2012 Instructors
We're excited to announce the 2012 RockyGrass Academy faculty.
Guitar | Mandolin | Banjo | Fiddle | Dobro | Bass | Songwriting | Vocals |
Bands-in-Residence | Kids Camp | Instrument Building
Please note: instructors are subject to change.
Guitarist Michael Daves made his Nonesuch debut with Sleep with One Eye Open, a duo album with mandolinist Chris Thile. He was born in 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Heralded as “a leading light of the New York bluegrass scene” by the New York Times, Daves has garnered attention for his work with Steve Martin, Tony Trischka, and Rosanne Cash in addition to his solo performances. Michael's long-awaited solo album, Live at the Rockwood, was released in October of 2007. [more...] Recorded at his weekly shows at New York's Rockwood Music Hall, it features twelve interpretations of unmistakably bluegrass songs. A natural-born guitar operator, Michael's playing style blends a bluegrass chord-melody function with a rock persistency. With such a pile-driver of an approach, he makes clear his belief that classic country and punk genres share in mind more than three-chord-songs. His singing gets compared to Bill Monroe and to Del McCoury, and words like "twang," and "high-lonesome" come into play, but mostly he just sounds like Michael. [less...] 
Andy Falco
Andy Falco started playing guitar at a young age and began his career in music playing electric guitar in roots and rock based bands. He eventually put down the electric and started playing bluegrass while still maintaining his blues and rock influences, and joined The Infamous Stringdusters in 2007.
2008 National Flatpicking Champion Tyler Grant has earned a reputation as one of today’s elite guitarists. A graduate of California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Guitar Performance, Tyler has recorded and toured with Adrienne Young, Casey & Chris Henry, Casey Driessen, Abigail Washburn, April Verch, the Drew Emmitt Band and the Emmitt-Nershi Band. Tyler has performed at most major US festivals and thousands of concerts worldwide. In addition to the National Flatpicking Championship at Winfield in 2008 and Merlefest Doc Watson Guitar Championship [more...] in 2009, Tyler has taken first place at Rockygrass, Wayne Henderson, and the New England Flatpicking Championships. He has released three solo CDs and been featured in Acoustic Guitar, Flatpicking Guitar, and Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine. In 2011 Tyler left his steady gig with the Emmitt-Nershi Band to pursue his solo efforts and go full time with his band, Grant Farm. In addition to his talent as a performer, Tyler is a gifted instructor with nearly twenty years experience. He brings a well organized, focused and common sense approach to his guitar workshops and never fails to enlighten and inspire his students. [less...]
Sandy has been a long-time instructor at the Academy and helped shape its programming since its inception. He has been teaching music classes at Colorado Mountain College and at his music store Great Divide Music in Aspen, since 1976. Sandy is a multi-instrumentalist and currently performs with the Flying Dog Bluegrass Band and the Crowlin' Ferlies both from Aspen. Sandy is one of only two instructors that have taught at every Academy since 1992. Having created a loyal student following both in Aspen and Lyons, he will once again be serving as a guitar instructor this year.
In addition to being the mandolinist, guitarist and vocalist for Bluegrass Etc., John Moore was also the mandolinist with the internationally acclaimed band California, the International Bluegrass Music Association’s 1992, 1993 and 1994 Instrumental Band of the Year. (See the cover story in the August 1992 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine). John’s musical performances have led him throughout the U.S. and Canada, Europe and Japan, as well as into the studio doing sessions for other artists.
John does radio and television commercials [more...] as well as movie sound tracks, including "Blaze" for Touchstone Pictures, "El Diablo" for HBO, "Christmas in Connecticut" in which he also appeared and "The Spitfire Grill" for Hallmark Hall Of Fame. John also recorded the soundtrack for, and appeared in the CBS Television Special "The Legend of the Beverly Hillbillies" in a four piece band along with Roy Clark, Byron Berline and Earl Scruggs. He recently recorded a Grammy nominated album with Byron Berline, Vince Gill, Bill Bryson, Dennis Caplinger, Rick Cunha and Jann Browne, and another with Mike Oldfield of "Tubular Bells" fame.
He recently appeared in the final episode of the second season of the HBO series "Deadwood", and in 2003 he appeared in a Television commercial for Cingular Wireless along with Dennis Caplinger, Bill Bryson, Herb Pedersen, Kenny Blackwell and Sara Watkins which aired nationwide for several weeks. John was featured on the cover of the May/June 1993 issue of Bluegrass Now Magazine, and is most recently featured on the cover of the May/June 1999 issue of Flatpick Guitar Magazine. [less...]
He recently appeared in the final episode of the second season of the HBO series "Deadwood", and in 2003 he appeared in a Television commercial for Cingular Wireless along with Dennis Caplinger, Bill Bryson, Herb Pedersen, Kenny Blackwell and Sara Watkins which aired nationwide for several weeks. John was featured on the cover of the May/June 1993 issue of Bluegrass Now Magazine, and is most recently featured on the cover of the May/June 1999 issue of Flatpick Guitar Magazine. [less...]
As one of the acoustic world’s top-ranked mandolin players and composers, veteran artist John Reischman is renowned for his exquisite taste, tone and impeccable musicianship. Born in Ukiah, California in 1955, John first played guitar at age 12, exploring fingerpicking and blues styles before discovering the mandolin at age 17. John’s synthesis of a wide range of genres – from bluegrass to hot swing and jazz – was honed over more than two decades of performing beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. As an original member [more...] of the legendary Tony Rice Unit, John helped to define the 'new acoustic' instrumental scene in the early 1980s with appearances on the band’s groundbreaking Rounder albums Still Inside and Backwaters. He cemented his reputation touring and recording for many years with the Bay Area’s eclectic Good Ol’ Persons before moving to Vancouver, British Columbia in the early 1990s to pursue a solo career. His mastery of the instrument is showcased today in the powerful bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds, and his Latin/jazz instrumental duo with highly-regarded acoustic guitar stylist John Miller. [less...]
Chris Thile, of the Punch Brothers, has changed the mandolin forever, elevating it from its
origins as a relatively simple folk and bluegrass instrument to the sophistication and brilliance
of the finest jazz improvisation and classical performance. For more than 15 years, Thile
played in the wildly popular band Nickel Creek, with whom he released three albums and sold
two million records, was awarded a Grammy in 2002. Recently, Nonesuch Records released
Sleep with One Eye Open, an impassioned collaboration/conversation between Thile [more...] and
guitarist Michael Daves, in which the subject is bluegrass, specifically how this upstart duo can
acknowledge history and tradition while exuberantly defying convention. The duo is currently
performing a handful of select UK dates. Thile also recently collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma for The
Goat Rodeo Sessions, an album due out October 24th. As a soloist he has released four albums,
as well as performing and recording extensively as a duo with double bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer
and with fellow eminent mandolinist Mike Marshall. He has also collaborated with a pantheon
of bluegrass innovators including Bela Fleck, Dolly Parton, the Dixie Chicks, Jerry Douglas, and
Sam Bush. [less...]
Dennis Caplinger
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Dennis Caplinger is one of the most sought after studio musicians in California and often travels to Nashville, Tennessee to do sessions. He is currently under contract with Network Productions of San Diego, Ca. recording numerous television and radio commercials as well as writing and recording music for their extensive music library - one of the largest in the world. His movie soundtrack credits include “Back to the Future III”, “El Diablo”, “Rio Diablo” and Steven King’s “Apt Pupil” among othersDennis’ playing is regularly [more...] featured on the soundtrack of the Warner Bros. cartoons “Pinky and the Brain” and “Histeria”, as well as on recent commercials for “New York Life”, “Supercuts”, “Subway Sandwiches” and “Discover Card” featuring John Lithgow. He is a regular in the Academy of Country Music Awards Show band, and has just finished recording on new album projects with Rita Coolidge and mandolinist John Reishmann Dennis is a frequent contributor to Banjo Newsletter and can be seen in the October 1999 issue of Bluegrass Now magazine which contains a feature article on him. [less...]
