Trading it in for a fiddle
By Melanie D.G. Kaplan (Columbia University Wire)
Tony DeMarco is big on tradition. So when it came to choosing a career, the Brooklyn native decided to become a commodities trader, like his father, brother, uncles and cousins, and a musician, like a great-grandfather and uncle. He splits his time in New York City between trading coffee futures at the New York Board of Trade and playing the fiddle.
"As wild and hectic as it gets in the trading pit, it's nice to be able to chill out with the music," said DeMarco, who may spend his days franticly focused on coffee, but at night, he has perfected the art of relaxation in the pubs with a pint and his fiddle.
DeMarco, with a round face, warm eyes and strong connections to his Irish and Italian roots, can spin a good story, fiddle practically any tune and make even the most novice musicians feel at home when they perform with him. But as conservative as he is in his day job, compared with other commodities traders, he can also get completely hot and bothered, pumping his fist and yelling across the trading floor.
"I'm not sure how he does it sometimes," said Nancy Groce, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution who invited him to play at a festival on the Mall in Washington last summer. "I've seen him playing at a session at 4 or 5 in the morning, and I know he has to get up in the morning for work."
That's where the coffee comes in. DeMarco said he always wakes up with a cup of coffee in the morning before he goes to trade it, and has one later in the day. "But because of my Irish side, I like my tea, too," he said. "My mom grew up drinking tea with biscuits, and I get my tea from Ireland when I go."
DeMarco, 46, is used to wearing two hats. For almost two decades, he has combined trading and fiddling, balancing the high-stress environment of the trading pit -- where orders are executed through a system called "open outcry" and yelling is the preferred communication method -- with the mellow world of Irish fiddling, where he leads other musicians and performs for regular crowds in dim, smoky bars. One job is high-risk, with an income that can fluctuate by $100,000 or more. The other is low-key and dependable, but often pays less than $100 a night.
Guy Taylor, a spokesman for the New York Board of Trade, home of the coffee, sugar and cocoa exchanges, said because traders work less than normal business hours they tend to be active hobbyists, whether it's golf or tai chi. But he said he thinks DeMarco is the only professional fiddler and coffee trader.
DeMarco started playing the guitar, a gift from his grandmother, in a neighborhood rock and roll band when he was 8, but it wasn't until his senior year at Tilden High School in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, that he started fiddling. Faced with choosing between English history and music for his elective, DeMarco chose music and picked up a violin for the first time.
Still at Tilden, in his largely Irish and Italian Catholic neighborhood, DeMarco started listening to bluegrass and classic rock, and he signed up for fiddle lessons. He said he was influenced by musical legends such as Frank Zappa, Papa John Creech and Don "Sugarcane" Harris, and by his Irish and Italian relatives.
"My mother's grandfather, John Fenimore, played piano, mandolin and harmonica," said DeMarco. "Uncle Louie was a doo-wop singer in the '50s, and my mother's father, Jimmy Dempsey, was a New York City cop and loved Irish music." When he started playing more Irish music than bluegrass, he considered swapping his last name for Dempsey, mother's maiden name, so it would sound more Irish than Italian, but, he said, "It was too late to go changing my name."
After high school, DeMarco moved to Indiana to play music, but his family and the trading business waited for him in New York. His father had started trading in commodities in the '70s, and at one point, there were eight family members working at the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange as locals, or traders, who have their own businesses and invest their own money rather than work for a company.
"You could never have any kind of comfortable living with the music thing," said DeMarco. "You're always going from one gig to the next and pretty much struggling all the time." Although traders work in a stressful environment, where tempers flair, faces redden and the air hangs heavy and stale like a stuffy locker room, there is a lot of camaraderie, trust and reward in the mostly male group. And then there's the money, which can easily be six figures in a good year.
So DeMarco returned to New York and started as a clerk at the exchange, working his way up to trader by the mid-'80s. Since, he has continued trading during the day and fiddling at night, building a reputation as one of the best Irish fiddlers in town.
"He picks up the fiddle, and he's just magical," Groce said. "He plays bluegrass, traditional Irish music and old-timey music. He knows thousands of tunes."
DeMarco, who lives in Pennsylvania but keeps an apartment in Battery Park, where he stays during the week, lost his office at 4 World Trade and temporarily lost his home after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He had just returned from a vacation in Ireland in early September, and he was walking to work when the first plane hit, and buying coffee when the second plane hit. Within minutes, he was running back to his apartment.
