On Tuesday, December 17, actor, comedian, and banjoist Steve Martin and the board of his Steve Martin Banjo Prize – now in its fourteenth year – announced this year’s winners of the $25,000 prize. Founded in 2010, the Steve Martin Banjo Prize for Excellence in Banjo has since awarded more than $500,000 in unrestricted prize funds to banjo players across the genre and style spectrum. The inaugural awardee in 2010 was modern banjo luminary Noam Pikelny; in successive years the list of recipients has grown rapidly, including such players, leaders, and composers as Rhiannon Giddens, Terry Baucom, Don Vappie, Jake Blount, Victor Furtado, Eddie Adcock, and many more.
This year, the prize’s two recipients are banjo pickers on the cutting edge of the instrument’s bright future in two distinct styles, Allison de Groot (one of the foremost old-time, clawhammer/frailing banjo players of her generation) and Tray Wellington (a Scruggs-style picker with a striking postmodern, newgrass approach.)
“Exploring had always been part of my personality since I was a kid,” Wellington explained via press release. “Music is the same way for me. Since I started playing banjo at 14, I had ideas for how I could constantly expand my musical vision and make my personality shine through banjo. Every day I am still on that journey and cannot wait to continue this pursuit.”
And exploration is certainly a hallmark of Wellington’s approach to the instrument. His right-hand approach is decidedly traditional, it’s powerful and assertive with limitless drive. While his left hand is mind-bending in its virtuosity, combining influences and textures from envelope pushers like Pikelny and Béla Fleck, he pulls an equal measure of inspiration from outside of bluegrass and roots music, as well.
Take for instance his rendition of Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness.” A layperson or bluegrass passerby might not ever expect a Kid Cudi cover performed at a roots music festival, let alone a straight-ahead bluegrass festival, but in almost every instance and context this writer has heard Wellington and band perform the number, the reaction from his audiences is electric. A buzzing excitement ripples through the crowd, murmuring recognition spreading like the most virulent contagion known to man (banjo) always does.
His live performances and through-composed instrumental pieces are out of this world, like his original “Moon in Motion 1” and “Spiral Staircase” from his most recent EP, Detour to the Moon. His 2022 full-length debut, Black Banjo, was critically acclaimed and well-received in bluegrass and beyond, combining new acoustic, jazz, Americana, and ‘grass together in his own particular blend. The project was something of a statement of perspective for Wellington, but that point of view has been anything but static since Black Banjo.
A nominee for multiple IBMA Awards – and 2019 winner of their Momentum Instrumentalist Award – Wellington is certainly right at home on bluegrass festival stages, but his music is expansive, broad, and fully-realized no matter the context. It’s clear he makes his musical and repertoire choices for himself first and foremost and following that, for a forward-thinking, equally broad audience to whom he’s directly bringing his songs and story.
This is the power of a picker like Wellington, to energize and electrify an audience – whether diehard banjo fans or new initiates – with a sound totally his own. It’s exactly how Earl Scruggs became the legendary figure of American music that he is today, by causing thousands of “What the hell is this magic?!” reactions from his listeners and bringing countless scores into the music with that inimitable sound alone.
For her part, de Groot is also a committed borderless musical explorer: “It still feels just as exciting as it did the first day I picked it up,” she relays in a press release. “I feel like I could live 100 lifetimes and explore the banjo.”
Meanwhile, her voice on the instrument would already seem to indicate multiple lifetimes lived on the banjo. A veteran of groups such as Bruce Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, the Goodbye Girls (with Lena Jonsson, Molly Tuttle, and Brittany Karlson), and duo outfits with folks like Nic Gareiss and Tatiana Hargreaves, de Groot has an absolutely idiosyncratic approach to old-time, clawhammer, and frailing styles.
Perhaps her most jaw-dropping achievement – to this banjo player, at least – is how melodic, intricate, and grounded her playing is. De Groot plays with the precision of a three-finger player and with a very similar rhythmic foundation, making it particularly compelling when she leans into melodic intricacies usually left to bluegrass strains of banjo playing. Her execution of Irish tunes on old-time banjo, too, are fantastic and baffling. How does she do it??
There may not be a more lyrical clawhammer banjo player around today, though de Groot has excellent company (Cathy Fink, Brad Kolodner, Victor Furtado, Nick Hornbuckle) in this rarest of niches she inhabits. Don’t get it twisted, though, this is a picker with grit; this frailing has teeth. At the same time, her playing never strays toward iconoclastic banjo pitfalls like showing off or territorialism or horse-measuring contests.
Her style is incisive, deliberate, and bold, and at the same time liberated by her commitment to listening and making music in partnership with her collaborators, whoever they may be and whatever styles they may dabble in. While the prize and the visibility it lends are beyond well-deserved, it’s clear that de Groot’s reputation as a superlative banjo technician is already well known across musical communities – take, for example, her and Hargreaves’ recent collaboration with guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams on “Hummingbird.”
As evidenced by this short primer on each of these fine banjo pickers, Wellington and de Groot are excellent choices to receive the Steve Martin Banjo Prize as selected by the award’s board – which currently includes Steve Martin, Alison Brown, Béla Fleck, Noam Pikelny, Anne Stringfield, Tony Trischka, Pete Wernick, Johnny Baier, Kristin Scott Benson, Roger Brown, Jaime Deering, Dom Flemons, Paul Schiminger, Chris Wadsworth, and Garry West.
Both Wellington and de Groot are young players poised to open minds and open up the instrument in exciting, engaging, and innovative ways – because that’s what the banjo has always been about.
Today, December 17, at 5:30pm ET / 2:30pm PT, viewers can tune into Deering Live to enjoy a livestream celebrating the two winners featuring Alison Brown as co-host and including interviews and performances. Tune in here.
Photo Credit: Allison de Groot by Phil Cook; Tray Wellington courtesy of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize.
