Everything in Sedona is on the rocks, especially the music. The jazz is on the rocks. The piano is on the rocks. The harmony is on the rocks. And the fiddler is most definitely — and visibly — on the rocks.

That fiddler is Tyler Carson, who, as the local Fiddler on the Rock, presents a free concert at the Sedona Airport overlook on weekends, weather permitting.

“I started as a classical violinist, but I was just a little 5-year-old kid learning Suzuki,” Carson recalled of his childhood in Calgary and Victoria, Canada. Shinichi Suzuki created a popular method to learn musical instrument instruction in the mid-20th century.

“My teacher was one of the best in Canada, and that was just good fortune,” Carson said. “Her name was Danuta Ciring. I was 5, and I got to about 8 years old with her, and she said, ‘Tyler, you’re a very talented boy, but you are very lazy.’ And here I am practicing every day for like half an hour! I thought that was pretty good.”

Another of his teachers was a fiddler his parents met at a school square dance and happened to ask about lessons, which was a question that turned out to have unexpected consequences.

“Within a year, he had collected about 10 students, and then was invited to perform at the Commonwealth Games,” Carson said.

The Commonwealth Games are a quadrennial international sporting event among the members of the Commonwealth of Nations. “We played to 60,000 people live. I was 11 years old. My feet didn’t touch the ground the whole time. I just started dancing and fiddling. People recognized me for that gig for 10 years.”

“The peak of my classical stuff kind of happened when I was 13,” Carson continued. “My sister is also a fiddle player, and she’s a full-time musician as well, so every once in a while I go down to the musical instrument museum in Phoenix and the band she’ll be touring with will be playing there, and I’ll just jump on stage with them down there. And that’s like the only time I’ll see her all year. She and I did a duet with the symphony — it was a Vivaldi duet, the A minor concerto, so three movements, and then we’d come back with cowboy hats on and our country gear, and we’d play a 15-minute fiddle menu. That was incredible, because then the whole symphony started going along with us.”

After a spell with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and several months in college, Carson quit to tour New Zealand with a Riverdance troupe before moving on to still other opportunities, which included stints with the legendary Celtic folk groups The Irish Rovers and The Chieftans.

“They are a great party band,” Carson said of the Rovers. “They brought Irish music in a way that no one had ever done before. They’ve done it so long, it’s kind of like you get on a wave and you’re just surfing and riding.”

Fiddle Culture

Carson’s approach to music changed abruptly in his early 20s, when he developed spasmodic dysphonia that deprived him of his singing voice and ended his plans for a career in country music.

“It’s basically a muscle overexcitement,” Carson explained. “It happens because the brain has created too many neural pathways. So it tends to only strike musicians, archers, golfers — people who do repetitive actions with extreme concentration individually.”

“It was almost like splitting my career right in half,” Carson reflected. “In place of that, I started discovering what music actually meant to me … I started to look at the violin differently. It was about telling a story.”

Spending time in the United Kingdom also led to his discovery of a musical culture very different from that of North America.

“Folk music never left their culture,” Carson said. “It is the birthplace of fiddle music and folk music, the birthplace of the modern violin being used in our culture. There are pubs that I went and played, you sit on one of these stone [seats], and it’s actually a little bit hollowed out because it’s been 600 years of fiddle players sitting on that seat. It’s seeped into the very stone and woodwork. What does that do for the people?

“Fiddle is a cultural instrument, a cultural skill set that historically is passed on from one amateur to another amateur, whereas a violinist is a trained skill set,” Carson elaborated. “That also cultivates a unique sound, a direct expression of the heart, because you’re sitting down with your friends having pints and figuring out how to fiddle. The closest we have in North America are square dances, and they stopped in the mid-20th century.”

After returning to the Pacific Northwest, Carson played with a band called Impossible Bird “that just fell apart,” after which he and his then-wife set off on a road trip across the United States.

