Forced to pick up string instruments, Black Violin finds passion blending classics with hip-hop

When Kevin “Kev Marcus” Sylvester picked up a violin, it was hardly love at first sight.

Sylvester is the violin-playing half of the classical-meets-hip-hop duo Black Violin, playing Tuesday in Olympia.

As many young musicians do, he started on the violin at his mom’s suggestion. He liked playing well enough and liked the friends he made in orchestra, but he didn’t imagine making music his career.

“I hadn’t fallen in love with it,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It was just something that I did.”

He kept on doing it, successfully enough to win a full scholarship to Florida International University. It was then he and high school friend Wilner “Wil B” Baptiste, now Black Violin’s violist, begin experimenting with adding hip-hop to music they were making.

“When I started making hip-hop beats and blending classical with the hip-hop, it was the first time it felt like the instrument was mine,” Sylvester said. “Before that, it felt like it was my teacher’s or my mom’s. It felt like it was Bach’s or Mozart’s.

“When I started making hip-hop beats and playing my violin or my viola on top of it, that’s when I really fell in love with it, and I never wanted to put it down.”

These days, classical-pop fusions are ubiquitous, but in the early 2000s, it was something new.

“We had heard no one else do it,” he said. “YouTube didn’t exist. Twitter didn’t exist. MySpace was just starting. We’d never seen anything like that.”

It took Baptiste and Sylvester a while to get established, and they surprised a lot of audiences along the way.

“People’s minds would just be blown,” he said. “You’d just look at their faces. No one had seen anything like that.”

It made it hard to get gigs, he said.

“Can you imagine: ‘Hey, I’ve got these guys; they’re really cool. I want them to perform at your party or your theater.’ ‘What do they do?’ ‘Oh, it’s two black guys playing violin.’ ‘I don’t know about that.’ ”

Given that, the origins of the band name might seem obvious, but there’s a bit more to it. “Black Violin” was the title of a 1965 album by African American jazz violinist Stuff Smith, who’s among the duo’s musical inspirations.

Eighteen years later, they’ve released three successful albums — with the latest, 2015’s “Stereotypes,” on Universal — and collaborated with Wu-Tang Clan, Wyclef Jean and Alicia Keys. In 2013, they performed at President Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Ball. They’ve sold out many shows, though tickets are available for the Olympia performance.

The duo plays mostly original music, but their unexpected covers have gotten them plenty of attention.

“The highlight of not only the concert, but of what Black Violin can do, was the duo’s hip-hop cover of Brandenburg Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach,” William Powell wrote in a 2016 review for DC Metro Theater Arts. “Starting low volume, low energy, Black Violin’s cover exploded into a majestic mushroom cloud of hip-hop beats and classical strings.”

As they start thinking about their next album, Baptiste and Sylvester are still aiming to surprise.

“What we’re always trying to do is find a cool way to create an emotional response and take a road sonically that most people haven’t heard,” Sylvester said.

This story was originally published March 24, 2017 at 6:34 AM with the headline "Forced to pick up string instruments, Black Violin finds passion blending classics with hip-hop."