Last time we saw Cora Venus Lunny she was a classical violinist. Now she's cooler than a thermos full of ice cubes and playing experimental gigs in Dublin's Sugar Club. What happened? asks Arminta Wallace
Cora Venus Lunny is curled into a tub chair, talking about musical improvisation, and why it's one of her favourite things to do. She's one of the few classically-trained musicians I've ever heard say such a thing. She's also the only person I've ever seen look totally at ease in a tub chair. "Coming from a classical background, you're not encouraged to improvise," she explains, curling her legs casually beneath her like a denim-clad cat.
"Well, no, actually," she corrects herself, "it's not that anybody says, Don't improvise, or you will be banned." Her voice is quick, bright, lightly frosted with American intonation. "It's more that you grow up with composers like Shostakovich and Schubert and Bach floating round in your head, so you go, Why would I even bother doing anything that comes out of the top of my head when there's that? That's the point. But improvisation is a different thing altogether. It's about the moment. It's like cooking. You get out all the stuff you have in the cupboard, and then someone goes, Oh, look what I bought today - try that. And you make something absolutely amazing. It isn't cordon bleu, but it's really yummy and gorgeous and perfect for that day with the bottle of wine you already have."
Such will be the vibe at the Sugar Club this weekend when Lunny takes to the stage in the company of a classical cellist and a jazz bassist to cook up a storm using the somewhat unorthodox ingredients of Bach, Ravel and the modern Jewish jazz composer John Zorn. For someone who began her musical career as a violin prodigy in the traditional classical mould, this is so far outside the box it isn't even on the envelope. How did Lunny get from playing Mozart with the Ulster Orchestra at the Waterfront Hall to doing her own gig at the Sugar Club?
She thinks for a moment. "It might have been Nigel Kennedy, actually," she offers. "I was invited to play at a session with him in Dingle a couple of years ago. We were supposed to play Bartok duos together, and I was totally down with that - but I was, like, I'm not going to take part in any of those jazz things because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm gonna show myself up. But then afterwards everybody was heading to the pub, and I thought, I want to go there. I want to see what's going to happen."
What happened was that Kennedy invited her to tour Poland and Germany with him, playing Jewish klezmer and Vivaldi concertos - and taking part in "the jazz things", big-time. In fact, she says, she learned as much from those post-concert, late-night jam sessions as she had from studying, from the age of 13, with the most respected classical violin teachers in Europe. "I learned about being more free with yourself as a musician," she says. "I realised that you don't have to do what other people have done, or follow some particular path. You can choose your own way."
It's perhaps not surprising that Lunny has baulked at the narrow musical horizons of the strictly ballroom classical scene. She is, after all, the daughter of Donal Lunny, who has always blazed his own distinctive trail in the traditional field. The influence of her German mother, a music-lover who brought Cora Venus to Stephane Grappelli concerts when she was a tiny tot, and insisted on a wide-ranging regime of home schooling until she reached the age of 14, is also apparent.
"My parents split up when I was quite young," Lunny says. "I didn't spend that much time with my father as a small child, so I wasn't really immersed in traditional music at all. I'm not sure where my mom got the idea of violin lessons; she was into Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and people like that." Nevertheless when young Cora Venus was given a violin at the age of three, she took to it without hesitation. "I think a big part of learning to play an instrument like the violin is becoming physically comfortable with it," she says.
"If you start at such a young age to mould your body to fit something so unnatural, then you're gonna be way ahead of people who started later on. Also, when you're that little, you don't realise you're making a tremendous screeching noise. You just think, Oh, this is fun. You don't associate practising with frustration, the way older beginners do." Having embarked on the classical path, she forged ahead at a terrific rate. "Until a couple of years ago I would not have considered anything else at all - as a career, I mean," she says. "I didn't think I could do anything else.
"And," she adds with an impish grin, "I was a horribly snobbish little kid, too. I thought that whatever I was doing was far superior to everyone else. Classical music better than trad? Of course it was! But I'm still not able to play trad. I mean, I'll play a nice air - that's fine - but playing in sessions? No way.
"You know what sessions are like? Someone goes, Do you know The Grey Goose, blah, blah, blah, and then they all go, Yeah - kind of, and next thing they're playing in unison and they've never met each other before and there's three of them and they're all playing exactly the same thing at the same time better than any orchestra could. I'm not tuned into that telepathic channel - so, sorry, bye."
She has, however, joined Lunny senior's bands on various occasions - once, memorably, on a trip to Iceland. "The landscape is amazing. You look out of the plane window and you see all this rock that looks like it's still moving and melting and dripping. It's alive."
Having a musical dad has it uses. It was through her father, for example - albeit indirectly - that she ended up recording six Friday-night radio programmes for RTÉ Radio 1. "Paddy Glackin is a producer in RTÉ, and he mentioned to my dad one day that they were looking for presenters for this series. He asked my dad would I be interested, and I think he said I wouldn't be - but he asked me anyway. And I'm interested in pretty much everything."
To call the music she has chosen for these shows "eclectic", is to understate the case. "I played some trip-hop, quite a bit of classical music, quite a lot of jazz, movie soundtracks - a mix of everything," she says. "Rather than going, Tonight we're gonna have a show about jazz. What do I know about jazz? I'd rather sit down and go, Well, what music made me feel a particular way, or, What artists are stepping out of their box? That was my main purpose. Finding things that people were doing that they had no qualifications for - no business dabbling in. When that comes out with great results, I think it's pretty magical."
She reels off a bunch of names, all unfamiliar to me except that of Tricky. "I just recently discovered Tricky," she says. "I was trying to illegally download Björk, and this came up. Amazing. Wow! Who else am I into? Regina Spektor. She plays the piano and sings really unusual songs." And sisters, singer-songwriters, who recorded an album in the bath. Can that be right? Something Rosie. How does she find out about this music? She beams. "Through friends, mostly. I'm not cool enough to actually discover it myself. I wouldn't know how."
Lunny seems to genuinely believe this last statement - though with her dishevelled blonde hair, her perfect skin and her engaging demeanour, she's cooler than a thermos full of ice cubes. What's next for her? "Oh," she says, apparently startled by the question. "I'm going to be touring in France with a harpsichordist. I'm going to Poland in September and maybe the Czech Republic in July. I want to do the Bartók solo sonata. I've been writing a cabaret opera - that's, like an opera without singing - with instrumentalists in the title roles, and some orchestral pieces which I'm thinking of recording myself by tracking them using violin and viola. And I'm writing a record, but - talk to me in another five years about that."
Does she find these open horizons exhilarating, or intimidating? "It's quite exciting," she says. She hesitates, then launches into one of her rapid-fire explanations. "It's really dark, the road I'm on. And I think it's at night time - and there's no lights and I can't see anything. But I've definitely picked my own road, so at least I'm happy with that." And, I add, she hasn't fallen over yet. The cornflower eyes widen. "Not yet," she says. "We'll see."
Cora Venus Lunny is at the Sugar Club tomorrow and Monday. Venus in Blue is on RTÉ Radio One, Friday nights at 10pm