Chris is quickly becoming recognized as one of the premier young banjo players on today's acoustic music scene. After being exposed to the music of Béla Fleck, he bought his first banjo while attending high school in New York. Chris later studied with legends Tony Trischka and Bill Evans, working on everything from traditional bluegrass to progressive instrumental music. With the help of Matt Glaser, he was admitted as the first ever banjo principal at the Berklee College of Music, studying jazz performance and composition. In the summer of 2002 Chris was [more...] awarded the prestigious Bill Vernon Memorial Scholarship at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. After relocating to Nashville in 2004, Chris toured with Grammy-nominated artist Bering Strait and the Drew Emmitt Band, before joining forces with some of the best young musicians around to form The Infamous Stringdusters. Over the past 6 years the 'Dusters have emerged as a trendsetter in the bluegrass/jam/festival scene, bringing a new and more eclectic acoustic sound/show to bigger crowds all over the country. In addition to playing full-time with the Stringdusters, Chris is also a film editor/producer and a prolific writer. In September 2011, Chris delivered a keynote address at the 2011 IBMA World of Bluegrass in Nashville, TN, giving some real recognition to a new vision of a bigger, more connected acoustic world. His teaching experience includes a number of prestigious camps as well as years of private instruction, helping students connect with both the foundations of bluegrass banjo and also a more modern sense of how the instrument can make music. [less...]
Though Beat The Devil and Carry A Rail is banjo player Noam Pikelny’s second solo disc, it represents something of a new beginning. Even more revelatory than his 2004 debut, In the Maze, it captures an artist as he unveils a developed and assured voice as musician and composer.
In 2010, actor-banjo player-author Steve Martin awarded Pikelny the first Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, calling Pikelny, “a player of unlimited range and astonishing precision.” Beat the Devil is virtuosic in execution but is warm, amiable and approachable [more...] in feel. Pikelny is backed by an all-star band of old friends and long-time heroes, including fellow Punch Brothers Gabe Witcher and Chris Eldridge, bassist Mark Schatz, fiddle player Stuart Duncan, vocalist-mandolinist Tim O’Brien, and dobro player Jerry Douglas—all of whom boast impressive credentials along with Grammy nominations and other accolades in the worlds of bluegrass, folk and country. Guest stars include Punch Brothers founder and mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Bryan Sutton, violin prodigy Alex Hargreaves, and fellow banjo player Steve Martin, who befriended Pikelny through the New York City music scene, and invited Punch Brothers to open his 2010 summer tour.
Though Beat The Devil and Carry A Rail is banjo player Noam Pikelny’s second solo disc, it represents something of a new beginning. Even more revelatory than his 2004 debut, In the Maze, it captures an artist as he unveils a developed and assured voice as musician and composer.
In 2010, actor-banjo player-author Steve Martin awarded Pikelny the first Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, calling Pikelny, “a player of unlimited range and astonishing precision.” Beat the Devil is virtuosic in execution but is warm, amiable and approachable in feel. Pikelny is backed by an all-star band of old friends and long-time heroes, including fellow Punch Brothers Gabe Witcher and Chris Eldridge, bassist Mark Schatz, fiddle player Stuart Duncan, vocalist-mandolinist Tim O’Brien, and dobro player Jerry Douglas—all of whom boast impressive credentials along with Grammy nominations and other accolades in the worlds of bluegrass, folk and country. Guest stars include Punch Brothers founder and mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Bryan Sutton, violin prodigy Alex Hargreaves, and fellow banjo player Steve Martin, who befriended Pikelny through the New York City music scene, and invited Punch Brothers to open his 2010 summer tour.
Pikelny recorded Beat the Devil And Carry a Rail in Nashville in April of 2011 but the album had spent years in gestation due to Pikelny’s demanding schedule. Making a second album had long been on Pikelny’s to-do list. Since 2006, however, he had been primarily devoting his creative energies to Punch Brothers, the prodigiously skilled quintet that despite the stringband format, defies all genres becoming, as the Village Voice recently called them, “one of the greatest young bands in the country, bluegrass or otherwise.” The growing success of Punch Brothers, and the quintet’s daunting touring itinerary, left little time for individual projects. “The time I had to myself when I wasn't on the road or in the studio with Punch Brothers was mostly spent catching up on sleep and making sure I had clean clothes”. In fact, Pikelny had realized his first solo album just weeks before first meeting Chris Thile, then a member of Nickel Creek, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, in June of 2004.
That chance meeting paved the way for the formation of Punch Brothers. Their sights were set high, first embarking upon Thile's album-length four-movement piece The Blind Leaving the Blind, which remains a cornerstone of the band. Pikelny was provoked, tested, inspired, and ultimately, changed by his newfound collaborators: “I was being challenged in so many ways—technically as a banjo player, conceptually as a musician. I couldn't have asked for a better situation. It was an amazing opportunity; I was being pushed so hard by the band that I felt I was having to redefine myself on the fly as a banjo player. When I listen to my playing before Punch Brothers, to my ears, it sounds like a different person as far as feel, approach, technique, improvising... Playing with those guys even inspired me to go out and find a great old instrument. I think my whole sound was going through a transformation.”
Resuming solo work in the midst of Punch Brothers commitments, Pikelny drew upon those experiences, infusing his album with a unique instrumental voice but within a more traditional context. “This metamorphosis brought upon by the Punch Brothers repertoire, interestingly enough extended itself even when I would return to playing more traditional music. This new understanding of the banjo was creeping into to whatever I was playing. So even if I was rendering a classic Earl Scruggs banjo tune or improvising over an old fiddle tune, the impact of Punch Brothers had become evident in my playing. I felt like it was high time to put together a record that was a little bit more connected to my roots and use some of my own instrumentals to showcase an updated version, if you will, of my banjo playing.”
On Beat the Devil, Pikelny offers eight original pieces—from intensely focused, fast-moving numbers like “All Git Out” and “Bear Dog Grit” to more pastoral, gently paced tunes like “Boathouse on the Lullwater” and “The Broken Drought.” He recasts the frequently recorded Appalachian folk tune, “Cluck Old Hen,” as an instrumental duet between Pikelny (on bluegrass banjo) and Steve Martin (on clawhammer banjo). Tim O’Brien adds lead vocals to 1920s-era songster Henry Thomas’ “Bob McKinney,” and Pikelny also fashions a lovely cover of Tom Waits’ “Fish and Bird,” featuring a heartbreaking, vocal performance from Crooked Still vocalist Aoife O'Donovan. Pikelny calls the track “a special tune on a couple of different levels. Tom Waits is a recent discovery of mine. Of course, it was all out there in front of me, but I had never caught on before how profound Tom Waits’ music is. Unfortunately, it was all too recent of an epiphany. The only other personal discovery on this level has been falling in love with John Hartford’s music over the last three or four years. He was one of the most unique and virtuosic banjo players, and wrote some of the greatest songs of all time. These guys are the gold standard, if you ask me. On ‘Fish and Bird’ there was a sweet collision of these worlds, as the key Aoife wanted to sing in warranted playing a low-tuned banjo, something that was one of John Hartford's signature sounds. When I got to Nashville, I asked Bela Fleck if he would consider loaning me John Hartford's old banjo that he acquired after John's passing. Bela was gracious enough to make it available. I was hesitant to ask, but Bela said that’s exactly what Hartford would want, for people to be using his instruments to make music. I was really honored by that. It was a meaningful, yet unforeseen union of the music of two men who have really moved me as of late.”
Pikelny says Beat the Devil and Carry A Rail was deeply informed by several people who inspired him as he was coming up in the ranks, and he feels lucky to have recruited many of them for the sessions: “I became really excited about the idea of reconnecting with some of my friends and heroes in Nashville that I had only gotten to play with informally at festivals, guys like Tim O’Brien, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas & Mark Schatz. It was the thrill of a lifetime to share a stage with these people, but I had never gotten to be in the studio with any of them. Based on the material I was amassing, I realized that I should make a somewhat traditional banjo record and call these guys. I wanted that experience—to be in the studio with these heroes for a week—not just because of the music we would capture, but to get to know these guys better, to hear their stories. They shed so much light on the history of the music. It was so meaningful to get a better understanding of these folks who I've looked up to for years, to learn more about their background and motivation. I came out of this experience with so much more than the files that became this record.”
Noam called on his Punch Brothers fiddler Gabe Witcher to produce the album. “When I first started imagining this record, I knew I wanted Gabe to produce it,” Pikelny says. “He has been such a powerful force during the recording of the Punch Brothers records. I had been extremely impressed by Gabber's poise when we've been in the studio. Also I've always taken note of how extraordinarily committed he has been to absorbing as much studio and recording wisdom from the ridiculously talented people we've been lucky enough to be around while in the studio. I couldn’t think of anybody who knows my playing better than Gabe. This is the first album where he is the official producer. I thought that would be a healthy challenge. I knew I made the right choice when a couple hours into the first day I found Gabe outside, on a break, pacing around the parking lot smoking a cigar while on a cell phone. Now that's a producer.”