Seven years have elapsed between Ben Sollee’s last studio release, his 2017 album with Kentucky Native, and his new one, Long Haul (arriving August 16). Much has happened in Sollee’s life since ‘17. His family has grown by two children. He worked on a number of soundtracks, even winning an Emmy Award in 2018 for his score on the ABC special, Base Ballet. The Kentucky born and based singer/songwriter/cellist, who has long been an advocate for environmental and other social causes, also helped launch a nonprofit named Canopy, which helps businesses in his home state positively impact people, the planet, and the future.
When COVID hit, it hit Sollee hard. “I was one of the early folks to get COVID in fall of 2020 and it stuck with me in a way that didn’t stick with other people.” During his prolonged recovery, he had to change how he ate, what he drank, how he slept, and how he exercised. “It turned into a journey of inward exploration and changing my external life. I really changed pretty much everything… It wasn’t until I started emerging from long haul [COVID], I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’ve got something to say about this.’”
While this album grew out of Sollee’s personal health crisis, it also was greatly affected by the death of his close friend and long-time collaborator, Jordon Ellis, who died by suicide in early 2023.
Always ready to blur genres, Sollee felt more free to expand his sonic palette on Long Haul, which includes a gospel-style choir, a Little Richard-inspired rock ‘n’ roll rave-up, West African rhythms, and Caribbean grooves. He purposely wanted to have lively, rhythmic melodies to balance deeply thoughtful lyrics.
“The same way,” he explained, “That Michael Jackson would have these big statements in the middle of these dance songs.” Sollee also recorded a special Dolby ATMOS Spatial Audio version for this album – a first for him – to underscore Long Haul’s immersive sound quality.
Part of what the title Long Haul refers to is your serious battle with long COVID and it also addresses life as being a long haul. How did the two interrelate for you, personally?
Ben Sollee: [COVID] definitely put me in relationship with my body in a way that I had never been before and once you start that relationship with your body, you realize just how interconnected everything is. I mean, we’re all on this long haul together… and I realized that maybe the most radical thing that I could do was to care for myself. That really shifted how I think of my live performances and really my purpose for being out on the road, [which] is to help people connect with themselves. Because once they connect with themselves, then they can have the capacity to be in relationship with nature, other people, animals, you name it. How I be in the world has shifted. It’s subtle from an external view, but internally it’s pretty profound.
How did this all affect your approach in making this album?
I realized that I had a very exploitative relationship with my creativity over the years, where it was just like: Here’s a project, just make stuff. And that was just really eye-opening.
I took a couple of different approaches in the making of this record. The passing of my friend and musical collaborator, Jordon, in the process of writing this record was really profound, because he was such a keystone to my creative process. It kind of forced me to think about how I was approaching music-making in the record without him.
So, I tried a couple different mantras, and one of them was “follow the resonance.” If it said something to me, I didn’t need to figure out why it said something to me, even if that is Polynesian flute playing or this sort of strange Tejano Caribbean groove – just follow it. In the past, I would kind of hedge; like I would hear something, I’d be really into that sound, but I wouldn’t feel like I could, for whatever reason. Like it’s not part of my cultural heritage. I would come up with a reason to be like, I shouldn’t make music with that sound or influence.
Another mantra was “show our fingerprints.” The way that we recorded the record – it was about hearing the hands and the strings and hearing the breath. I chose instruments that would really feature those human aspects of breath and touch. We incorporated woodwinds, which you can hear prominently on the first single, “Misty Miles.” We incorporated choirs in this record for the first time, because I really wanted that breath and sound. Much of the percussion is hand percussion. It’s a very tactile record… very high touch record.
You produced Long Haul. What was the recording process like?
It was a very intuitive, collective approach, and it meant that not only did the music turn out as a surprise to me and others, but it also meant that it was a very engaged, emotional journey. Adrienne Maree Brown [author of the book, Emergent Strategy] is really the inspiration for this – instead of having a singular artist’s vision, you really bring together a group of people in a facilitated way.
It made me maybe a little bit more brave and confident that wherever things went, we could execute that… I mean, musicians left the sessions crying, because they had such a good time and they felt seen and heard. And that, to me, means as much as the music that came out.
Did your experiences composing film soundtracks serve at all as an influence?
[Film work] also inspired me to explore Atmos. I really wanted this record to be an immersive experience, kind of like a sonic film. In keeping with that, there are a few songs that actually have sound design incorporated into them. It’s the first time I’ve done it in such an intentional and immersive way where we’ve got cars driving by with “Hawk and Crows.”
There is a real stylistic diversity to the sound of this album, like “Under The Spell” is one song with a funky dance groove to it.
[Laughs] I wasn’t trying to make a dance track. It started with that cello lick that you hear at the beginning. And it’s sort of this hypnotic West African loop of a lick that really began as kind of me trying to figure out some old-time banjo, like clawhammer music, on the cello.
The words are referencing this kind of duality… dealing with identity and self and how often we are under the influence of the stories that people tell of us. Every time I have this ambition, desire, and even just like the idea of me having something, it sets me down a path of being unsatisfied, which causes a lot of harm to other people and myself in the world. So, the words can go as deep as somebody wants to, but it’s also if people just want to release and have some sort of existential-like dance experience – then let’s go, let’s dance!
It touches on an evolution that I don’t expect anybody to notice in my music and career. My early records had a lot of direct social and political statements in the song. I realized that they were a little bit superficial and surface-y. They weren’t really getting it to the core of those issues. So, I’ve kind of moved into, I guess what I would call like a “post-activist” stance. My music has moved away from direct political commentary most of the time to more of a foundational, fundamental idea of togetherness, of connectedness.
“One More Day” stands out as a key song too.
I guess the original seed of that song emerged as I was beginning to travel again after Jordon had passed away – to places where he and I had traveled so many times. I started thinking about what would I have said had he called me in that moment of decision before he took his life? But the only thing that I would have really said to him is, “Listen, I hear you, I respect your decision, but what’s the rush? Like, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it, but you don’t have to do it right now. Just give it one more day, give it one more sunrise. Just get one last look.”