“We had traveled with a trailer all through the western U.S., and we accidentally ended up wintering here in the Verde Valley because we had a mechanical problem that set us back,” Carson said. “We were here for two or three months, and the phone rang, I was probably on Forest Road 525, and I got a call from this film company that I’d done a little interview with, and they’d filmed my concert — they called me and said ‘Hey, we did a documentary on you, it’s going to premiere in Sedona next month.’ I’m like, you have to be kidding me, I am five minutes from Sedona. Mind blown.”

The documentary “Living Music” debuted at the 2018 Illuminate Film Festival to a response that Carson said was “overwhelming” and one of the biggest reasons he decided to stay in Sedona.

During 2019, he played eight shows at the Posse Grounds Pavilion, all without advertising, drawing an audience of over 200 for his final performance.

Opportunity Rocks

“When I went to Sedona, I saw an opportunity that most musicians probably wouldn’t see because of my background,” Carson said of discovering the Sedona Airport overlook. “When I grew up and I first started playing in Victoria, we saw that there were street performers … My parents went, ‘Why don’t you guys go busking?’ As little kids, we used to play in the street and we’d make like $120 an hour … We’d play for half an hour and figure we got enough for the arcade and quit. So when I first came to visit Sedona, of course I went to the airport, the overlook, and I took one look at that, and having grown up busking, if you have a stationary crowd, it equals dollar signs. That’s always the biggest trick for street performers, to make the audience stop long enough to get engaged and give you money.”

He approached airport manager Ed Rose with a business plan for overlook performances in February 2020. Rose was enthusiastic about the idea, and Carson did two shows to test the concept, “all to positive feedback, 100%, and then [COVID-19] lockdowns. And my wife and I had just split up, and I’d also gotten one show at the pavilion done for that season.”

Rather than abandon his music in a time of overwhelming paranoia, Carson responded by playing more loudly. He began giving performances for the local neighborhood on the balcony of a friend’s house in the Village of Oak Creek.

“There were dear friends of mine that were taking care of elderly grandparents,” Carson said. “He would sing and his wife would videotape, and we would play music for the neighborhood. That’s one of the purest experiences of music and its medicine … Music was almost literally a lifeline, to be able to know, at four o’clock, I’m going to be able to go play music … It was all the beautiful things for the neighbors.”

Carson resumed his airport shows in 2022, starting with improvised sets and playing quietly to explore the boundaries of the space. He discovered that when he turned the volume up, “my pay went up 50%.” He also began incorporating a few popular staples into his repertoire, such as “In the Jungle” and “All Along the Watchtower.”

“What I do is dependent largely on the natural environment and the energy of the audience,” Carson said. “Music changes depending on the season. It’s very fascinating. It changes with the way the sun is operating on people, the temperatures. In the springtime, I feel like people are really excited to be out there. Fall and winter, they’re getting a little quieter. But if I play a jig, there will always be someone in the audience, or several people, who will start dancing. Kids really get it.”

Observers at Carson’s airport performances will also notice that he plays two instruments during his shows — a standard violin and a Stroh violin, which looks like the mere outline of a violin with a horn attached. The Stroh violin is a relic of the gramophone era, when its built-in amplification made it ideal for recording.

“I was vaguely aware that the instrument existed, because it was in a glass case at the university in Victoria where I used to go and do recitals. God forbid we have it out that students can learn to play it,” Carson remembered. He obtained his own, a Romanian model, from an actor who used it as a stage prop. “The frequency, the tonality of it, it’s amazing the difference … it’s kind of like a steel guitar.”

“I have this plot brewing to go on ‘America’s Got Talent,’” Carson speculated. “I have the trifecta of a great story, a unique sound and then a certain level of pizzazz … Maybe if I show up with that, we’re going to see a bunch of kids with Stroh violins.”

The airport gig has also generated three albums that he plans to release soon, and on Sept. 11, Carson kicked off his fall season of appearances at the Hub at Posse Grounds, which will run every Monday night through Dec. 18. Each show pairs the “Living Music” documentary with his live accompaniment. In addition, he joined the Sedona Dance Project to provide music for their fall concert on Nov. 2 and 3.

“Sedona’s been this process of refining my artistic voice,” Carson said. “I really do finally feel free for the first time.”