Chris Thile says he fell in love with music before he could talk. The song was “The Girl from Ipanema,” and when he heard João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz on the track — singing in Portuguese and English and playing the saxophone — he remembers feeling like he understood all three, he said.
“This is me at the very beginning stages of learning English, I suppose, where the sax playing made as much sense as the English, made as much sense as the Portuguese,” he told GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Siegel ahead of a show in Worcester Friday. “It's emblazoned in my inner ear.”
Thile, a mandolin player and singer-songwriter, has covered a wide range of musical styles over his career. On the Minnesota Public Radio show "Live From Here," he and the band Punch Brothers covered contemporary artists like The Strokes.
On his current tour, he’s performing with The Knights, an orchestral collective. In one piece, a double violin concerto, he plays the part of a second violin, but performed on his mandolin.
“I'm a voracious listener, and so when I hear something I love, you know, it's going to come out on the mandolin because that's my voice,” he said. “If you hear a piece of music that intrigues you, it behooves you to learn it to the extent that you can deliver it as if it were yours. And that'll add colors to your palette as you go about creating your own music.”
He picked up the mandolin by “pure happenstance,” he said.
“My parents started attending this weekly bluegrass jam at a pizza place in Southern California. And the mandolin player in that jam was uniquely charismatic,” he said. “If that dude played kazoo, I'd be a kazoo player.”
One piece concert-goers can expect is “Attention,” an original composition about Thile’s favorite story to tell.
“It’s the story of me meeting Carrie Fisher, the actor, at a rooftop party in San Diego,” he said. “It was a crazy experience. I ended up playing her theme for her. That's the best story I have. When it's story time, you know, you're two rounds in at a good cocktail bar and people would trot out stories, that's the one I'm going to trot out if I haven't already told it.”
One piece of music Thile does not usually play: “The Girl from Ipenema.”
“I don't know if I've ever actually performed it,” he said. “But of course I plucked around on it.”
