Darol Anger has left a legacy for string players, the result of sticking to his vision with an instrument that has until recently flown below the radar of several genres — the violin.

Republic of Strings, lightly described as an Irish-Afro-Scandinavian-Brazilian old-time string band, is an example of where that vision has taken him. The band performs April 15 in Bothell.

Anger, creator of numerous techniques, was one of the first string players to integrate different styles (jazz, bluegrass, pop, blues).

The former Lake Forest Park resident has helped create some of the best string bands in the last 25 years: David Grisham Quintet, Turtle String Quintet, Grammy-nominated folk-jazz group Montreaux, PsychGrass and Republic of Strings.

Trace their evolution and you trace the evolution of string music, starting with the Grisman group’s first forays into incorporating pop and classical into bluegrass.

The Beatles’ jump-started Anger’s interest in music in 1964. His folks bought him a guitar. “It was better as a planter than a guitar,” Anger said.

While in a restaurant with his family, a man playing a violin strolled through the dining tables.

“I said, ‘That looks a lot easier than the guitar. I’ll play that!’”

A confessed classical failure at age 13, he discovered bluegrass music on an FM station that played a wide variety of styles.

“I grew up with the idea that there were really no legitimate boundaries. Except for maybe classical music, everything else was fair game.

“And when I discovered bluegrass, it was a great moment. Not only was it acoustic string music but it had an incredible drive and rhythm to it.”

In the last 20 years, the main innovations outside of hip-hop have been in the string-band field. Jazz music has consolidated harmonic gains made in last 50 years; rock has moved to beer commercials or gone back to the garage. Until a couple of decades ago, most string bands stuck with regional music.

“Now musicians like it all and by God they’re going to play whatever they want and base it on traditional music from their region,” Anger said; “Celtic musicians getting into complicated Greek rhythms with Celtic melodic structure, for instance.

“It’s all the same country — the Republic — an imaginary country of string players. And string-band music is where the real movement is happening.”

Anger had an interesting take on the resurgence in violin players.

“There was a little bubble of unhappiness between World War I and the 1960s, especially for string instruments,” he said. “The really good violin teachers came over from Europe and most were traumatized by world wars. There was an insistence that Western European music was the only music worth anything. A lot of teachers were trying to hang on to what little they could of their former lives.”

The newer teachers have fewer traumas in their backgrounds and wider vision, he said.

Anger is excited about the new crop of violin players.

“I’ve been laying the groundwork for the next generation of kids so they can finish blowing away the old conceptions. Kids are taking it to heart.

“It’s very exciting that I can do (Republic of Strings) with this fantastically talented younger generation, these young geniuses. It seemed like violin skipped a generation. There’s my age and then a big gap, and now a huge crop of genius kids, 15 to 25.

“The wave is getting ready to break, and I get to hire them.”