Caliente

Michael Dalzell

Age: 35 For the record: Born from the Día de los Muertos All Soul's Procession and a Tucson blues band's need for a side project, the Molehill Orkestrah provides a mix of Gypsy klezmer, Turkish melodies and its own brand of swing jazz to the Old Pueblo. A self-taught aficionado of the mandolin, Michael Dalzell has been a member of the group since it began six years ago. How did you get interested in music in Tucson? "When I got to Tucson like 15 years ago, I met a few people who were putting together a Celtic band, and that was something I was always really interested in. It's the first type of music I heard that actually made me want to play music. That was a very obscure project - a Celtic-blues band. Half the songs were jigs and reels, and the other half were neo-traditional blues songs. It was in the spirit of Molehill in that it came from a lot of different places and relied heavily on obscure source material. That's something that has appealed to me as part of my makeup." Who influences you most in your style? "I really like (mandolin player) Andy Statman the best. I think he's not as well known as David Grisman, but he is definitely up there. He's so versatile, and he plays clarinet, too. That is something I really respect and admire. I also have a really good collection of old records of obscure Italian mandolin players of the '50s and '60s; cheesy tangos and things like that." What was your biggest onstage nightmare? "Most of my bad experiences on stage have to do with ex-girlfriends showing up with new guys." What was your biggest onstage success? "My favorite was playing at the Seattle Hemp Festival a couple of years ago. We had been bumped and bumped and came on last. The sun was going down. The cops were sweeping through the place clearing everybody out and telling us we had to stop. We decided that we were going to play one more song because that was the spirit of the moment. We played and you could actually hear the crowd saying, 'Are they going to make it to the end of the song?' It just gets faster and faster until the end. It's just light-speed all the way." What is your dream gig? "I would like to perform on 'Prairie Home Companion.' I listen to that program sporadically but regularly, and every time I hear it I think we would be dynamite on the program. I would know I had gotten somewhere at that point." What do you plan on being for Halloween? "I hadn't thought about it yet. It's always a last-minute thing, whatever it turns out to be. " Now playing: The Molehill Orkestrah play at Club Kilimanjahro, 33 Subway St. in Bisbee, 9 p.m. Saturday.