I think that’s what I would have said to him. And the song makes that case through different vignettes of our time together on the road. And, it does it over this Caribbean, Tejano groove that must have come from some jams that he and I did together. It must have. It just feels like a very Jordon groove. What I love about that is it has this real joyous, almost like early Police kind of vibe to it. There’s some really tough content in there and I just love the idea of people dancing at a festival – and just saying, “Give it one more day.”
The closing song, “When You Gonna Learn,” features a rousing gospel-style choir and addresses following your inner voice. It launches the listener out of the album and into the world in a very uplifting way.
I wanted to end with that message, because as a father I watch my four- and six-year-old who have yet to really settle into a sense of self or identity, and they are just so connected to their world and just basic truths about caring for things and protecting things and love and justice. And I think that it’s just more proof to me that there are things we know that get taught out of us. This song just is like: When are you going to learn that you already know?
You address a lot of tough issues on the album, but do so with a sense of humanism and spirited music that offer a hopeful way out of these challenging times.
I often reflect on that “Pale Blue Dot” image that Voyager took looking back at Earth and it’s just black and there’s just one little, tiny dot. And that dot really says it all, because it’s all there, as Carl Sagan says: every love, every heartbreak, every war, every church, it’s all on that one little dot.
So, we got to make it work here. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have right now. How do we make this work? I get that we’re going to make some big mistakes along the way. I sure have in my life. That’s where the grace comes in, but we got to make it work here. We don’t have another spot.
Artist:Kendl Winter Hometown: Olympia, Washington Latest Album:Banjo Mantras Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): “Lower half of The Lowest Pair”
What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?
I like this question, because I think everything you do, witness, consume, walk by, dance with, or touch informs your (my) music. Most books I’m reading make their way into my lyrics directly or indirectly. I know I’ve quoted or misquoted from E.E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan, Hafiz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Rumi, Rebecca Solnit, Thich Nhat Hanh, and probably so many others. All the authors and poets and spiritual leaders I’ve read or listened to and been moved by have woven their ponderings into mine and in turn the tumble of words that spill out onto my morning pages is often informed by those thoughts.
I watch a lot of film and I love movement. I go for long runs in the Northwest – or wherever I currently am – and the landscape informs my music, or the highway does, or the venue. I’m (we) are so porous and regularly trying to make sense of the cocktail of experience I’ve been sipping on. That said, this is an instrumental record, so for me it’s a new kind of transcription or interpretation of the collage of experiences in my head.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
My Hebrew school teacher back in Arkansas said he had a video of me as a 5 year-old singing to a stick of butter. In second grade, I wrote a song about landfills and saving the birds. My folks were both classically trained musicians, one a high school string teacher, and the other a low brass professor, so I had music and the example of disciplined musicians practicing around me all the time. As kids, my sister and I were often crawling through the orchestra pit in the Arkansas Symphony or falling asleep in the balcony.
I loved punk music and dabbled with guitar and drums though high school, although I don’t think I actually knew I wanted to be a musician until my early 20s, when I had just moved to Olympia. In the Little Rock area of Arkansas and in Olympia, Washington there was/is such a vibrant DIY scene for music. Some of my first attempts at performing were in Olympia and I had only written half-songs, so they were very short and with a lot of apologies.
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
I would say lately has been the toughest time for me, writing lyrics at least. Maybe that’s why I’ve been enjoying the spaciousness of instrumentals for a while with the Banjo Mantras. It’s felt less exacting to let my art be more ethereal and open to interpretation. Something about the last five years has made me feel less sure about what to share, in terms of my own verbal songwriting. I think I’m more self conscious or potentially private and maybe more aware of my voice in a way that makes me feel a bit uncertain of what more can be said from my vantage. Songwriting has always been such a huge piece of how I interpret life, though, and it’s an integral piece of my personal process. So I’m still writing, just having a more difficult time sharing it.
If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?
If I had to write a mission statement for my career, I guess it would be to let curiosity and interest/passion lead me. My music has never been easy to put in a genre and my voice and songwriting has changed over the years. It’s been great to work in the Lowest Pair, because my bandmate Palmer T. Lee is similar in that his sound is difficult to box in, and that both of us have roots and interest in traditional sounds, but are always curious about expanding upon the subject matter and textures in our duo. The Banjo Mantras are just an expansion of that I think. I love the sound of a solo banjo and wanted to share some of the meanderings I found in various tunings and grooves. But yeah, I think my mission statement would involve personal growth, following curiosity and passion, a focus on heart-centric themes, and a goal for connection.
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
I spend at least an hour most days going outside for a run or walk. I live in one of the most beautiful places, the PNW, so a short jaunt from my house and I’m next to the Puget Sound inlet full of kingfishers, seagulls, blue herons, and mergansers depending on the season. Low tides and high tides, I see and hear eagles swooping about and on a rare sunny horizon I can see the Olympic Mountains. The other day, I came home with a sticky pocket full of cottonwood buds for my housemate to make a salve with. The nettles have just begun showing this spring. I go for regular wanderings and collect pictures and sounds and try to make a regular practice of noticing things. Less like a practice, and more like just the way my days are, but I recognize it as an integral part of my centering practice.
“What do Chinese and Appalachian music have in common?” is not really the central question in the minds of Cathy Fink, Marcy Marxer, and Chao Tian, whose From China to Appalachia concerts may first appear wildly random in their combination of instruments and styles. To these expert folk musicians, the real question is, “What don’t Chinese and Appalachian music have in common?” The latter would have a much shorter answer.
There’s a sense of belonging, of homeyness, of ease to this musical collaboration. With their primary configuration including Chinese hammered dulcimer played by Tian, clawhammer five-string banjo played by Fink, and cello banjo played by Marxer, those overarching moods could feel surprising, but for this trio there is really no such thing as not belonging.
