If you have ever caught the bouncy acoustic theme of NPR’s Car Talk, you have heard Darol Anger. This episode traces the life of the San Francisco-born violinist, from his 1977 arrival as a founding member of the David Grisman Quintet, where progressive bluegrass or dawg music ported jazz harmony and syncopated Latin and swing rhythms onto fiddle and mandolin, to his development of a percussive, rhythmic bowing style that became his lifelong signature.

The conversation follows Anger to Paris and his partnership with pianist Barbara Higbie, the 1982 Windham Hill album Tideline, the expanded quintet that played the 1984 Montreux Jazz Festival and renamed itself Montreux, and the 1985 founding of the Turtle Island String Quartet with David Balakrishnan. It covers his collaborations with Mike Marshall, Psychograss, Fiddlers 4, Stephane Grappelli, Marin Alsop, Nickel Creek and Bela Fleck, his teaching at Berklee and his online fiddle school, his move to Nashville, the two violins he built by hand with luthier Jonathan Cooper, and his ongoing work with the band Mr. Sun.

• How the David Grisman Quintet applied jazz chords and complex rhythms to string band instruments
• Why leaving bluegrass for chamber jazz with Barbara Higbie and Montreux paid off
• How Turtle Island String Quartet made four classical strings function as a jazz rhythm section
• Anger’s shift into education at Berklee and the ArtistWorks online fiddle school
• Why a world-class violinist chose to carve and assemble his own instruments