Rising to the occasion is in many ways a theme of the album, and the underlying meaning of its title. Pikelny, now based in Brooklyn, explains: “I've always loved the South and Appalachia. I obviously have fallen in love with the music, but also many other aspects of the heritage. I always love learning some of the old expressions and phrases and have made a hobby of searching through books of southern regionalisms. “Beat The Devil and Carry A Rail” stems from a bizarre and antiquated rural tradition of handicapping whoever is favored in a race or a contest by having them carry a rail. Yes, quite unbelievable – but hey, you can’t argue with something if it's in a reference book. It can mean two things. One would be to beat someone decisively, a clear victory; the other would be to triumph against all odds. The second meaning appeals to me more as something that relates to this record and the music on it. Not on a super literal level, but it definitely applies to the actual task of getting this record made. While the album was made over the course of two months, it had been seven whole years since my last solo effort. In Punch Brothers, we had established this brain trust; we had become comfortable relying on each other to put music together as a group. It’s an extremely powerful thing to have access to that, and with each year that passed it became more daunting how to step away and finally record another project of mine. Having Gabe on-board as producer helped lessen the shock, but I was still forced out of what had become my natural habitat. So this record is a little personal triumph of mine, something of my own that makes me proud.” [less...]
Though Beat The Devil and Carry A Rail is banjo player Noam Pikelny’s second solo disc, it represents something of a new beginning. Even more revelatory than his 2004 debut, In the Maze, it captures an artist as he unveils a developed and assured voice as musician and composer.
In 2010, actor-banjo player-author Steve Martin awarded Pikelny the first Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, calling Pikelny, “a player of unlimited range and astonishing precision.” Beat the Devil is virtuosic in execution but is warm, amiable and approachable in feel. Pikelny is backed by an all-star band of old friends and long-time heroes, including fellow Punch Brothers Gabe Witcher and Chris Eldridge, bassist Mark Schatz, fiddle player Stuart Duncan, vocalist-mandolinist Tim O’Brien, and dobro player Jerry Douglas—all of whom boast impressive credentials along with Grammy nominations and other accolades in the worlds of bluegrass, folk and country. Guest stars include Punch Brothers founder and mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Bryan Sutton, violin prodigy Alex Hargreaves, and fellow banjo player Steve Martin, who befriended Pikelny through the New York City music scene, and invited Punch Brothers to open his 2010 summer tour.
Pikelny recorded Beat the Devil And Carry a Rail in Nashville in April of 2011 but the album had spent years in gestation due to Pikelny’s demanding schedule. Making a second album had long been on Pikelny’s to-do list. Since 2006, however, he had been primarily devoting his creative energies to Punch Brothers, the prodigiously skilled quintet that despite the stringband format, defies all genres becoming, as the Village Voice recently called them, “one of the greatest young bands in the country, bluegrass or otherwise.” The growing success of Punch Brothers, and the quintet’s daunting touring itinerary, left little time for individual projects. “The time I had to myself when I wasn't on the road or in the studio with Punch Brothers was mostly spent catching up on sleep and making sure I had clean clothes”. In fact, Pikelny had realized his first solo album just weeks before first meeting Chris Thile, then a member of Nickel Creek, at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, in June of 2004.
That chance meeting paved the way for the formation of Punch Brothers. Their sights were set high, first embarking upon Thile's album-length four-movement piece The Blind Leaving the Blind, which remains a cornerstone of the band. Pikelny was provoked, tested, inspired, and ultimately, changed by his newfound collaborators: “I was being challenged in so many ways—technically as a banjo player, conceptually as a musician. I couldn't have asked for a better situation. It was an amazing opportunity; I was being pushed so hard by the band that I felt I was having to redefine myself on the fly as a banjo player. When I listen to my playing before Punch Brothers, to my ears, it sounds like a different person as far as feel, approach, technique, improvising... Playing with those guys even inspired me to go out and find a great old instrument. I think my whole sound was going through a transformation.”
Resuming solo work in the midst of Punch Brothers commitments, Pikelny drew upon those experiences, infusing his album with a unique instrumental voice but within a more traditional context. “This metamorphosis brought upon by the Punch Brothers repertoire, interestingly enough extended itself even when I would return to playing more traditional music. This new understanding of the banjo was creeping into to whatever I was playing. So even if I was rendering a classic Earl Scruggs banjo tune or improvising over an old fiddle tune, the impact of Punch Brothers had become evident in my playing. I felt like it was high time to put together a record that was a little bit more connected to my roots and use some of my own instrumentals to showcase an updated version, if you will, of my banjo playing.”
On Beat the Devil, Pikelny offers eight original pieces—from intensely focused, fast-moving numbers like “All Git Out” and “Bear Dog Grit” to more pastoral, gently paced tunes like “Boathouse on the Lullwater” and “The Broken Drought.” He recasts the frequently recorded Appalachian folk tune, “Cluck Old Hen,” as an instrumental duet between Pikelny (on bluegrass banjo) and Steve Martin (on clawhammer banjo). Tim O’Brien adds lead vocals to 1920s-era songster Henry Thomas’ “Bob McKinney,” and Pikelny also fashions a lovely cover of Tom Waits’ “Fish and Bird,” featuring a heartbreaking, vocal performance from Crooked Still vocalist Aoife O'Donovan. Pikelny calls the track “a special tune on a couple of different levels. Tom Waits is a recent discovery of mine. Of course, it was all out there in front of me, but I had never caught on before how profound Tom Waits’ music is. Unfortunately, it was all too recent of an epiphany. The only other personal discovery on this level has been falling in love with John Hartford’s music over the last three or four years. He was one of the most unique and virtuosic banjo players, and wrote some of the greatest songs of all time. These guys are the gold standard, if you ask me. On ‘Fish and Bird’ there was a sweet collision of these worlds, as the key Aoife wanted to sing in warranted playing a low-tuned banjo, something that was one of John Hartford's signature sounds. When I got to Nashville, I asked Bela Fleck if he would consider loaning me John Hartford's old banjo that he acquired after John's passing. Bela was gracious enough to make it available. I was hesitant to ask, but Bela said that’s exactly what Hartford would want, for people to be using his instruments to make music. I was really honored by that. It was a meaningful, yet unforeseen union of the music of two men who have really moved me as of late.”
Pikelny says Beat the Devil and Carry A Rail was deeply informed by several people who inspired him as he was coming up in the ranks, and he feels lucky to have recruited many of them for the sessions: “I became really excited about the idea of reconnecting with some of my friends and heroes in Nashville that I had only gotten to play with informally at festivals, guys like Tim O’Brien, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas & Mark Schatz. It was the thrill of a lifetime to share a stage with these people, but I had never gotten to be in the studio with any of them. Based on the material I was amassing, I realized that I should make a somewhat traditional banjo record and call these guys. I wanted that experience—to be in the studio with these heroes for a week—not just because of the music we would capture, but to get to know these guys better, to hear their stories. They shed so much light on the history of the music. It was so meaningful to get a better understanding of these folks who I've looked up to for years, to learn more about their background and motivation. I came out of this experience with so much more than the files that became this record.”
Noam called on his Punch Brothers fiddler Gabe Witcher to produce the album. “When I first started imagining this record, I knew I wanted Gabe to produce it,” Pikelny says. “He has been such a powerful force during the recording of the Punch Brothers records. I had been extremely impressed by Gabber's poise when we've been in the studio. Also I've always taken note of how extraordinarily committed he has been to absorbing as much studio and recording wisdom from the ridiculously talented people we've been lucky enough to be around while in the studio. I couldn’t think of anybody who knows my playing better than Gabe. This is the first album where he is the official producer. I thought that would be a healthy challenge. I knew I made the right choice when a couple hours into the first day I found Gabe outside, on a break, pacing around the parking lot smoking a cigar while on a cell phone. Now that's a producer.”
Rising to the occasion is in many ways a theme of the album, and the underlying meaning of its title. Pikelny, now based in Brooklyn, explains: “I've always loved the South and Appalachia. I obviously have fallen in love with the music, but also many other aspects of the heritage. I always love learning some of the old expressions and phrases and have made a hobby of searching through books of southern regionalisms. “Beat The Devil and Carry A Rail” stems from a bizarre and antiquated rural tradition of handicapping whoever is favored in a race or a contest by having them carry a rail. Yes, quite unbelievable – but hey, you can’t argue with something if it's in a reference book. It can mean two things. One would be to beat someone decisively, a clear victory; the other would be to triumph against all odds. The second meaning appeals to me more as something that relates to this record and the music on it. Not on a super literal level, but it definitely applies to the actual task of getting this record made. While the album was made over the course of two months, it had been seven whole years since my last solo effort. In Punch Brothers, we had established this brain trust; we had become comfortable relying on each other to put music together as a group. It’s an extremely powerful thing to have access to that, and with each year that passed it became more daunting how to step away and finally record another project of mine. Having Gabe on-board as producer helped lessen the shock, but I was still forced out of what had become my natural habitat. So this record is a little personal triumph of mine, something of my own that makes me proud.” [less...]