Fink and Marxer have constructed every facet of their lifelong careers with community building centered – that’s how they connected with Tian, after all, when she participated in a fellowship program at Strathmore Arts Center nearby their home in Maryland. Fink & Marxer host their hugely popular UkeFest at Strathmore, and Fink is often a mentor of fellowship artists such as Tian. When the three began making music together, they realized the seamlessness of their musical and cultural vocabularies almost immediately.
That realization, it turns out, is contagious. Recently, a simple promotional video of the trio performing a song to highlight a slate of performances went viral on TikTok. At the time of this writing, it has gained more than 550,000 views, more than 101,000 likes, and 14,000 saves. (Theirs is a music well worth holding onto for later.) Fink, Marxer, and Tian immediately noticed an impact from the viral video at their shows, with multiple dates selling out and new fans driving hundreds of miles to catch a tour date.
Listening to the three perform, the ease and charm of the music – however disparate its parts may feel – is immediately apparent, whether through a screen, a workshop, a community event, a concert, or a sing along. It’s clear that Cathy, Marcy, and Chao are using their music to teach the world and anyone who will listen that with roots music, there’s no such thing as not belonging.
We spoke to Fink, Marxer, and Tian via FaceTime last month, as they prepared for a short tour in the mid-Atlantic and immediately following their viral TikTok. The trio will continue touring From China to Appalachia throughout 2024 with appearances planned at Wintergrass, in the Northeast with special guest Jake Blount, and beyond.
Let’s start with your recent viral video on TikTok, I wonder what you might think is so exciting about this particular combination of instruments? Because, clearly there is something about this lineup that has resonated with folks! I have a couple of my own ideas about it, but I wonder what you think is particularly electric about banjos and Chinese dulcimer together?
Cathy Fink: Chao, do you want to start?
Chao Tian: Okay! So, I play the Chinese dulcimer, right? The most common question that people ask me in this country is, “What’s the difference between the Chinese one and the American hammered dulcimer?” They share a similar history. The Chinese dulcimer was actually introduced to China by British travelers back more than 500 years ago. And, somehow I have just felt, when I play with Appalachian musicians, or play American Roots music, I feel like I’m home. This instrument actually feels the same way – back home. It just melts into this genre of music smoothly and without any problems. The music languages are quite matchable, perfectly.
I feel like if I try to collaborate with musicians of any other type of genre – like, I play with jazz musicians – I need to learn their language. For Appalachian music, I just feel like I speak it, not the native language, but some kind of accent. But, without any limitations to communicate with those musicians.
I wanted to ask you, also, because one of the first things that came to mind for me when I saw your collaboration is Abigail Washburn collaborating with Wu Fei. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between a guzheng and a dulcimer and about your approaches and how they differ?
CT: Yes, that’s another question that people think about when they see our collaboration. Some of them just bluntly ask us, “What’s the difference?” Instrumentally we have some differences [from Wu and Washburn], because Cathy and Marcy, they are multi-instrumentalists. They can play more [instruments] and our music style is versatile.
The dulcimer’s history and background is quite different from the guzheng, because guzheng is a Chinese instrument traditionally and dulcimer is actually a worldwide instrument. As I said, [the U.S.] is a home country of this instrument.
We have a collaborative vibe and more like a family vibe. Like a family reunion… I define our collaboration as an intercultural collaboration. For most people’s opinions, they see us, too, like an intercultural thing. But when people talk about intercultural collaboration, we somehow initially think about what’s the difference between these two cultures, or three cultures, or among different cultures.
Our collaboration is based on mutual understanding and cultural respect. When we started this collaboration, we noticed there are a lot of commonalities between Chinese traditional music and American roots music. So this intercultural collaboration transformed from, “Let’s just try something” into, “Let’s delve into more about the musical language, the musical form, the scales–”
Because there are similar scales we use – the pentatonic scale, the modes. The format of the folk musics are similar, very similar. I always feel like even though folk music, those little tunes are short, but they can contain very powerful, immense messages that we can deliver to people.
And I really think our title, From China to Appalachia, actually is a very clear description. Yes, literally, but it’s not only that. Some people on TikTok suggested a very interesting idea, that we should replace China with my hometown, Beijing, because Appalachia is a region and China is a country, right? But actually we use that title not to describe the geographic thing, we are talking about music. We’re talking about culture. So from China to Appalachia, there is something that strongly linkages between them. Not only musically, not only culture, but also on a people to people level.
We should try our best to find what our commonalities are, more than trying to show, “I am special! I am special! You should listen to me! You should listen to me more!” So, it’s just musical healing.
That’s such a great answer and it makes me think of, Cathy and Marcy, how you’ve always placed community so central in how you make music. It’s not something that’s an after effect of music making for you. It’s something that’s very present in the beginning stages when you make music. Can you talk about how this project is another example of how you build community with all the music making that you do?
CF: It’s definitely that and I thank you for recognizing that. Right now, we’re in the midst of a tour that is co-sponsored by Mid Atlantic Tours of Mid Atlantic Arts. To our delight, one of the criteria for presenters participating [in the program] is that there be a community outreach event. In each place that we go, that event is different. We’ve performed for some high school kids, and this weekend our outreach was playing music at a Unitarian service. I have to tell you, it was the most beautiful service of community gathering and worship without using two words that you almost always hear in a church – God and Christ. Everyone was included. They didn’t care who you worshiped. They didn’t care who you were. If you wanted to come together and be in community, then please come in the door. For us to play music in that scenario was really amazing.
In Fredonia, [New York], it just so happened that Emily Schaad – a fiddler in the old-time music community, but also a phenomenal conductor and classical musician – had just moved to Fredonia, and we were playing at the Fredonia Opera House. They reached out to Emily and said, “How about putting together a workshop?” So, Emily had her orchestra students come and she reached out to all of the regional youth bluegrass organizations. We had a room of like 75 people – her orchestra students, kids learning bluegrass, Appalachian dulcimer players, tuba players, horn players, you name it. There was an amazing cello player who took over on Marcy’s cello banjo and immediately understood what it was.
