Ravinia 2021 - Issue 3

Everybody Wants to Play IT SEEMS IMPLAUSIBLE that a casual bet on a golf game could determine the trajectory of a young man’s life. But truth is stranger than fiction, as Wil Baptiste found out. ¶ One half of the groundbreaking string duo Black Violin, 38-year- old Baptiste spent much of his life thinking a mix-up had determined his musical fate. Although he hadn’t played an instrument during his first decade of life, the adolescent started daydreaming about the saxophone. So he joined a summer music program, visions of John Coltrane bebopping in his head, but ended up in the string section. For years, he thought he’d just ended up in the wrong class by fate, but, as he told Ravinia Magazine during a recent phone chat, “Came to find out, it was orchestrated.” A self-described “island boy” born in the Bahamas, Baptiste moved to Florida when he was 10. He encoun- tered the viola during the fateful sum- mer before 8th grade. Back then, “I was that kid beating on the table while the other kids rapped. That was me,” Baptiste recalls. “The security guards would get really upset with me. One of them told me he made money on the weekends playing the sax. I was like, ‘I need money,’ so I signed up for the band summer program.” Plot twist: When he went to enroll, “the string teacher was there too, and I guess he and the band teacher both saw my enthusiasm. The string teacher says, ‘All right, let’s play golf, and whoever wins the game gets this kid in their class.’ Obviously the string teacher won. I got to class and real- ized it was not where I wanted to be, but I was stuck there. So I picked up the viola because everyone’s ignoring it. Everybody wants to play violin! “I didn’t find out that story about the golf game until 2012,” he adds. When Black Violin performed on Broadway, Baptiste’s original teach- er attended. “We were hanging out afterward and he told me. This whole time, I’ve been saying it was a crazy mistake, you know?” Teenaged Wil Baptiste looks on as Kev Marcus practices violin (right), not yet aware that the scene would continue to play out between them as the genre-defying duo Black Violin (left), both on concert stages far and wide and in schools to inspire young musicians like they once were. RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 23