Don Julin

He took up the mandolin in 1979, at nineteen, after hearing the first David Grisman Quintet album, and he was studying music theory at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City at the time. Jazz came to him through Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and while most beginners were learning “Soldier’s Joy,” he was trying to play Charlie Parker heads on the mandolin. With classmates drawn to the reggae, ska, punk and jazz on the college radio station he formed the Microtones, for which he switched to a Fender Stratocaster; the band made two singles and spent several years playing college-town clubs around the Midwest.

Around 1988 he settled down in Traverse City and picked the mandolin up again, playing whatever music he could find work for, including electric mandolin with loud bands and jazz combos, running a small demo studio, mixing live sound for other bands and teaching mandolin at a local music store. For about twenty-four years he stayed close to home. His recordings from this period include the albums of Big Swifty & Associates (1993 and 1998), Brite Lights, Big Insects (1999) with Glenn Wolff, and three albums with the Neptune Quartet: Lonesome Cactus Groove (2002), The Great Thaw (2004) and Live at Poppycock’s (2006). His compositions have been used in programs on HBO, VH1, MTV, NBC, Bravo and National Geographic, among others. He attended the Mandolin Symposium in Santa Cruz, California, as a student in 2009 and was invited back in 2011 to lead its nightly swing and jazz jams, sharing a stage there with Grisman.

Wiley approached him in 2011 to write Mandolin For Dummies, published in 2012. He recorded its audio tracks in his basement studio and drew on other players for particular chapters: Grisman proofread the chapter on Dawg music, and Rich DelGrosso, Marla Fibish and Mike Compton contributed to the chapters on blues, Irish and bluegrass mandolin. A second book, Mandolin Exercises For Dummies, followed in 2014.

William Apostol, who plays as Billy Strings, moved to Traverse City after finishing high school in 2011, and in 2012 Julin asked him to join him on a paying gig. Apostol’s knowledge of traditional bluegrass and Doc Watson’s guitar style turned Julin toward the music that had first drawn him to the instrument, and to the mandolin styles of Bill Monroe, Frank Wakefield and Grisman. The duo played a regular Thursday-night gig in Traverse City and made two albums: Rock of Ages (Pygmy, 2013), with Julin’s instrumental “Kickin’ Mule,” and the self-released Fiddle Tune X (2014), recorded around one microphone, on which Julin plays mandolin and tenor banjo and wrote “The String Changing Tune” and the title track. By late 2014 they had signed with a booking agency and were touring full time, and that November they opened for David Grisman and Del McCoury at City Winery in New York. They parted early in 2016, when Strings moved to Nashville.

Afterwards Julin played in Traverse City pianist Jeff Haas’s jazz quartet and in the reggae band Eye Ham Wes, led his own instrumental acoustic group, Don Julin’s Mr. Natural Project, and taught through camps and workshops in Michigan, Missouri and Kansas, including Wheatland Music Camp, and through Mandolins Heal the World, his online mandolin school. He recorded Live 2018 with the Don Julin Quartet and Tractor II, a set of thirteen originals; in February 2020 he and the mandolinist Tim Connell were playing twin-mandolin concerts of jazz, fiddle tunes, Brazilian music and originals, and the two recorded the album Cabin Fever. His album Fractured Fiddle Tunes (2024) was made with Kevin Gills, Joe Wilson and Will Harris, with John Mailander and Ron Getz among the guests.