We put together an arrangement of a tune and that was meaningful to everybody. Then, we have something coming up this weekend in Martinsville, Virginia at a place called Piedmont Arts and we’re so excited about it. Our first set is going to be based on our repertoire, we’re just going to pick what we want for an hour long set. In our second set, there’s a Chinese watercolor artist, local to that community, who has an exhibit at Piedmont Arts right now, and he’s going to be on stage creating a new watercolor while we play music, much of it improvised.
I think this grant [from Mid Atlantic Arts] has opened the door to more community. I think it will be a centerpiece of every place we go. When this grant is finished and presenters are interested in us, one of the things that we’re going to say is, “What collaborative community thing can we do?” How can we meet more people eye-to-eye, music-to-music, or whatever it may be?
Community is one of the most important things that this show and our collaboration stands for, and we’ve made music with Chao for, I don’t know, six years or so. She did some touring with us and Sam Gleaves, which was really fun. We did a little run out to Ashe County Arts Council there, in our neighborhood. And that was an interesting test for how does this music fly in Appalachia? It was just amazing, the response.
When we started doing more work together, remember that when COVID hit, there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in the country. We felt like making this music together was our statement of community and of humanity. We never had to say a thing about it. We just had to all be there together and present a very honest sense of community and love.
It’s perhaps another reason why this TikTok video of yours took off. Because, I think a lot of people, whether consciously or subconsciously, when they see banjos they might not know anything about banjo music besides stereotypes. I think there’s something about this lineup, and in particular the mission that you’re bringing to the music, that makes it so inviting to folks. You’re not just saying, “Come and listen to us.” You’re saying, “Come be a part of this.”
I think that’s part of why people see and hear this music and it might come off as intellectual or cerebral music, but they’re responding to it in a very down to earth way and they feel invited by it.
CF: And it’s very participatory. I will tell you, in Richmond, when we started singing and playing “High on a Mountain,” there were a lot of people there who knew the song. We just said, “Sing it with us!” And my God, did they ever sing it with us. There are several songs in the show full of sing-along participation, and I’m going to guess that a lot of the new fans through TikTok and social media haven’t been to a lot of folk concerts where that’s kind of an expected part of what happens.
But we have a very full circle story with a piece that Chao brought to the group after she heard a recording of Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie doing it. It’s a Chinese song called, “Three Rules of Attention and Eight Points of Discipline.” They recorded it in 1975. It’s a really awkward choice in many ways, because it deals specifically with peasants who were leaving Chiang Kai-shek’s army for the Red Army. They used this particular piece of music in the Red Army to teach what I’m going to call, “rules of humanity.” When you hear and read these rules of humanity, and you look at what’s going on in the world today, you go, “Oh my God, 1928, this song?” And Chinese people in the audience feel like we’ve brought them back to their home and their childhood. It’s a really interesting thing. Pete has, of course, a thousand people whistling on it with him. I can’t whistle worth nothing. Marcy’s pretty good at whistling. but we get the audience singing “La” and taking over the song and we’re all there together
I wanna make a quick point about Abigail and Wu Fei, because so many people make that immediate connection, too. First of all, I wanna say that we’re friends with Abigail and Chao has met Wu Fei, and I find that what we do is, separately, is very complementary. There are some differences – you know, Abby speaks fluent Chinese! Chao’s trying to teach us to sing in Chinese, and we’re working on it every day. That’s a little part of how she’s stretching us in some ways. And then we’re stretching her in some ways.
Additionally, in our show From China to Appalachia, there’s a sort of hidden parentheses: “And beyond.” From China to Appalachia (and Beyond). It’s a big focus of ours to collaborate on Chinese and Appalachian music, but it is also a real joy to pick a Django Reinhardt piece like “Dark Eyes,” which Marcy plays on the mighty ukulele. So then we have ukulele and guitar and Chinese dulcimer. Or, we’ve kind of reinvented Cousin Emmy’s “Ruby.” We have a gourd banjo, Marcy on the doumbek – she’s got a pink Barbie doumbek – and Chao on hammered dulcimer. Chao does things on hammered dulcimer that no one else does. She’s got a slide she uses on it, she’s got all these interesting sounds.
We certainly see what we do as embracing a lot of different world music concepts and basically, we feel like it’s all very complimentary. We’d love nothing better than to share a show and collaborate with Abby and Wu Fei.
That’s perfect as a segue, because I also wanted to talk about sonics and about the music itself. Marcy, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how as you’re crafting these tunes, how are you thinking about building the ensemble? How do you decide which instruments you’re going to utilize when?
Marcy Marxer: At first, we just try a bit of everything and see what works best. For me personally, the cello banjo is working really well in this group. My main instrument is guitar, of course, and I will be playing more guitar in the future, but I love the high angelic overtones of the hammer dulcimer with Cathy’s banjo ringing and then the cello kind of being, as Chao calls it, the panda of the group. [Laughs] The giant panda. [That combination] is just a sonic sound that I’ve never heard before.
You know, the hammered dulcimer was so popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s in old-time, traditional music. Then it kind of fell out of favor. Much of that had to do with the fact that the hammered dulcimer was hard to tune and the rest of the group would have to tune to the dulcimer. But it’s such an engaging sound. I mean, it really captured my heart ever since I was a little tiny child, listening to my grandma play, and then playing it myself. I think it’s really time for the hammered dulcimer to come back. I mean, we still have a generation or two of hammered dulcimer players who are 60 and over and some younger players, but I’m not so aware of them. But, I’d love to see the hammered dulcimer really come back into American traditional music in a way that younger people can still learn from the masters.
Audiences have always loved the hammered dulcimer. It’s just like old-time festivals and jams where it kind of fell out of favor to a point that some hammered dulcimer players just don’t go.