On a blustery cold morning in December of 1978, in the small southern Minnesota town of Owatonna, a fiddler was born. His father played banjo and pedal steel guitar in a band called Everybody & His Brother while his mother gardened and painted with watercolors. The first fiddle he ever held was a cardboard box with paint stirrer taped ...on for a neck and a wooden dowel used for a bow. As soon as he learned to respect his "instrument", the child was given his first real fiddle.
The boy grew up healthy and strong on two different diets ... tater tot hot [more...] dish and popsicles for physical nourishment, and bluegrass, western swing, and jazz for his ears. His parents used to say the song Roly Poly was written about him. There had also been passing mention that he had been found under a rock -- a theory that has yet to be disproved.
This young boy learned the value of hard work and practice by being bribed with baseball cards. He grew and grew and practiced and practiced...and then grew some more...stopping just a hair short of 5'7". It's been said that summers full of bluegrass festival campfire jam sessions and fiddle camps, years of public school orchestra, and a couple of seasons on the diving team may have prevented him from reaching 6'0". However he did reach his goal of growing a goatee by the end of high school . . . if you could call it a goatee.
Goatee was accepted to Berklee College of Music, along with many other goatees, and swiftly left his then home of Chicago. The following three years taught him about life on his own, parking in Boston, and all the other wonderful "lessons" you learn in those "college years."
With diploma in hand, this young man -- really a big kid at heart -- moved to Music City USA, home of the Grand Old Opry, the Station Inn, George Jones, the Wooten brothers, and hot chicken, Nashville TN. Goatee already owned a pickup truck but felt life could be more fully realized if he changed his name to Mustache.
Harnessing the power of red shoes, Mustache and his trusty sidekick, 5-String Fiddle, have spent the last decade in studios, on stages, and crammed into various forms of transportation, traveling across the North American continent and over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - not only as a sideman for Béla Fleck, The Sparrow Quartet, Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, Steve Earle, and Frank Vignola, but also as a solo artist with his band, a drums/bass/fiddle power trio called The Colorfools - fighting evil music, toppling language barriers, and sharing his view of the world through a camera lens.
In 2006, Mustache and 5-String Fiddle made their debut record entitled 3D (Sugar Hill Records). On the morning of his birthday, what at first seemed like prank phone call turned out to be the honest truth -- 3D was nominated for a Grammy.
Two years, thousands of frequent flyer miles, and even more thousands of notes later, the time had come to return to the studio. Genre lines were smeared; sounds and colors from beautiful to ugly and everywhere in between were explored; drums & loops (Matt Chamberlain), bass (Viktor Krauss), electric guitar & pedal steel (Darrell Scott), fiddle & voice (midwest boy) grooved through twists and turns; new melodies were born while old ones were de'rranged. Life's most recent adventures of sight and sound have been sonically summed up in less than an hour.
That midwest boy is Casey Driessen, and thus begins the story of his second solo record, Oog (Red Shoe Records). Enjoy music.[less...]
This young boy learned the value of hard work and practice by being bribed with baseball cards. He grew and grew and practiced and practiced...and then grew some more...stopping just a hair short of 5'7". It's been said that summers full of bluegrass festival campfire jam sessions and fiddle camps, years of public school orchestra, and a couple of seasons on the diving team may have prevented him from reaching 6'0". However he did reach his goal of growing a goatee by the end of high school . . . if you could call it a goatee.
Goatee was accepted to Berklee College of Music, along with many other goatees, and swiftly left his then home of Chicago. The following three years taught him about life on his own, parking in Boston, and all the other wonderful "lessons" you learn in those "college years."
With diploma in hand, this young man -- really a big kid at heart -- moved to Music City USA, home of the Grand Old Opry, the Station Inn, George Jones, the Wooten brothers, and hot chicken, Nashville TN. Goatee already owned a pickup truck but felt life could be more fully realized if he changed his name to Mustache.
Harnessing the power of red shoes, Mustache and his trusty sidekick, 5-String Fiddle, have spent the last decade in studios, on stages, and crammed into various forms of transportation, traveling across the North American continent and over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - not only as a sideman for Béla Fleck, The Sparrow Quartet, Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, Steve Earle, and Frank Vignola, but also as a solo artist with his band, a drums/bass/fiddle power trio called The Colorfools - fighting evil music, toppling language barriers, and sharing his view of the world through a camera lens.
In 2006, Mustache and 5-String Fiddle made their debut record entitled 3D (Sugar Hill Records). On the morning of his birthday, what at first seemed like prank phone call turned out to be the honest truth -- 3D was nominated for a Grammy.
Two years, thousands of frequent flyer miles, and even more thousands of notes later, the time had come to return to the studio. Genre lines were smeared; sounds and colors from beautiful to ugly and everywhere in between were explored; drums & loops (Matt Chamberlain), bass (Viktor Krauss), electric guitar & pedal steel (Darrell Scott), fiddle & voice (midwest boy) grooved through twists and turns; new melodies were born while old ones were de'rranged. Life's most recent adventures of sight and sound have been sonically summed up in less than an hour.
That midwest boy is Casey Driessen, and thus begins the story of his second solo record, Oog (Red Shoe Records). Enjoy music.[less...]
Jeremy began playing and singing when he was on his way out of the womb! In reality he started learning the Suzuki classical violin method at age three and with the additional instruction from his musician father, Glen, learned fiddle. Later, he played in the high school orchestra while sitting in with his Dad's bluegrass band on the weekends. Jeremy attended South Plains College in Texas, to study commercial music and went on to freelance with many other musicians and singers. After moving to Nashville, Jeremy met the other members of what is now, The Infamous Stringdusters.
Andy Hall plays and sings with excitement, passion, precision and a dynamic that is quickly establishing him as one of the top players in acoustic music today. Based in Nashville, he plays resophonic guitar, guitar and sings lead, tenor and baritone vocal harmony parts. A graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA with a degree in Music Production and Engineering, Andy's credentials include a long list of live performances and recordings with various artists. He has recently been featured on projects by Dolly Parton, Ronnie Bowman, [more...] Charlie Daniels, Moody Bluegrass, Dale Ann Bradley, Matt Flinner and others. Andy is a member of the acoustic band The Infamous Stringdusters. Andy has 3 solo releases, the second of which, "The Sound Of the Slide Guitar", won IBMA's instrumental album of the year. Andy has his own Dobro instructional website at andyhalldobro.com. Instrumentally, look to Andy for driving instrumental breaks, tasteful instrumental backup, and sensitivity to the groove. Vocally, Andy provides a blend that enhances the harmony structure of the artist and song with equal finesse. [less...]
Growing up the youngest of 5 in a musical and artistic family in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Michael found his voice playing the Dobro at the age of 14. In less than a year, he was playing with his dad's, Dennis and brother, Gabe's band The Witcher Brothers. Michael started teaching and doing session work when he was 16. Since then he has recorded/toured with Dwight Yoakam, Fernando Ortega, Peter Rowan, Laurie Lewis, Tyler Hilton, Missy Raines and The New Hip, John Paul Jones, Sara Watkins, The Gibson Brothers, Dolly Parton, Joan Osborn, Willie Watson, [more...] Chris Jones and others. Michael is currently a member of The Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band.
Known not only for his rich tone and lyrical phrasing, Michael is also a highly sought after instructor. At age 19 he published his first instructional book, Resonator Guitar: Tunes Techniques and Practice Skills. Since then he has published a second book Resonator Guitar: 20 Bluegrass Jam Favorites and can be found teaching at the top acoustic music camps around the world. [less...]
Travis Book
Hailing from Palmer Lake, Colorado, Travis first went upright in the Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band before moving to Nashville, TN to join the Stringdusters. He now resides in Central Virginia with his wife, Sarah Siskind, where he pursues his other passion: the great outdoors.
Paul Kowert lives in Brooklyn, NY and plays bass in Punch Brothers. He grew up in Madison, WI and graduated from The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Harold Robinson and Edgar Meyer. Paul can be heard in concert and on recording with Punch Brothers (Antifogmatic), Mike Marshall's Big Trio, and The Jordan Tice Trio.