"I ran up, grabbed my two fiddles and my passport, told my girlfriend, Linda, to grab her flute," DeMarco said, "and we drove out of the parking garage and flew over the Brooklyn bridge before the towers came down."
The New York Board of Trade, which occupied three floors in 4 World Trade before it was destroyed, moved to a disaster relief site in Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan. DeMarco hesitantly returned to both trading and fiddling the week after Sept. 11.
"You didn't feel like it, didn't feel like having a good time," DeMarco said. "Normally, playing helps me get my mind off the market, but the whole scene was kind of numb. I don't think it was back to normal until after the holidays, maybe February."
Now, faced with an hour commute to the temporary trading facility, DeMarco is trading two or three days a week instead of five. Coffee trades only from 9 to 11:45, shortened by two hours because the temporary space is one-quarter the size of the World Trade location, and traders have to work in shifts until the Board of Trade moves back to Manhattan in early 2003.
But after St. Patrick's Day, which concluded the busiest fiddling week of the year for DeMarco, he said the music scene finally felt completely back to normal in Lower Manhattan. This spring, he is working on putting out his first solo CD.
TonyDeMarco is one of America’s finest folk fiddlers. A Brooklyn native of Irish and Italian decent, he is among the worlds leading exponent’s of the sophisticated County Sligo style of Irish fiddling. Tony’s playing has all the characteristics of great Sligo fiddling- swinging rythmic drive, a wealth of bowed and finger ornamentation, and a high degree of improvised melodic variation.
Sligo fiddling has been closely associated with the New York Irish musical trdition for many yesrs. Imigrant Sligo fiddlers in New York, notably the great Michael Coleman, James Morrison and Paddy Killoran, made hundreds of classic recordings in “the Big Apple” during the 78-rpm era. the influence of these discs back in Ireland made the sligo style, as played in New York City, the de facto national standard for decades thereafter.
In the early 1970’s, following a musical apprenticeship in American folk fiddling, Tony immersed himself in Sligo fiddling. In addition to listening intensively to the old 78’s, he absorbed tunes and techniques from leading Sligo style fiddlers in both the U.S. and Ireland. Paddy Reynolds, a Conty Longford-born New York fiddler and a protoge of the late Sligo fiddle great James “Lad” Obeirne, was a major influence on Tony’s music, He also learned a great deal from playing with and listening to the late Martyn Wynn, John Vesey and Johnny McGreevy.
Tony spent the summer of 1976 is Co, Sligo, playing with local musicians on thier home ground. Back in New York, he developed a musical partnership with Bronx fiddle standout Brian Comway, a callaboration that led to the 1981 recording- The Apple in Winter- a landmark album of fiddle duets.
Tony has recorded and perfomed with The Flying Cloud , the Kips Bay Cieli Band, Celtic Thunder and Black 47. He’s played for the Smithsonian Institute’s Folklife Festival and co-autored a fiddle tutor “ A Trip To Sligo” . He has been a featured performer at leading Irish music festivals in the U.S. and Europe and can be seen at Paddy Reilly’s Pub in N.Y.C. weekly.
Don Meade
N.Y.C.
Tony Man EXCITED about u new cd ...un hu ... just won it off Ebay -the bidding was tough though. Looking forward to your delicious rolls and those truffels . Love your playin !!!! Tanks fer the tunes and the inspiration through the years . Milli Grazie all the best
Buona musica caro Toni! Mi sono divertito un sacco leggere il tuo biog. Non so se e l'Irlandese o l'Italiano che da il 'lift' alla tua musica - un buon cominazione pero!
Hey Tony, Enjoyed having the chunes with you all up at The Scratcher a few weeks ago. Amy and I will definitely stop by again the next time we are in NYC. Great music on the new album! Adh mór, Scott
Great music Tony. I remember having a few tunes with you in Spiddal a few years ago. Hopefully you'll make it again some time. Tóg go bog é, Caoimhín Ó Sé
Hi ya Tony, great you're on the myspace too ha ha! How's the craic? Haven't seen ya since the Catskills and you'd just got biten by some horrible spider or something. I was too hungover to remember what it was ha ha. Hope you're well anyway and a real Happy 2007 for you. Mirella x
Hello Tony,
Greetings from Los Angeles. Just wanted to let you know your a couple of your tunes have been played around here for years. A few years ago I was in a band called Buzzworld, and we used to play Tony DeMarco's Reel #1 and #2 followed by Love at the Endings . Thanks for the tunes.
tj montgomery
