Grant Flick & Ethan Setiawan in the Speakeasy!
Bob Midden
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Grant Flick is a performer, recording artist, composer, educator, and collaborator currently based in Ann Arbor, MI. He plays many instruments including violin, mandolin, tenor guitar, nyckelharpa, tenor banjo, and viola. Primarily, his interests are new acoustic music, jazz manouche, jazz/swing, bluegrass, and American old-time. His current original music projects, Westbound Situation, Warren & Flick, and Hannah O’Brien and Grant Flick, explore the fusion of chamber music with the influences listed above. In these groups, he writes pieces influenced from many styles that feature the collective spontaneity and imagination of the fellow improvisatory musicians with whom he collaborates. Examples of his writing can be heard on “Accord” (Westbound Situation), “Tomorrow Worries About Itself” (Grant Flick), “Windward” (Hannah O’Brien and Grant Flick), and “Waxwing” (Warren & Flick). Grant has received numerous music awards including the 2013 Daniel Pearl Memorial Violin. He was a finalist in the 2015 Walnut Valley Festival Fiddle Competition in Winfield, Kansas, as well as the 2017 Freshgrass Fiddle Competition in North Adams, Massachusetts. Additionally, several competitive collegiate awards and grants for improvisation, acoustic chamber music inventiveness, and music education have been presented to his original groups in the past few years. Grant has been selected as a two-time participant (2015 and 2016) of the Acoustic Music Seminar held at the Savannah Music Festival in Savannah, Georgia. He has taught workshops at numerous camps throughout American including Augusta Bluegrass Week, Charm City Django Fest, the Tenor Guitar Gathering, and River of the West Mandolin Camp. Grant also tours and performs regularly and has played at many music festivals including Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, ROMP Fest, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and the Savannah Music Festival. Frank Vignola, Mike Marshall, Julian Lage, and Darol Anger are just some of the notable musicians with whom Grant has appeared on stage. Grant recently completed a Master’s degree at University of Michigan in Improvisation.
Ethan Setiawan has a command of the mandolin far beyond his twenty-some-odd years, and has won both the National Mandolin Championship at Winfield, KS and the Rockygrass Mandolin Championship. Named “creative and virtuosic” by WBUR, his path has wended its way through traditional bluegrass, to Bach partitas, to free jazz. On his new album, “Gambit”, Setiawan takes the calculated musical risks of a seasoned player. He moves aptly between stylistic influences, harkening back to the experimental string band music pioneered in the early 80s while presenting entirely original compositions.
Setiawan was one of three children who were all homeschooled by folk-loving parents, so his childhood was untraditional, and full of exploration. “As a teenager, I loved the idea of going to jams and having this community of people I could hang out with”, he explains. He began driving to Chicago to take lessons with Don Stiernberg, and traveled to California to attend The Mandolin Symposium. After finishing high school, Setiawan attended Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship. “I think I came into Berklee as a very technically oriented musician, but just being exposed to so many different styles and incredible musicians really broadened my musical horizons, and gave me a deeper understanding of artistry and musicality beyond technical proficiency”, he explains.