Five Questions For Tony DeMarco
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By Denise Foley
If you’ve ever been to a session at New York’s Paddy Reilly’s Music Bar or the 11th Street Bar in the Village, you’ve seen and heard Tony DeMarco on fiddle. He’s played Paddy Reilly’s every Thursday night for 17 years, almost as long at the 11th Street. He shows up sometime after the nap that separates his stressful day job from his mellower hobby.
For more than two decades, DeMarco, 50, has earned his living as a commodities trader at the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT), where cocoa, coffee, cotton, sugar, and frozen orange juice deals are made with shouts and hand signals—a system known as open outcry, the business version of a brawl—in a room called the trading pit. Traders can make millions a year, or lose $100,000 in an hour. It’s no place for sissies.
But when the evening starts cresting that downhill slope toward tomorrow, DeMarco is in a bar, taking out his fiddle, tucking it under his chin, and coaxing out the melodic, foot-tapping sound of County Sligo in between pints. (See: What Is Sligo-Style Fiddling, Anyway?)
The bar may be just as noisy as the pit, but the pay pales in comparison to what he makes “screamin’ ‘n yellin’ all day.” So for now, although he’s been called “one of America’s finest folk fiddlers,” music is still a hobby. “It’s more like something fun,” he says. “If I didn’t make money at it I would still go out and do it.”
But De Marco is serious about his fun. He’s performed and recorded with other Irish musicians like Bronx-born fiddler Brian Conway (which led to their 1981 recording The Apple in Winter: Irish Music in New York); Kips Bay Ceili Band, Celtic Thunder, The Flying Cloud, and Black 47. He even spent the summer of 1976 playing with and learning from native musicians in County Sligo. And a few years ago, he took both his professions to the Smithsonian Institute’s Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.—doing mock trades for an audience in a simulated trading pit, then, a few hours later, hopping on stage to play reels and jigs on his fiddle. In the works: a solo CD, maybe sometime this summer.
If you can’t make it to New York, you can hear Tony DeMarco at the Philadelphia Irish Center on Friday, May 19, where he’ll be playing with his friend Ivan Goff, a virtuoso of the uilleann pipes. (Visit his MySpace site, which features some great sound files and video.)
We recently caught up with DeMarco, who splits his time between a home in the Poconos and a Manhattan apartment, after a hard morning in the pit.
OK, let’s get it right out there: What’s a nice Italian guy like you from Brooklyn doing hanging around Irish bars playing the fiddle?
My mother is Patricia Dempsey, so that’s the Irish part there. [Laughing] Her father was an Irish cop in N.Y., Jimmy Dempsey. There’s a big Irish-Italian connection in Brooklyn—East Flatbush—which is where I’m from. They’re all Catholics and they all went to same parish churches. And this goes way back. My mother’s mother was Italian, and she and most her sisters married Irish guys. My parents and grandparents are all Irish-Italian.
Italians are as well known for music as the Irish. Where did you get your interest and your gift?
Mostly, as far as I know, from my mother’s Irish side, My uncle Louie was a good doo-wop singer in the '50s. Dickie Dell and the Ding Dongs was one of the groups he was with. What a name, eh? [laughing]
How did you get started with the fiddle?
I picked it up in my last year in high school as a requirement for graduation. I fell into it by chance. I never planned to play violin. I just needed a class to get out. A guitar player friend talked me into taking lessons in country and blue grass, so I did. The Appalachian stuff was having a revival then. After that I got into the bluesy rock fusion guys like Jerry Goodman (Mahavishnu Orchestra) and Papa John Creech (Jefferson Airplane). Then I met [Irish fiddle legend] Paddy Reynolds, who lived around the corner from me. I actually met him in the park. He came by walking his dog and I was practicing fiddle on the bench. He took me to his house and taught me jigs and reels. (He passed away last summer; he was 84. ) After that, I started playing with a lot of the Irish groups around the city. I met and played with Brian Conway and Andy McGann [a master of the Sligo fiddle who played with Michael Coleman, the father of N.Y.’s Sligo fiddling tradition, and noted Philadelphia fiddler Ed Reavy]. And I started doing the sessions.
You’ve been playing at Paddy Reilly’s for 17 years—has Irish music been popular in New York that long?
Now, sessions are hip. But when I started, a lot of bars didn’t want Irish trad music. They all wanted ballad singers and guys who did a little bit of country and rock and mixed it in with the Irish. Then 10-15 years ago, the whole Riverdance stuff kicked it in the ass and put a little Emeril “Bam!” on it. There are now six sessions on Sunday night in the Village and Midtown. The 11th Street is like a musician’s bar. Little Stevie [Steve Van Zandt, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and a star of HBO’s mob opera, The Sopranos] dropped in one night with his leopard jacket and do-rag. I was playing and he came by and said hi. Nickel Creek’s mandolin player Chris Thile just moved to the Village—he’s a monster player who sits in. [Country star] Steve Earle also came in and played with me. I’m eclectic. I started with rock, blues, country. That’s one of the reasons the 11th Street got me to do a session. They wanted someone who could branch it out and play with the folk and bluegrass performers.
If you’re at the 11th Street every Sunday night, then you don’t get to watch Little Steven play Silvio, Tony’s right-hand man, on The Sopranos.
[Laughs} I’d rather be in an Irish bar, drinking beer and playing the fiddle. It’s better than staying home and watching The Sopranos. I love it! They can keep their cannolis and wine!
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