We need to bring that back, because there’s just a spirit and a liveliness to the dulcimer that nothing else has. You’ve got your percussion, you’ve got your sparkling tones, you’ve got your deep tones. It’s a real joy to play along with, to hear Cathy’s banjo and Chao’s dulcimer together just blows me away sometimes. It’s really stunning. And then to be able to add the lower stuff and take some solos. For me, that’s the comedy part, the cello banjo solos always make people laugh.
CF: Marcy’s kind of like the pinch hitter, right? I do three things: I sing, I play whatever banjo is the best banjo for the moment, and I play rhythm guitar. Like Marcy, I think the unique center of our sound is the cello banjo, the five-string banjo, and the hammered dulcimer. But then Marcy adds ukulele. She adds a mandolin. She adds tin whistle if it’s appropriate. She has percussion things. She plays the doumbek. With each song that we play, Marcy and I are going in our heads, “What does she play that might add something to this, that we don’t mind schlepping on the road?” [Laughs]
Marcy describes this sometimes like you have this box of crayons. Chao’s got a big fat crayon, I have two or three small crayons, and Marcy owns the rest of the box! [Laughs]
Canadian-born, New-York based banjo person Taylor Ashton’s second solo album, Stranger to the Feeling, was recorded on a coast-to-coast road trip in 2021. These were the two weeks post-vaccine where we thought everything was A-OK, so Ashton and producer Jacob Blumberg set out on a recording adventure that included collaborations with friends new and old.
Ashton, who’s since become a new parent with wife Rachael Price (Lake Street Dive), wanted to create an album that “meditates on the meaning of closeness and connection in an age of increasing isolation.” The energy of the new album is just that and it is palpable alongside its use of space and natural sound (gotta love those birds and room noise).
In our conversation, Taylor expands on the making of the album while addressing questions on the difficulty of reconnecting after the pandemic and how the music helped break that barrier of social isolation. We also go through a lot of the album’s songs and get to topics like crying while playing your own song, struggling with expressing feelings, and both being and not being cool. Taylor also graciously shares their thoughts on gender expression and walking the line of benefiting from the patriarchy and not feeling exactly like they embody the male gender all of the time. Being 6’2 and crying while listening to your own song maybe sums it all up? Or maybe you can’t summarize Taylor Ashton? I’m very grateful to welcome him back to Basic Folk!
When a craftsman pauses to reflect, students of all skill levels benefit from the lesson. Alison Brown’s latest album, On Banjo, released May 5 on Compass Records and is a masterclass; it’s also a study on where the instrument has been and where it’s going.
Brown is a Compass co-founder and a GRAMMY Award-winning artist and producer. A self-described “lifer” in the bluegrass community and an IBMA “First Lady of Bluegrass,” she eagerly explores what the five-stringed instrument can do outside typical genre parameters. The new record is packed with star-studded duets with comedian Steve Martin, mandolin player and fellow First Lady of Bluegrass Sierra Hull, and fiddle legend Stuart Duncan.
The result is a varied, rich track list we couldn’t wait to ask Brown about.
BGS: Let’s walk through some of the tracks and collaborations on On Banjo. What kind of music inspired the duet with Anat Cohen?
AB:Anat Cohen is a clarinetist; she was born in Israel and lives in New York, but she’s well-known in jazz circles for Brazilian choro. I actually watched lots of videos of Anat on YouTube.
I reached out. I said “I know we don’t know each other, but would you consider doing this?”
What’s it like working with a famous comedian like Steve Martin in a musical context?
I’ve had the good fortune to go out and do some shows with him and Martin Short. There’s inevitably some time to jam in the dressing room, so it’s fun to play with Steve in that context, too.
Steve’s a great banjo player with a really beautiful touch and a delicate, sweet tone. He loves playing in double C tuning. Banjo players usually tune to a G, but you can drop the fourth string to a C and tune the second [string] up to a C. It’s an old tuning that clawhammer guys use a lot.
The way “Foggy Mountain Breaking,” came about is I wrote the A section. It was during the pandemic. I asked Steve, “Do you wanna write a B part?” He sent me a perfect B section 24 hours later. We figured out a bridge together. It’s named after a lyric in a John Hartford song and is obviously a riff on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
How does it feel to work with younger bluegrass talents like Sierra Hull? Is it gratifying to have a feminine duo on that track?
I wrote that tune hoping Sierra would be up for learning and recording it with me. I’m a huge fan of her mandolin playing; she’s another one with such a delicate touch. Her fingers just really dance over the fingerboard.
It required her to play every fret on the first string of the mandolin and she did it flawlessly. She said she’d never had a chance to work on such complicated music with another woman. So it’s a really special thing. It’s always a delight to play with Sierra, but to do a duet with her was like chocolate and more chocolate.
How do you balance two strong, independent main instruments like banjo and fiddle together, such as with Stuart Duncan?
Banjo and fiddle are just so complementary. They say a banjo and fiddle make a band, and they do.
I’ve known Stuart since he was 11 and I was 12. We go way back. And on this tune I want to give a tip of the hat to Byron Berline and John Hickman. Growing up in Southern California when we did in the ’70s, those two were the guys that everybody worshiped at the feet of. I wanted to try and capture some of that spirit, and I wanted to do it with Stuart.
Who is this album for, and what do you hope listeners take away from it?
That’s the existential question of the banjo player. And it is a bit of a challenge when you take the five-string banjo and go somewhere else with it. Earl Scruggs perpetuated a style and brought it to the masses that was just so electric. Most people think that’s all the banjo does and they don’t worry about its history before that. There’s a lot of voices inside the instrument; the bluegrass one has become the loudest one most recently.
It’s so interesting because at the beginning of the 1800s the banjo was found on plantations. Then white people appropriated that music in minstrel shows, performing in blackface. It’s deep in terms of what it says about our history and America’s original sin. It went from being a Black instrument to being a white lady’s instrument. The Black voice of the instrument and the female voice of the instrument were both disenfranchised. There are gorgeous old photos of women in the 1890s holding banjos, and there were female banjo orchestras. I’m excited to see that re-emerging.