Eric brings a wide range of teaching and performing experience to his post as staff bassist. Bluegrass fans know him as the bass player for Open Road and Brother Mule. He also performs regularly with Leftover Salmon and the Tony Furtado Band. Eric is equally at home on acoustic and electric bass and has played everything from bluegrass and old time, to jazz and salsa. When not touring, he is in constant demand as an instructor and session player.
Grammy-award winner and five-time Grammy nominee, Peter Rowan is a bluegrass singer-songwriter with a career spanning over five decades. From his early years playing under the tutelage of bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe, and following his stint in Old & In the Way with Jerry Garcia and subsequent breakout as both a solo performer and bandleader, Rowan has built a devoted, international fan base through his continuous stream of original recordings, collaborative projects, and constant touring. On the road, Rowan performs internationally as a solo singer-songwriter, while stateside he plays in three bands: the Peter [more...] Rowan Bluegrass Band, a quartet featuring Jody Stecher, Keith Little, and Paul Knight; The Peter Rowan & Tony Rice Quartet; and his rocking band, The Free Mexican Air Force.[less...]
When USA Today predicted that Aoife O’Donovan would soon become “the newest darling of the Americana set”, it had already been true for quite some time.
Aoife (pronounced EEF-ah) grew up in a musical family, immersed in folk music. She went on to study contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music in her hometown of Boston. Aoife has performed and recorded with Ollabelle, Sometymes Why, Karan Casey and Seamus Egan, Jerry Douglas, Jim Lauderdale, [more...] Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins, Christina Courtin and Chris Thile. For the past 10 years, Aoife has been fronting the alt-bluegrass/string band Crooked Still, which she formed when she was 18. Aoife has toured in ten different countries, performed with the Boston Pops and the Utah Symphony Orchestra, and has appeared on countless radio and television programs including The Tonight Show (performing with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile).
Aoife's natural talent for songwriting recently came to the attention of Alison Krauss, who recorded Aoife’s song "Lay My Burden Down" on the 2011 Alison Krauss & Union Station release Paper Airplane. [less...]
The Infamous Stringdusters are doing something right. They’ve earned critical acclaim, from their inception, awards and nominations aplenty, host their own successful music festival, have their own record label and a quickly growing and enthusiastic fan base across the country. They sound like no one else, combining virtuosic chops on five traditional bluegrass instruments, with an ethos on pushing the genre forward. The Stringdusters are taking improvised string band music to new places, combining musicianship, songwriting and experimental performance. As the band's newest record, We’ll Do It Live shows, a [more...] Stringdusters performance is ecstatic, with contagious energy flowing between the band and crowd. At each show you’ll see the band relaxed and having fun, while focusing on the music, "podding up" and directing swells of energy from their fans. [less...]
“Antifogmatic” is a bit of bygone slang that mandolinist Chris Thile and his bandmates stumbled across, “an old term,” explains the Punch Brothers founder, “for a bracing beverage, rum or whiskey, that one would have in the morning before going out to work in rough weather, to stave off any ill effects.” It’s an apt title for the Punch Brothers’ second Nonesuch disc. This ten-song set of collectively written material takes a clear-eyed view of those things less tangible than booze that can make us woozy: the pleasures and pitfalls of romance, the seemingly limitless possibilities and multifarious temptations of life in the big city. “When we heard [more...] that term,” says Thile, “it was so easily applied to the bulk of the record. We want our music to be something that people can sink their teeth into, if not help make sense of all the various things happening to them. We want to pat them on the head and slap them in the face and tell them everything will be okay.”
The arrangements on Antifogmatic range from intimate to boisterous and back; genre-wise, the band once again ventures where no string band has ever gone before. The spare opening track “You Are” contrasts percussive guitar riffs with lyrical string parts that dance around Thile’s sweet upper register as he spins a tale of romantic emancipation; occasionally, the other instruments give way to reveal the throb of the bass. The band also engages in some unexpectedly beautiful harmony singing, smoothing out the compelling melodic twists and turns of “Welcome Home.” “Me and Us” and “Woman and the Bell” both have a dream-like quality; the former, in fact, was inspired by those jumbled, thought-filled moments before sleep sets in, and the instrumentation keeps pace with the ever-shifting imagery. In contrast, “Don’t Need No” and “Rye Whiskey” are foot-stomping barroom boasts and “Next to the Trash” is the closest the band gets to traditional bluegrass, even as the lyrics tug the piece in a more surreal direction.
Thile has earned the right to impart a bit of his own hard-earned wisdom in the lyrics he’s contributed to Antifogmatic, which the quintet cut live at Ocean Way in Los Angeles with producer Jon Brion and engineer Gregg Koller. At the heart of the Punch Brothers’ 2008 debut, Punch, Thile’s four-movement “The Blind Leaving the Blind” chronicled in cathartic detail the events and faith-shaking emotions surrounding the dissolution of his youthful marriage. The musically rigorous, personally revealing composition—carefully notated but allowing room for improvisational passages—came to vivid life in the hands of the former Nickel Creek singer’s old friends and newly recruited bandmates: guitarist Chris Eldridge, banjo player Noam Pikelny, violinst Gabe Witcher and bassist Greg Garrison, each of whom were already envelope-pushing figures in the forefront of modern bluegrass, folk and country. (After the departure of Garrison, Paul Kowert, a member of mandolinist Mike Marshall’s Big Trio, stepped in.) “The Blind Leading the Blind” was bracketed by four collaboratively conceived instrumental pieces from this freshly minted group, a foretaste of what was to come two years later on Antifogmatic. Upon the release of Punch, theWashington Post described this then-new band as “some of the best string-band pickers of the new generation, and Thile has given them rich, challenging music to wrestle with.”
“Our new record is a very pure collaboration,” Thile emphasizes. “I would often come to the boys with a start, a little nugget, and we would collectively fashion it into something. None of these songs would have been like themselves if I had been left to my own devices. Several of them were starts that other guys had, and we would build from there. It’s fun how liquid the writing process was on this.”
Says guitarist Eldridge, “We got to find out what the band sounded like when we tried to collectively make music from scratch. A song might start with something as simple as a phrase that everybody thought was cool and worthy of development, maybe a set of chord changes, maybe more than that. Everyone was bringing things to the table and putting them in front of the band’s collective consciousness to try to build them into something together. It was a pretty neat experience to see how things took shape that way. It really happened completely before our eyes.”
The process of creating the work that would ultimately comprise Antifogmatic also happened before the eyes—and ears—of many Punch Brothers fans in New York City, where the members of this former “commuter band,” as Pikelny characterized it, had all decided to relocate. In early 2009, the quintet began a monthly residency at The Living Room, a small club on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for what they dubbed P-Bingo Nights, a laboratory for developing new material and trying out songs of any genre that struck their fancy—and, as countless YouTube fan videos attest, for having a good time.
As violinist Witcher, who moved to the city from his lifelong home of Los Angeles, recalls, “We were finally able to hang out and play music for fun, when we weren’t trying to frantically warm up for a show or frantically go into the studio to record. We started doing these shows in New York—informal performances where the goal was to try out a bunch of stuff that we never had the time to do before or that wouldn’t necessarily be right for our live show. In doing so, we started saying, like, ‘Hey, do you think we could work up this Strokes song? Sure. Oh man, I really love the fourth movement of this Mozart Quartet. What if we tried to do that? Absolutely!’ Anything we felt excited about, any piece of music, we tried to see if we could arrange for our ensemble. It was challenging, fun, and kind of successful. When it came time to write this new material, everyone was feeling confident that whatever kind of influence you’re feeling for a song, we would be able to pull it off. All these different styles and different approaches we had been doing in the six to seven months preceding that, it all just kind of seeped into the writing. No one was ever forcing anything on the record; everything that we had learned started coming out naturally in the parts they were offering, the direction they heard a song going in, or in an approach to take for a section.”
The banjo-playing Pikelny says, “It was endless what we could investigate on a particular song or concept. We never stopped pursuing something in the interest of time or because we had to move on. We were able to get deeper inside some of the music than we’ve ever been able to before, to the point that we were spending so much time on this stuff and making so much progress, we were compromising the other aspects of life in New York. I remember one day calling the band and saying we had to cancel this writing session or I wouldn’t have clean laundry for the next tour.”
