When Edgar Meyer comes to town Friday, Central Illinois will be seeing one of its rare concerts centered on a world-class double bass virtuoso.

It will definitely be the first, at least as far as Bloomington-Normal is concerned.

The occasion is the Grammy-winning Meyer's guest performance with the Illinois Wesleyan Civic Orchestra at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts (7:30 p.m.; $20 for adults and $10 for students).

Compared to the famously daunting double bass as a showy solo instrument, pianos, violins, cellos, flutes and others are almost a dime a dozen.

That's why The New Yorker, in a profile of Meyer, designated the Tennessee native "the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument."

"Relatively unchronicled" suggests that a.) no musicologist has been motivated enough to take on the task, or, b.) there just haven't been enough double bass virtuosos at large to chronicle.

Meyer agrees about the lack of double bass accounting through history. In fact, he confesses that the classical repertoire for the instrument is, to be frank, "not very interesting."

He adds, "That's the one I grew up with, so I was starting off with a major deficit."

That doubtless explains why his career has spun off in a dozen different tangents, which ranged from composing his own double bass repertoire to stretching boundaries by working in such seemingly off-track realms as bluegrass, jazz and blues.

His regular collaborators are, to drop a name or two: banjo great Bela Fleck, master cellist Yo-Yo Ma, A-list bluegrass fiddler Jerry Douglas, violin prodigy Joshua Bell, mandolin ace Sam Bush and pop icons like James Taylor and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

There's a lot of musical range and variety being covered across that panoply of names, and Meyer embraces them all.

He says he has the next three years entirely plotted in terms of those collaborations. They include: a continuation of his 20-year association with Fleck (they've recorded and performed together in configurations ranging from duo to trio) and more work with bluegrass aces Bush and Douglas (the latter best known, of course, as Central Illinois native Alison Krauss' right-hand dobro player).

For his IWU Civic Orchestra performance, Meyer is presenting the best of several of his worlds.

First off is a work from the classical repertoire that does do his instrument and skill justice, "Giovanni Bottesini's Concerto No. 2 in b minor."

Then there's his own composition, "Concerto in D for Double Bass and Orchestra," which he wrote 15 years ago as "my first piece that involved an orchestra" and displaying his passion for chamber sounds wandering off into blues-tinged reveries.

For the record, "Bottesini," says Meyer, "is my favorite of all the historical classical bass players. In fact, there are no others I know about from the pre-1900 period."

Such are the wages of an unchronicled history … or, as Meyer calls it, "less than under-chronicled."

He feels that the instrument has truly come into its own during the past 50 years, around half of which he has been active.

"There have been a lot of creative contributions by a lot of interesting people," he says, and they have been facilitated by such evolutionary trends as the inroads made by jazz and the technical improvements in microphone placement and other amplification improvements for an instrument notoriously difficult to assert itself on the solo front.

The 47-year-old Meyer came into the instrument by heritage: His late father, Edgar Meyer Sr., directed the string orchestra program for the Oak Ridge, Tenn., public school system.

By the age of 5, Edgar Jr. was studying the double bass - an instrument whose sheer physical dimensions doubtless dwarfed him at that age.

"There was never any question about it," says Meyer. "My father played the bass well, and I just wanted to be like him. I didn't have the perception that it was hugely difficult at that age. My perception was that it was fun and easy."

Because dad was basically "a jazz player first," Meyer again followed suit.

"I came from a bilingual household where both jazz and classical were in heavy rotation." In his teens, he discovered bluegrass - not exactly scarce in Tennessee - "and I loved the music threefold, the way the (bass) instrumentation fit in with it. I think all of the talent of my generation was attracted to it, people like Bela (Fleck) and Jerry (Douglas), and we all still work together."

As for the physical demands of his chosen instrument, "I've seen pictures of myself at that age, and I look comfortable with it. I was playing the full-size instrument by the time I was around 8. I used a smaller one before that, but I still had to reach up a bit."

That instant identification with the double bass from an early age kept Meyer from ever wavering from a course that continued through high school, his Indiana University years studying with Stuart Sankey and his eventual rise to worldwide prominence and a litany of honors (among them, the 2002 MacArthur Award, three Grammy Awards and the first Avery Fisher Prize ever awarded to a bassist).

Renowned not only as one of the double bass' pre-eminent virtuosos, Meyer's work as a composer and collaborator has made him equally famous.

Though working with fellow established names like Fleck and Yo-Yo Ma is rewarding on its own level, Meyer says he also values his frequent guest work with symphonies around the country, a la the IWU Civic Orchestra this weekend.

The payoff for him is meeting the challenge of a soloist and an orchestra getting two dialogues going "where the cross-talk can get very intense, but where the similarity is greater than the difference."

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At a glance

What: Edgar Meyer, performing with the Illinois Wesleyan University Civic Orchestra

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, 110 E. Mulberry St., Bloomington

Tickets: Adults, $20; students and children, $10

Box office number: (866) 686-9541