *[The Singularity](https://www.caseydriessen.com/the-singularity)*; collaborated with Béla Fleck, Bassekou Kouyate, Abigail Washburn, Raghu Dixit, Steve Martin & Martin Short, Jerry Douglas, Steve Earle, Darrell Scott, Tim O’Brien, and others; produced and engineered records; teched, managed stages, tours, and merch; and travelled the world playing music in 22 countries on four continents and counting…all while wearing red shoes.
**Craig Havighurst** has been playing music since he was seven and trying to figure out how it works for almost as long. That second project — the figuring out — turned out to be the one that defined his life. Not because it replaced the playing, but because it led him to a question most musicians never think to ask and most listeners never realize they should: what are you actually hearing when you hear music, and what are you missing? He landed in Nashville in the late 1990s, a journalist drawn to a city that runs on sound the way other cities run on finance or government. As staff music writer for the Tennessean from 2000 to 2004, he won the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. He reported for NPR, for WPLN-FM, for the Wall Street Journal, for Acoustic Guitar and No Depression. He wrote *Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City*, a book that documented for the first time how a single radio station — launched by an insurance company in 1925 — transformed Nashville's identity and, with it, the trajectory of American popular music. The Wall Street Journal called it a service to history, a reminder that giants once lived on the radio dial. The University of Illinois Press published it. It remains the definitive account. Then he helped build a radio show. Music City Roots launched in 2009 from the Loveless Cafe on the outskirts of Nashville with Emmylou Harris as the first headliner and Havighurst as the on-air journalist and interviewer, seated alongside host Jim Lauderdale and announcer Keith Bilbrey. The show became a nationally syndicated weekly broadcast, a PBS television series distributed by American Public Television, and for nearly a decade one of the most important platforms for Americana, bluegrass, folk, gospel, and roots music in the country. Havighurst was its senior producer and co-host until the show's original team was forced out in 2021. By then he had already moved into his current role as editorial director of WMOT Roots Radio 89.5 FM, where he hosts *The String*, a weekly interview show covering culture, media, and American music. He also co-hosts *The Old Fashioned*, which airs Saturdays and Tuesdays. The station — a 100,000-watt NPR affiliate owned by Middle Tennessee State University — had been languishing in last place in Nashville's market ratings before adopting the Roots Radio format that Havighurst and his colleagues helped build. Within one quarter, it climbed from forty-third to the top twenty. All of that work — the newspaper years, the radio station history, the live broadcast, the hundreds of interviews with everyone from Marcus King to the Po' Ramblin' Boys — feeds into his new book, *Musicality for Modern Humans: How to Listen Like an Artist*, published by the Sager Group in the fall of 2025. Kirkus named it one of the most anticipated nonfiction books of spring 2026 and called it a warm, wise guide to hearing music and each other with renewed clarity. Béla Fleck wrote that Havighurst reminds us we all have the potential to participate in the flight of great music. The book is part memoir, part manifesto, part ear-training companion. It begins with Havighurst's own formative encounters — a high school orchestra, a listening booth at the British Museum where he first heard Wagner and felt sound rearrange something in his body — and moves outward into a tour of music's fundamental elements: tone, harmony, rhythm, timbre. It argues that Americans have drifted into passive, algorithm-guided listening habits that have narrowed our collective musical diet, and that the remedy isn't expertise but attention. Learning to listen for harmonic motion, melodic contours, the texture and color of specific instruments — what Havighurst calls the difference between listening to music and listening for something in music — is a practice available to anyone. It doesn't require a degree. It requires the willingness to sit in a room, put down the phone, and let sound do what it was designed to do. Havighurst positions himself in the lineage of Leonard Bernstein, Wynton Marsalis, and Billy Taylor — public figures who believed that musical literacy was a civic good, that helping people hear more deeply was a form of cultural stewardship. He fills a void, he argues, left by the retreat of music education from public schools and the disappearance of thoughtful music criticism from the mainstream press. His instrument is the question — asked of the musicians he interviews, asked of the listeners he addresses, asked of himself every time he sits down to write about why a particular arrangement or performance or three-note phrase made him feel something he can't quite name but refuses to leave unexamined.
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