Thile, also a California native, had befriended Jon Brion during the producer-composer-musician’s own residency at L.A.’s Largo, off-the-cuff evenings that were more salon than concert, attracting some of the best, and often well-known, musicians who happened to be in town that night. Brion, who has worked most famously with Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, and Kanye West, was reluctant to take on a new project, but when Thile asked him for advice on finding a producer, Brion admitted that he might be the best guy for the job. However, the role Brion would assume turned out to be anything but traditional, more about pedagogy than straight-up production. He and engineer Gregg Koller spent a couple of days setting up the studio with remarkable precision—moving the players and instruments like chess pieces until they were in the exactly right positions, testing out microphones until they decided everyone should have a Telefunken 251—then they let the band simply play. Each evening, Brion would return with a great bottle of Port and some equally good cheese to listen back to what the band had done, assess the results and talk—deeply, philosophically—about what they were trying to achieve.
“He knows the room really well,” the young bassist Kowert enthuses. “He knows the point on the floor where the bass should be—whether it was where he liked the sound of it the most or where it would be the loudest. Just knowing how the room reacts to sound. I really like his spirit; he has a really joyful approach to music and he was a positive presence in the studio. He kind of guided us towards choices that made for the best record, like picking earlier takes that surely had more mistakes but had a vivacity and energy to them that later takes lacked.”
The stories the Punch Brothers tell in Antifogmatic—partly autobiographical, partly imagine—were shaped by after-hours camaraderie as much as musical collaboration; they’re ultimately about drinking everything in as well as drinking what’s in front of them up, though there was plenty of that too. Concludes Thile, “The boys and I would work all day in one of our apartments and then we’d want to go out and have a drink. That’s what you do in New York City, because everyone’s apartment is too small to hang out comfortably in. We’re a group of five guys. If friends start attaching themselves to the fray after that, you forsake the one-bedroom apartment and you go into the incredibly vibrant bar scene that isn’t merely an encouragement for intoxication and spending obscene amounts of money per drink. It’s really a wonderful way to get to know your fellow man, with your top button unbuttoned and your tie loosened a little bit.” [less...]
The arrangements on Antifogmatic range from intimate to boisterous and back; genre-wise, the band once again ventures where no string band has ever gone before. The spare opening track “You Are” contrasts percussive guitar riffs with lyrical string parts that dance around Thile’s sweet upper register as he spins a tale of romantic emancipation; occasionally, the other instruments give way to reveal the throb of the bass. The band also engages in some unexpectedly beautiful harmony singing, smoothing out the compelling melodic twists and turns of “Welcome Home.” “Me and Us” and “Woman and the Bell” both have a dream-like quality; the former, in fact, was inspired by those jumbled, thought-filled moments before sleep sets in, and the instrumentation keeps pace with the ever-shifting imagery. In contrast, “Don’t Need No” and “Rye Whiskey” are foot-stomping barroom boasts and “Next to the Trash” is the closest the band gets to traditional bluegrass, even as the lyrics tug the piece in a more surreal direction.
Thile has earned the right to impart a bit of his own hard-earned wisdom in the lyrics he’s contributed to Antifogmatic, which the quintet cut live at Ocean Way in Los Angeles with producer Jon Brion and engineer Gregg Koller. At the heart of the Punch Brothers’ 2008 debut, Punch, Thile’s four-movement “The Blind Leaving the Blind” chronicled in cathartic detail the events and faith-shaking emotions surrounding the dissolution of his youthful marriage. The musically rigorous, personally revealing composition—carefully notated but allowing room for improvisational passages—came to vivid life in the hands of the former Nickel Creek singer’s old friends and newly recruited bandmates: guitarist Chris Eldridge, banjo player Noam Pikelny, violinst Gabe Witcher and bassist Greg Garrison, each of whom were already envelope-pushing figures in the forefront of modern bluegrass, folk and country. (After the departure of Garrison, Paul Kowert, a member of mandolinist Mike Marshall’s Big Trio, stepped in.) “The Blind Leading the Blind” was bracketed by four collaboratively conceived instrumental pieces from this freshly minted group, a foretaste of what was to come two years later on Antifogmatic. Upon the release of Punch, theWashington Post described this then-new band as “some of the best string-band pickers of the new generation, and Thile has given them rich, challenging music to wrestle with.”
“Our new record is a very pure collaboration,” Thile emphasizes. “I would often come to the boys with a start, a little nugget, and we would collectively fashion it into something. None of these songs would have been like themselves if I had been left to my own devices. Several of them were starts that other guys had, and we would build from there. It’s fun how liquid the writing process was on this.”
Says guitarist Eldridge, “We got to find out what the band sounded like when we tried to collectively make music from scratch. A song might start with something as simple as a phrase that everybody thought was cool and worthy of development, maybe a set of chord changes, maybe more than that. Everyone was bringing things to the table and putting them in front of the band’s collective consciousness to try to build them into something together. It was a pretty neat experience to see how things took shape that way. It really happened completely before our eyes.”
The process of creating the work that would ultimately comprise Antifogmatic also happened before the eyes—and ears—of many Punch Brothers fans in New York City, where the members of this former “commuter band,” as Pikelny characterized it, had all decided to relocate. In early 2009, the quintet began a monthly residency at The Living Room, a small club on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for what they dubbed P-Bingo Nights, a laboratory for developing new material and trying out songs of any genre that struck their fancy—and, as countless YouTube fan videos attest, for having a good time.
As violinist Witcher, who moved to the city from his lifelong home of Los Angeles, recalls, “We were finally able to hang out and play music for fun, when we weren’t trying to frantically warm up for a show or frantically go into the studio to record. We started doing these shows in New York—informal performances where the goal was to try out a bunch of stuff that we never had the time to do before or that wouldn’t necessarily be right for our live show. In doing so, we started saying, like, ‘Hey, do you think we could work up this Strokes song? Sure. Oh man, I really love the fourth movement of this Mozart Quartet. What if we tried to do that? Absolutely!’ Anything we felt excited about, any piece of music, we tried to see if we could arrange for our ensemble. It was challenging, fun, and kind of successful. When it came time to write this new material, everyone was feeling confident that whatever kind of influence you’re feeling for a song, we would be able to pull it off. All these different styles and different approaches we had been doing in the six to seven months preceding that, it all just kind of seeped into the writing. No one was ever forcing anything on the record; everything that we had learned started coming out naturally in the parts they were offering, the direction they heard a song going in, or in an approach to take for a section.”
The banjo-playing Pikelny says, “It was endless what we could investigate on a particular song or concept. We never stopped pursuing something in the interest of time or because we had to move on. We were able to get deeper inside some of the music than we’ve ever been able to before, to the point that we were spending so much time on this stuff and making so much progress, we were compromising the other aspects of life in New York. I remember one day calling the band and saying we had to cancel this writing session or I wouldn’t have clean laundry for the next tour.”
Thile, also a California native, had befriended Jon Brion during the producer-composer-musician’s own residency at L.A.’s Largo, off-the-cuff evenings that were more salon than concert, attracting some of the best, and often well-known, musicians who happened to be in town that night. Brion, who has worked most famously with Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, and Kanye West, was reluctant to take on a new project, but when Thile asked him for advice on finding a producer, Brion admitted that he might be the best guy for the job. However, the role Brion would assume turned out to be anything but traditional, more about pedagogy than straight-up production. He and engineer Gregg Koller spent a couple of days setting up the studio with remarkable precision—moving the players and instruments like chess pieces until they were in the exactly right positions, testing out microphones until they decided everyone should have a Telefunken 251—then they let the band simply play. Each evening, Brion would return with a great bottle of Port and some equally good cheese to listen back to what the band had done, assess the results and talk—deeply, philosophically—about what they were trying to achieve.
“He knows the room really well,” the young bassist Kowert enthuses. “He knows the point on the floor where the bass should be—whether it was where he liked the sound of it the most or where it would be the loudest. Just knowing how the room reacts to sound. I really like his spirit; he has a really joyful approach to music and he was a positive presence in the studio. He kind of guided us towards choices that made for the best record, like picking earlier takes that surely had more mistakes but had a vivacity and energy to them that later takes lacked.”
The stories the Punch Brothers tell in Antifogmatic—partly autobiographical, partly imagine—were shaped by after-hours camaraderie as much as musical collaboration; they’re ultimately about drinking everything in as well as drinking what’s in front of them up, though there was plenty of that too. Concludes Thile, “The boys and I would work all day in one of our apartments and then we’d want to go out and have a drink. That’s what you do in New York City, because everyone’s apartment is too small to hang out comfortably in. We’re a group of five guys. If friends start attaching themselves to the fray after that, you forsake the one-bedroom apartment and you go into the incredibly vibrant bar scene that isn’t merely an encouragement for intoxication and spending obscene amounts of money per drink. It’s really a wonderful way to get to know your fellow man, with your top button unbuttoned and your tie loosened a little bit.” [less...]