You started Compass Records with Garry West almost three decades ago. What’s on the horizon, and what are your goals?
All the labels were run by business people, not musicians. We said, “Why can’t musicians run a label for other artists?”
The other part is really wanting to build a label that can have a cultural impact and Garry and I are both invested in roots music. I’ve been a member of the bluegrass community since about 10 years old. I’m a lifer. The whole economy of the record business has been turned upside down and stirred and shaken eight times. We want to make sure this music not only survives but thrives into the future.
You mentioned growing up in SoCal. How is bluegrass there different from Appalachia?
There would be Eagles’ songs in set lists. It was wide open. When I first came east with Stuart and his dad, we drove around and did the festivals in 1978 or so, but it was rooted in the first generation bands’ repertoire.
On that trip we entered a band contest in Oklahoma and we played something we learned from a Richard Green record. It was a funky fiddle thing in E. I remember somebody coming up afterwards and saying “We don’t appreciate you knocking the music.”
What did you learn while making On Banjo?
The deep dive to find new melodies, and that process of discovery of the instrument, is the process of self-discovery. You get to the end and it teaches you something new about yourself.
Twin fiddles are the bluegrass instrumental duo that get all the attention, but double banjos are really where it’s at. (Is this writer a banjo player? Why, yes. Is this writer biased? Why, of course!) It makes sense that twin or triple fiddling would end up more popular than double or triple banjos, given that fiddles are sounded by bows, so the melodic contours are more like vocal harmony, often longer phrases and bow strokes languidly and charismatically laced together. Banjos, with their rapid-fire sixteenth notes and syncopated, idiosyncratic rolls, are just more difficult to sync up. Hundreds – if not thousands – of banjo jokes devoted to rhythm and timing will certainly back that claim up.
But double banjo is an art form as old as bluegrass itself – and older, by quite a few dozen decades, if you count early American popular music, banjo orchestras, minstrel and vaudeville songs that all centered banjos before and during the turn of the 19th to 20th century.
In bluegrass, twin five-strings are at their most astounding in jaw-dropping and acrobatic contexts such as High Fidelity’s incredible rendition of the Don Reno classic instrumental, “Follow the Leader.” Famous for his steel guitar and chicken-pickin’ Telecaster licks transferred to banjo, Reno’s harebrained and wonky turns of phrase might seem like the last musical context in which one should attempt perfect synchronization, especially on banjo, but Jeremy Stephens and Kurt Stephenson defy reason, logic, and surely physics with their buttery, seamless, double banjo blend. The track perfectly encapsulates the “WHAT IS THAT!?” quality of five-string, three-finger banjo – raised to the second power.
Anyone who grew up tuning in to or has ever binge-watched reruns of Hee Haw knows the beauty of a good double, triple, quadruple, quintuple banjo number, a common feature of the homespun country, comedy, and pickin’ variety show. Roy Clark, the Hee Haw host who could tear through almost any instrument in any style, released an entire album of double banjo music with regular Hee Haw guest Buck Trent in 1978 called Banjo Bandits. “Down Yonder” kicks with all-too-rare (and certainly delicious) bluegrass piano, a delightful intro to a bluegrass, old-time, and American songbook standard that almost sounds like a carnival merry-go-round thanks to the effect of the banjos “in stereo.” Banjo Bandits is something like a bluegrass and country double banjo primer, every track a stunning example of the form.
Like twin fiddling, double banjo lends itself so intuitively to the collaborative, community quality of bluegrass music. Through many a duo album and “featured artist” slot pickers have been using double banjo tunes to bring in their favorites, their mentors, their heroes, and their peers to swap licks, rising and falling, rolling and tumbling in breakneck unison. Alison Brown’s first Grammy Award was won for “Leaving Cottondale,” her double banjo instrumental with Béla Fleck from her also-nominated 2000 record, Fair Weather. In 2007, modern banjo hero Tony Trischka released a 14-track album of all twin banjo tunes entitled Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular. Its roster included Earl Scruggs, Brown, Fleck, Noam Pikelny, Steve Martin, and more. On “Doggy Salt,” a silly, winking instrumental that reconfigures the classic chord progression of “Salty Dog,” Scott Vestal joins Trischka, leaning into the humorous, comedic quality of these sorts of duets — a quality we see in Banjo Bandits and “Follow the Leader,” too.
Do not be mistaken, though, putting together a banjo duet isn’t just a comedic or intra-bluegrass activity! Cross-genre double banjo forays are certainly just as delightful, if not rarer and even more difficult to lock into rhythmic synchronization. Those that can mesh together three-finger’s rolling right hand with clawhammer and frailing’s loping, looser right hand are true virtuosos, defying not one but two genre’s expectations that banjos are intrinsically arhythmic and constantly rushing. Old-time players like Allison de Groot, Cathy Fink, Mark Johnson, Victor Furtado, and others all make it look and sound easy, matching their bluegrass compatriots’ rhythms and syncopations with ease and not just blending in, but counterpointing tastefully as well. One such recording, “Cluck Old Hen” from Pikelny’s Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail project, features Steve Martin, once again, on clawhammer. A less traditional approach, the two play with textures and senses, not striving for perfect unison, but rather exploring what an old-time-and-bluegrass dialogue can look and sound like, expanding our ideas of what twin banjo can be.
No matter the context, genre, roster of pickers, or style of playing, this fact remains true: more banjos equals more fun. (To this writer, at least.)
