A Tale of Two Cellos
My younger son, now 37, has played the cello since he was four. I fell in love with the instrument as much as he did. For years I’ve kept an eye out for “street” cellists, far from concert halls, who give themselves to what makes the cello unique: its perfect range, from warm low pitches to bright higher notes, which can touch our feelings in profound ways. My tips haven’t been generous enough.
Ashland is blessed with two performing “street” cellists — more, in my mind, than “buskers.” They play at opposite ends of town. One performs in Ashland’s gracious Lithia Park, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The other sets up his cello in front of the town’s funkiest grocery store, drawing a tapestry of listeners with shopping carts. Both gentlemen are composers as well as musicians. The first, always sporting a fedora and a tie, offers “easy listening.” The second, dressed for the weather, offers intricate compositions intended to unleash positive Reiki-like energy. Indeed, Ashland’s two public cellists could not be more different except in the way they hold their instruments close.
I learned about these local musicians through observations, conversations, and published commentary. At the end of each profile there is a video of them performing.
I had come to Lithia Park, the crown jewel of Ashland, to capture the reflection of blossoming trees in the duck pond near the entrance. A man with fanciful tatoos was much more interesting, though, as he dipped a cylindrical wire frame into a bucket, pulled it out wet and dripping, then made a slow arc in the air.
“Mommy, what is that man doing? I want to watch,” a girl nearby in a princess dress said.
Me too, I thought.
A minute later, an oblong bubble just the size of the girl floated past her and up into the sky.
“I want to catch it” she cried as she chased after it.
It was then that I heard the smooth tenor of a cello, following the bubble’s plight as it rose slowly and then burst on an oak branch above. A sweet crescendo accompanied its rise; a somber decrescendo traced its collapse.
For more than 11 years, 64-year-old cellist Daniel Sperry has played this spot in Lithia Park bringing musical improvisation to moods, emotions and, today, floating bubbles.
“Of all instruments, the cello has the closest range to human voice and has the closest approximation to human feeling,” Sperry once told a reporter. “Its voice appears to drop like a ton of soul on people in the park.”
Sperry began studying the cello when he was five. At age 19, he won a chair in the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, DC) but “lost heart” about making a living as an orchestra musician. Eventually he began working in sales and marketing in Iowa. That life brought him marriage and a family of his own, but burnout too.
“I decided that if I was going to do music, I was going to play for anyone who asked,” he said.
He did just that for a friend who invited him to play at a gathering at her house in Fairfield, Iowa. There, he performed improvisation pieces around poetry that he read—feeling the crowd and interpreting the poems. He played beautifully, one woman said, but, if he were to go further along that path, he would need a proper instrument. Sperry couldn’t afford his own cello, so he had rented a cheap one for the evening. She bought him a $10,000 replacement, which he promptly named Flare.
With a new cello, Sperry found himself in Lithia Park in the fall of 2008, visiting his son —his ex-wife had moved to Ashland — and throwing around a football. His son asked him if he wanted to play his cello instead. Sperry opened his case, sat down, closed his eyes and began to play. Thirty minutes later his son said, ‘Look in your case.” Five dollar bills coated the bottom.
For the next two years, Sperry took up residence as a busker alongside the quietly gurgling Lithia Creek and Port Orford cedars, improvising and, he hoped, healing his audience with the assuring voice coming from his new cello.
Winter months were fallow, though, as passersby fell to a trickle.
He decided to take his music on the road in a tour of intimate gatherings. For several years he traveled state to state, home to home, couch surfing and bringing personalized compositions for paying patrons, what he called “musical portraits.” “It was incredibly intimate and precious,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I was a homeless musician.”
Sperry returned to Lithia Park in 2013, wondering if he could busk again. He remembers playing Leonard Cohen’s soul-searching “Hallelujah” when, by chance, a visiting college choir entered the park and spontaneously began layering vocal harmonies over Sperry’s rendition. He reclaimed his spot on the pathway near the duck pond.
This February marks the 11th year since Sperry and his cello, Flare, returned to Lithia Park, bringing a tenor continuo to passersby and time—a connective tissue between rising bubbles and children chasing them, young couples and widowers, music buffs and ingenues. His performance attire has not changed: a fedora, a sport coat, and a tie. He travels to and from the park, with his cello, on an electric-assist bike he received as a gift.
Last year he started a nonprofit, Park Music Beauty, hoping to raise money to bring other classical performers into his airy music hall.
At the other end of town, on the sidewalk in front of a busy supermarket — what I think of as the “people’s market” and where I shop — Ashland’s other public cellist plys his craft.
Here the audience is an eclectic mix: ex-Hippies, young families, retirees, the unhoused, “creatives,” contractors, hikers from the Pacific Crest Trail, and more. What draws them are the low prices and the organic produce that fill the shelves at the employee-owned Shop ‘n Kart.
“It’s a perfect stage,” Martin Watkinson told me after I videotaped him one wintry morning playing his cello with wool gloves, surrounded by grocery carts. “I can be seen and heard by so many people.”
Like Sperry, Watkinson began playing the cello when he was five. He’d been taking violin lessons, “but I wanted to sit down to play.”
Talented and prodigious, in 2001, Watkinson won a gold medal for the best classical performance at the Spokane Music festival in Washington State. He was 12. He’d also begun experimenting with “alternative” cello music, far removed from the Bach cello suites he’d mastered, and created two full-length albums under the name “Parallax.” He was still in high school.
In 2008, a full music scholarship to Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, along with an invitation to perform with the Oregon Symphony, seemed to secure Watkinson’s path as a rising classical musician.
It didn’t.
A college masquerade party he attended his junior year “changed everything,” he explains. There he met Cherita Meadows, a musican who shared his interest in Indie rock music, and soon they headed to Los Angeles to record an album called “Love, Life, Laugh,” with eight more albums to follow. Rather than gather their college diplomas, Watkinson and Meadows headed for the streets, performing at farmer markets, festivals, and music hangouts across the Pacific Northwest. They performed as Gaea, named after the Greek goddess who emerged from chaos to become the supreme goddess of immortals and mortals alike.
After eight years on the road, they settled in Portland, OR. A tragic house fire, soon after they moved in, destroyed almost everything they owned, except Wilkinson’s cello which was at the luthier’s being repaired. Wilkinson spent the next three weeks on life support as his smoke-ravaged lungs recovered.
In 2020, the couple hit the road again, living out of a rental minivan.
“I feel the spirit was pushing us back to our nomadic lifestyle, following our heart winds,” says Wilkinson.
Reiki therapy — based on the Eastern belief that vital energy flows through our bodies — was part of Wilkinson’s healing, and what he calls “musical Reiki” became integral to his cello creations, “keeping our chakras open to the flow of positive energy.”
The Gaea website has more than 500 comments from people who say Wilkinson saved their day. “Your passion for what you love creates divine tendrils of healing energy wherever you share your gifts,” writes Elsey Rose. “Thank you for creating so much beauty.”
Wilkinson’s TikTok account, where admirers post videos of him playing in front of Shop ‘n Kart and elsewhere, has thousands of followers.
There will be a day, for sure, when Wilkinson’s healing cello will be gone as he chases new heart winds — along with a place where he and his partner can plant sturdy roots, when they save enough money.
“Maybe Hawaii?” Wilkinson muses as he tunes his cello.
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