Sleep with One Eye Open is an impassioned collaboration/conversation between mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile and guitarist Michael Daves in which the subject is bluegrass, specifically how this upstart duo can acknowledge history and tradition while exuberantly defying convention. Though it was recorded in four feverish days of sessions at Jack White’s Third Man studio in Nashville, the album has deep roots in a serendipitous side of New York City that reveals itself at certain times of the night, when strangers become kindred spirits as clubs empty out, and only the hardiest souls stick around to keep the music playing. [more...] It’s a story that begins, like so many, with a guy walking into a bar.
In August 2005, a newly divorced but still smarting Thile had come to New York City to test his urban mettle. He was looking for a bracing change of scene from the San Diego area where he’d grown up and where, as a precocious kid, he’d formed Nickel Creek with Sara and Sean Watkins: “I decided I would go when I’d heard New York is the worst, when it smelled like trash and it would generally be a big sticky mess, and I plopped myself right in the middle of the Village.” Though he’d envisioned this trip as a solitary one, friends persuaded him to come out to a mid-week bluegrass jam at the Baggot Inn. As Thile now recalls, “It was just this cool vibe-y thing, nothing too out of the ordinary—until Michael started playing. Then I was just like, whoa, who is this guy?”
An Atlanta native, Daves, like Thile, grew up playing bluegrass with his fiddle- and banjo-playing parents, but he drifted towards jazz and the outer fringes of rock after he’d migrated north to attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. After college, he settled in New York City envisioning a career as a jazz cat, but found himself, despite the urban setting, drawn back to bluegrass: “I didn’t expect for New York to be such a big part of that for me, but it proved fruitful. There was a lot of great music going on and there were these late night jam sessions like I’d played in during high school. New York is a challenging and inspiring place to be because you are rubbing elbows with great jazz musicians, rock musicians, artists, writers, everyone doing what they do so well. Coming from this kind of laid-back college town, it was amazing to move to where everyone was so much more purposeful and serious about what they were doing. At the time I went there it felt like this niche had opened up for what I was ready to do musically, so I started playing bluegrass on my own.”
That fateful August night at the Baggot Inn, recounts Daves, “I was very surprised to see Chris show up; it had been kind of a dead night. He hung out talking to some people and we ended up playing a couple of tunes together. After everybody else had stopped playing and things were dying down, we went off to a corner and ended up jamming for a couple of hours. I knew he played the mandolin in a refined technical manner while I found myself more interested in basic, raw stuff. But once we started playing we totally hit it off and I realized he was a very adventurous musician. We went to places musically, even in that first meeting, that I had never gone to with other players, so it was really exciting just for that experience itself, to be so pleasantly surprised at how much Chris had to offer beyond his technical prowess, beyond the very clean presentation of Nickel Creek. He was really going for it.”
Two years after Daves’ and Thile’s first encounter, Nickel Creek had gone on an indefinite hiatus and Thile had officially become a New Yorker. He’d channeled lingering feelings about his marital breakup into a remarkably ambitious 40-minute, four-movement suite-cum-confession, The Blind Leaving the Blind, that premiered in March 2007 at no less a venue than Carnegie Hall. For that project, Thile had enlisted four similarly intrepid musicians who, with Thile, would shortly thereafter christen themselves Punch Brothers. The suite became the centerpiece of the quintet’s 2008 Nonesuch debut, Punch. Essential to Thile’s new life in Manhattan and his overall emotional revival was that Wednesday night jam at the Baggot Inn and the musical dialogue he’d embarked upon with the Brooklyn-based Daves, who by then was teaching guitar by day and often playing his own dates by night.
“I kept going to that jam,” says Thile, “in part because it was just a fun scene and there was this good local stout on draft, but also very pointedly to hang with Michael and play tunes with him. I have a tendency to over-think things and to put too severe a microscope on everything that’s being played or sung, and I can squeeze the life out of some music as a result. Michael helps me get out of that part of my musicianship. He has such a visceral relationship to music and that kind of frees up that side of my own musicianship. And that’s so important, especially playing these tunes. I feel like when Michael and I are firing on all cylinders, it’s like being possessed. It’s liberating, all of a sudden being given license to not think so goddamned much and to just let it fly.”
Daves and Thile knew they wanted to cut a record together and spent an inordinate amount of time mulling over exactly how to approach it. Daves admits, “We felt we needed to have a concept; we shouldn’t just try and go to record an album until we really knew what we wanted to say with it. Finally, Nonesuch head Bob Hurwitz told us, ‘You need to just do what you do.’ We decided to go down to Nashville and get good performances of the songs with the understanding that spontaneity is a big part of what we do.” Thile agrees: “It seemed like it kept being the best if we just showed up and went at it.”
The pair wanted White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather guitarist Jack White to produce the album, having been impressed by the work he’d done with Loretta Lynn and, more recently, with Wanda Jackson (on Third Man/Nonesuch’s The Party Ain’t Over). White only had time to cut two sides with Daves and Thile—to be released as a single on Third Man Records—but he gave them free rein of his studio and White’s engineer Vance Powell stuck around for all of the sessions. White would occasionally pay them encouraging visits. Says Thile, “Jack was really, really generous and let us cut the whole record at his place on his beautiful two-inch eight-track machines. It was just so much fun, man, like records ought to be—all ribbon mics and not that many of ‘em, and singing into just one RCA 77. It’s just like we do live, huddled around a microphone doing our best.”
Over the course of four days, the pair recorded 23 tracks, choosing 16 for the album. The material was drawn from the bluegrass canon: traditional tunes plus classic numbers from Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs. Songs like “Loneliness and Desperation” and the title track emphasize rollicking, rapid-fire arrangements that serve to mask the most sorrowful of feelings, an approach that Thile has extrapolated on in his own wider-ranging compositions with Punch Brothers. Daves’ and Thile’s voices blend as seamlessly—and, on tracks like “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” as plaintively—as their instruments. As Thile says, “Mandolin and guitar and two male voices—it’s such a good sound. What was important for us was to get that brother duet thing but with this Lower East Side punk energy. One of the most enjoyable things about this experience was to underline the slightly delinquent side of bluegrass.
“Bluegrass gets all of its emotion, all of its righteousness from humanity and the mistakes that humans make,” Thile concludes. “It needs that humanity and celebrates it. We were mindful of that. All the work for this record had already been done at the jam sessions and at the shows we put on at the Rockwood Music Hall, we just had to take a snapshot of it. I think we found a way to maintain our wide-eyed wonder about this stuff and deliver it with the sincerity of people who need to play this music to feel good.” . [less...]
In August 2005, a newly divorced but still smarting Thile had come to New York City to test his urban mettle. He was looking for a bracing change of scene from the San Diego area where he’d grown up and where, as a precocious kid, he’d formed Nickel Creek with Sara and Sean Watkins: “I decided I would go when I’d heard New York is the worst, when it smelled like trash and it would generally be a big sticky mess, and I plopped myself right in the middle of the Village.” Though he’d envisioned this trip as a solitary one, friends persuaded him to come out to a mid-week bluegrass jam at the Baggot Inn. As Thile now recalls, “It was just this cool vibe-y thing, nothing too out of the ordinary—until Michael started playing. Then I was just like, whoa, who is this guy?”
An Atlanta native, Daves, like Thile, grew up playing bluegrass with his fiddle- and banjo-playing parents, but he drifted towards jazz and the outer fringes of rock after he’d migrated north to attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. After college, he settled in New York City envisioning a career as a jazz cat, but found himself, despite the urban setting, drawn back to bluegrass: “I didn’t expect for New York to be such a big part of that for me, but it proved fruitful. There was a lot of great music going on and there were these late night jam sessions like I’d played in during high school. New York is a challenging and inspiring place to be because you are rubbing elbows with great jazz musicians, rock musicians, artists, writers, everyone doing what they do so well. Coming from this kind of laid-back college town, it was amazing to move to where everyone was so much more purposeful and serious about what they were doing. At the time I went there it felt like this niche had opened up for what I was ready to do musically, so I started playing bluegrass on my own.”
