Casey Driessen

He was born in Minnesota and was ten when the family moved to the Chicago area. His father played banjo and pedal steel at home, took him to festivals and put a fiddle in his hands; he played in the school orchestra but never had a classical teacher, learning instead at fiddle camps. His models were the bluegrass fiddlers Byron Berline, Vassar Clements, Bobby Hicks, Kenny Baker, Stuart Duncan and Mark O’Connor. He took the chop from Darol Anger, who had learned it from its inventor, Richard Greene, and it became central to his playing.

Driessen graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2000 with a degree in music production and engineering and moved to Nashville. There he toured with Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Jerry Douglas, Jim Lauderdale and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, played with Steve Earle and the Bluegrass Dukes, and fiddled on four tracks of Crooked Still’s Shaken by a Low Sound (2006). In 2005 he joined Washburn, Fleck and the cellist Ben Sollee in the Sparrow Quartet, which toured China and Tibet in November 2006 and made the album Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet (2008).

His first solo album, 3D, produced by Jason Lehning and recorded in January 2006, came out on Sugar Hill on 12 May 2006, with Scott, O’Brien, Douglas, Fleck, the bassist Viktor Krauss and the percussionist Jamey Haddad among the players, and set fiddle tunes such as “Sally in the Garden” and “Done Gone” beside “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Its version of “Jerusalem Ridge” was nominated for Best Country Instrumental Performance at the 49th Grammy Awards. Oog (2009), an instrumental album, followed, and he also led a trio with the bassist Matt Mangano. On The Singularity (2013) he made every sound himself with his voice and fiddle loops, and he toured it as a one-man live-looping show; with the video series Fiddle/Sticks he recorded duets with drummers and percussionists.

In 2015 Berklee named him director of the master’s program in contemporary performance (production concentration) at its campus in Valencia, Spain, a post he held for four years; while there he published The Chop Notation Project with the Spanish violinist Oriol Saña, a free system for writing chop strokes in standard notation. Between 2019 and May 2020 he traveled with his family through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan and Finland, recording with local musicians, and released the results as Otherlands: an album, Otherlands:ONE, with short films and essays.

Now based in Asheville, North Carolina, he started the annual Blue Ridge Fiddle Camp at the Brevard Music Center in the fall of 2024. As of mid-2025 he was touring with Tony Trischka and playing with Woody Platt as the Bluegrass Gentlemen, a group formed to work with Steve Martin and Martin Short, and in 2026 he sat in with the Dave Matthews Band in Charlotte on 16 May and at Forest Hills Stadium in New York on 10 June.