Jeff Midkiff
Jeff Midkiff is a mandolinist, clarinetist and composer from Roanoke, Virginia, who played mandolin and fiddle in the Lonesome River Band from 1983, on its first two albums, and later wrote the mandolin concerto From the Blue Ridge, first performed by the Roanoke Symphony in 2011.
A neighbor, Sherman Poff, gave him his first mandolin, and at seven he began lessons at a local music store with Mabel Musalino, who taught him to read music, before learning by ear from the bluegrass mandolinist Dempsey Young. A year later he was playing in bands of his own and entering fiddlers’ conventions. In middle school, where there was band but no orchestra, he took up the clarinet, and he went on to study music education at Virginia Tech, graduating in 1985.
He joined the Lonesome River Band, organized in 1982 by the guitarist Tim Austin, in 1983, touring with it in summers and other breaks from college. On the band’s first record, I Guess Heartaches Are in Style This Year (Shar-Lin, 1985), he played mandolin and fiddle and sang with Austin and the bassist Jerry McMillan, with Billy Wheeler on banjo and Dobro, and he played mandolin on its first album for Rebel, The Lonesome River Band (1986), with Austin, Brian Fesler on banjo and McMillan. He then left to earn a master’s degree in clarinet performance at Northern Illinois University, and Adam Steffey replaced him for the band’s 1988 album.
Since then he has divided his time between the clarinet and the mandolin. He has played clarinet in orchestras and mandolin with the Milwaukee Symphony, recorded a solo album, Partners in Time, and directed orchestras in the Roanoke City Schools; in 2017 he received Yale’s Distinguished Music Educator award.
In 2010 he took the idea of a mandolin concerto to David Stewart Wiley, music director of the Roanoke Symphony, which commissioned From the Blue Ridge, a work in three movements, and gave its premiere in 2011. Midkiff has since played it more than twenty times with orchestras including the Rochester Philharmonic, the Jacksonville and Knoxville symphonies and the Boulder Philharmonic, with which he performed it at the Kennedy Center during the SHIFT Festival in 2017, and on 23 July 2023 he played it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Wilkins at Tanglewood. He arranged the concerto for mandolin and string quartet as his First Quintet (2015) and wrote a Second Quintet, premiered in 2017; his recording with the Carpe Diem String Quartet, Jeff Midkiff: Music for Mandolin and String Quartet, won a Global Music Awards gold medal, and the quintet played at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 2019.