Artist:Cristina Vane Hometown: Turin, Italy Song: “Prayer For the Blind” Album:Nowhere Sounds Lovely Release Date: April 2, 2021
In Their Words: “‘Prayer For the Blind’ is inspired by a friendly couple I met while camping on the border of Nebraska and Iowa. She told me her mother suffered from dementia, but that it couldn’t help but make her laugh when her mother claimed that her husband was cheating on her, going dancing with a woman with two peg legs, and that she was going to wring her neck. The anecdote got me thinking about how we try and find levity in heavy situations, and also about the bond between mothers and daughters and the intergenerational burdens that can be passed along through them. I wanted to find a tone that matched the difficult nature of these questions, and the lonesome modal banjo seemed perfect for that, paired with Nate Leath’s great fiddling. The issues of motherhood and illness are no new phenomenon, so I thought old time sounds fit the theme well — you can’t beat a fiddle and banjo!” — Cristina Vane
Photo credit: Oceana Colgan Video credit: Jeremy Harris
Editor’s note: Tunesday Tuesday is changing slightly in 2021. What began in 2017 as a bi-weekly tune feature and short review will now be expanded into a monthly roundup of interesting, engaging, and groundbreaking instrumental music and the themes we trace within it.
One of the most thoughtful and virtuosic clawhammer banjoists around, Allison de Groot (Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, The Goodbye Girls) has released a brand new video with fellow Canadian, guitarist Quinn Bachand. The two old-time musicians found themselves with free time hunkering down on British Columbia’s coast last fall and joined together on a gorgeous rendering of a couple of tunes — not rousing old-time or bluegrass fiddle melodies, though. Instead they chose a pair of Irish jigs: “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone.”
“I love working up fiddle tunes outside of the American old-time repertoire,” de Groot relays via email. She arranges old-time and bluegrass with a striking, clean precision and unmatched rhythmic pocket for a frailing banjo player — facets of her playing style which might not seem to lend themselves to the often staccato or triplet-heavy or frenetic flurries of licks and trills in Irish music.
“When I’m playing in a new style,” she goes on, “I try to capture aspects of what makes the music special to my ear while still embracing the unique qualities of clawhammer banjo.” And on “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone,” she does just that, impeccably so. De Groot is a player that at times can perfectly disappear into her source material, but her obvious embrace of clawhammer’s idiosyncrasies is what makes these Irish forays so entrancing.
“Adapting jigs to the five-string banjo is not a historically new endeavour, but there is lots of room to explore clawhammer banjo in this setting. I find a lot of freedom in that space!” That freedom is perhaps the most charming aspect of this set of tunes — second only to the joy always apparent in de Groot’s picking.
Though perceptibly rare, other banjo players have indeed been enticed by that very same freedom (de Groot is right that it’s not a new endeavor). The five-string banjo, especially post-Earl Scruggs, is an instrument with intrinsic qualities of innovation, acrobatics, and thinking outside the box. The physical instrument itself and the lore driving the mystique behind it lend it perfectly to Irish and Celtic folk music.
Ron Block, longtime member of Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station, and an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, has long been an acolyte of five-string Irish banjo. On a 2018 duo release with Irish songwriter and picker Damien O’Kane entitled Banjophony, the pair explore not just the mind-bending beauty created by a five-string banjo’s interpretations of traditional Irish musical vocabularies, but also the ways in which the five-string and four-string instruments bump into each other — often delightfully — in these contexts. The linear-laid-out four-string banjo and the more bouncy, melodic five-string each naturally settle into their roles in this dialogue, like old-time and bluegrass’s primordial band structure of fiddle and banjo, but with more aggression and dissonance — and a heavy dose of the stark sort of beauty that grows from the spine-tingling friction between such gregarious and bold instruments.
Irish music fully embraced the banjo — the four-string iteration of the instrument, most often tuned in fourths (C, G, D, A) — by the mid-twentieth century, closing a transatlantic feedback loop that began in Africa, landed the banjo’s precursors in the Americas brought by enslaved Africans, and then transported the instrument in its modern form back across the Atlantic to Ireland. This conclusion occurred after the four-string banjo (and any/all banjos with varying counts of strings) skyrocketed to the height of fame in America’s popular music of choice throughout the nineteenth century: minstrelsy.
Its punchy volume, its bubbly, single-string triplets, the low buzzing of the wound strings were each folded into the greater sound of Irish folk so naturally, from the purest traditional instances to the most daring punk affectations. The banjo’s subversive, trailblazing tendencies are ripe for exciting forays and experiments. One such experiment is banjo player, builder, and inventor Tom Saffell’s behemoth Infinity 8-String Banjo.
In this 2007 video with acoustic Irish-bluegrass band Plaidgrass, Saffell demonstrates how the Infinity 8-String Banjo combines Irish banjo approaches on both four-string and five-string instruments. The two lower, wound strings, while droning or being picked, round out the natural high-end of five-string banjos, bringing in some of the punch and gravel we know and love in Irish banjo. Meanwhile, the higher strings — with one additional above the typical D first string — equip Saffell to efficiently execute Irish turns of phrase with a simple bluegrass roll of the right hand.
Whatever it is about Irish banjo playing that just works, these pickers demonstrate there’s an entire world to be discovered not just in other genres that may be seen as outside of the norm for our instruments, but even more so in the space created between those genres. That’s as close to a definition of American roots music as we might get, the “melting pot” quality we all know and love, evident and flamboyant in each of these examples of Irish banjo on more than four strings.
In this must-see live video bluegrass and Americana veteran Jalan Crossland plays it lonesome at the Lincoln Theater in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Crossland, who has been releasing music since 2000, is a champion-level instrumentalist, but he mixes several techniques to shape his mountain sound on his song “Moonshiner.” Listen for a little flatpicking here and there, some fingerpicks like a Scruggs-style banjo player, and clawhammer thrown in for good measure on the strings of his banjitar (or ganjo, if you prefer).
The sound that comes from Crossland’s hands matches the gritty timbre of his rich voice, which seems to emanate from deep within and pour out like smoke from a fire. “Moonshiner” is from one of the instrumentalist’s earliest albums, dating all the way back to 2004. Performing solo inside one of Wyoming’s most beautiful and historic venues, he brings a skill and prowess to what is otherwise folk music, and the result has a magnetism that few others can achieve. Watch the striking performance from our friends at Western AF below.
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