That fateful August night at the Baggot Inn, recounts Daves, “I was very surprised to see Chris show up; it had been kind of a dead night. He hung out talking to some people and we ended up playing a couple of tunes together. After everybody else had stopped playing and things were dying down, we went off to a corner and ended up jamming for a couple of hours. I knew he played the mandolin in a refined technical manner while I found myself more interested in basic, raw stuff. But once we started playing we totally hit it off and I realized he was a very adventurous musician. We went to places musically, even in that first meeting, that I had never gone to with other players, so it was really exciting just for that experience itself, to be so pleasantly surprised at how much Chris had to offer beyond his technical prowess, beyond the very clean presentation of Nickel Creek. He was really going for it.”
Two years after Daves’ and Thile’s first encounter, Nickel Creek had gone on an indefinite hiatus and Thile had officially become a New Yorker. He’d channeled lingering feelings about his marital breakup into a remarkably ambitious 40-minute, four-movement suite-cum-confession, The Blind Leaving the Blind, that premiered in March 2007 at no less a venue than Carnegie Hall. For that project, Thile had enlisted four similarly intrepid musicians who, with Thile, would shortly thereafter christen themselves Punch Brothers. The suite became the centerpiece of the quintet’s 2008 Nonesuch debut, Punch. Essential to Thile’s new life in Manhattan and his overall emotional revival was that Wednesday night jam at the Baggot Inn and the musical dialogue he’d embarked upon with the Brooklyn-based Daves, who by then was teaching guitar by day and often playing his own dates by night.
“I kept going to that jam,” says Thile, “in part because it was just a fun scene and there was this good local stout on draft, but also very pointedly to hang with Michael and play tunes with him. I have a tendency to over-think things and to put too severe a microscope on everything that’s being played or sung, and I can squeeze the life out of some music as a result. Michael helps me get out of that part of my musicianship. He has such a visceral relationship to music and that kind of frees up that side of my own musicianship. And that’s so important, especially playing these tunes. I feel like when Michael and I are firing on all cylinders, it’s like being possessed. It’s liberating, all of a sudden being given license to not think so goddamned much and to just let it fly.”
Daves and Thile knew they wanted to cut a record together and spent an inordinate amount of time mulling over exactly how to approach it. Daves admits, “We felt we needed to have a concept; we shouldn’t just try and go to record an album until we really knew what we wanted to say with it. Finally, Nonesuch head Bob Hurwitz told us, ‘You need to just do what you do.’ We decided to go down to Nashville and get good performances of the songs with the understanding that spontaneity is a big part of what we do.” Thile agrees: “It seemed like it kept being the best if we just showed up and went at it.”
The pair wanted White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather guitarist Jack White to produce the album, having been impressed by the work he’d done with Loretta Lynn and, more recently, with Wanda Jackson (on Third Man/Nonesuch’s The Party Ain’t Over). White only had time to cut two sides with Daves and Thile—to be released as a single on Third Man Records—but he gave them free rein of his studio and White’s engineer Vance Powell stuck around for all of the sessions. White would occasionally pay them encouraging visits. Says Thile, “Jack was really, really generous and let us cut the whole record at his place on his beautiful two-inch eight-track machines. It was just so much fun, man, like records ought to be—all ribbon mics and not that many of ‘em, and singing into just one RCA 77. It’s just like we do live, huddled around a microphone doing our best.”
Over the course of four days, the pair recorded 23 tracks, choosing 16 for the album. The material was drawn from the bluegrass canon: traditional tunes plus classic numbers from Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs. Songs like “Loneliness and Desperation” and the title track emphasize rollicking, rapid-fire arrangements that serve to mask the most sorrowful of feelings, an approach that Thile has extrapolated on in his own wider-ranging compositions with Punch Brothers. Daves’ and Thile’s voices blend as seamlessly—and, on tracks like “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” as plaintively—as their instruments. As Thile says, “Mandolin and guitar and two male voices—it’s such a good sound. What was important for us was to get that brother duet thing but with this Lower East Side punk energy. One of the most enjoyable things about this experience was to underline the slightly delinquent side of bluegrass.
“Bluegrass gets all of its emotion, all of its righteousness from humanity and the mistakes that humans make,” Thile concludes. “It needs that humanity and celebrates it. We were mindful of that. All the work for this record had already been done at the jam sessions and at the shows we put on at the Rockwood Music Hall, we just had to take a snapshot of it. I think we found a way to maintain our wide-eyed wonder about this stuff and deliver it with the sincerity of people who need to play this music to feel good.” . [less...]
K.C. Groves is a Lyons-based musician who embodies the "can-do, will-do" side of Front Range creativity. An instrumentalist (mandolin, guitar, bass), singer/songwriter and musical force of nature, K.C. keeps tradition alive while creating new reasons for fans and fellow players to follow her lead—and harmony—of sound and ideas.
Kate grew up in Anchorage, Alaska listening to her parents and friends play bluegrass, old tyme, and folk music. At the age of 14, she joined Bearfoot, a nationally touring band, and played festival such as Merlefest, Greyfox, Wintergrass, Rockygrass, and Telluride to name a few. As a Compass recording artist, Bearfoot cut their 4th album, called "Doors and Windows" in April 2009, which quickly rose to #1 in the Billboard Bluegrass Charts. Kate is also the director of the renowned bluegrass music education program, "Bluegrass Camps for Kids", which has taught thousands of children internationally in the last decade. This year [more...] will be her 9th year leading the Rockygrass Academy for Kids, along with 10 other camps in 2011 in various locations across the U.S. Kate also has a B.S. in Elementary Education through the University of Idaho and is now teaching in San Francisco after leaving Bearfoot last April. [less...]
Justin Hoffenberg is originally from Illinois, but now makes his home in Boulder, CO. When he was in the fifth grade, Justin began playing the violin for school orchestra, and shortly after discovered bluegrass. Ever since, he has dedicated much of his life to the music, and is now on the road to achieving his goal of being a professional bluegrass musician. Currently the fiddle player with Long Road Home, Justin has shared the stage with such performers as the Yonder Mountain String Band, The Infamous Stringdusters, The Del McCoury Band, Hot Rize and others. After high school, Justin decided to give full time music a shot [more...] instead of going straight into college, and is still touring and producing full time. Justin draws his inspiration from a variety of sources, including the classic styles of Benny Martin and Chubby Wise, the blues and jazz of Vassar Clements and Darol Anger, and the newer sounds of Jason Carter and Stuart Duncan. [less...]
More Kids Camp instructors still to be announced...
Michael Hornick
Shanti Guitars
Michael Hornick is the builder of Shanti Guitars. After building his first guitar in 1985, he worked at Santa Cruz Guitar Company, and presently works alone in his shop in Missoula, Montana, building about twelve instruments a year. Michael has built the first place guitar prize for the nationally recognized Telluride Troubadour contest from its inception in 1991, and helped design the original mandolin and mandola kits. His love of lutherie is reflected in the high quality of craftsmanship found in each of his custom instrument. Michael has assisted students in the building of well over two hundred mandolin kits over the past sixteen years. 
Dan Roberts
Dan Roberts began his instrument making career with Flatiron Banjo and
Mandolin Company in Bozeman, MT. He was production manager for Gibson Montana
Division before moving to California as luthier and production manager for
Santa Cruz Guitar Company. Dan lived in Santa Cruz for 6 years before moving
back to Montana to work for Santa Cruz out of his own shop. There he built
the SCGC archtops, did new model design and some prototypes, and was the
warranty repairman, service manager, and production manager with the help
of an on-site [more...] shop foreman. After 17 years with SCGC Dan hung out his own
shingle and is a Custom guitar maker building Roberts Guitars. Dan has been
teaching the mandolin building class at Rockygrass Academy since 1996. [less...]
Bobby Wintringham
Bobby Wintringham is returning for his sixth year as an instructor at the Academy's mandolin building experience. He is a full time luthier building San Juan Mandolins in his shop in Dolores, Colorado. Says Bobby, "The only thing more rewarding than building instruments is being able to share that knowledge with others."
Chuck Midgley
Chuck has known Michael Hornick since 1992, owns a Shanti guitar, and has
assisted Michael with the mando building class since 2002. Each year Chuck
produces a mandolin while assisting other students with theirs. In his other
life, he is a master mechanic building hot rods in California.
Marcus Engstrom
Marcus has been building and repairing instruments for 16 years. He
graduated from a four year guitar building school in Norway and received his
bachelor degree in classical guitar making in Germany. Marcus apprenticed
with Dan Roberts and worked for Santa Cruz Guitars for 2 years doing high
end acoustic guitar repairs. He is currently building and repairing
instruments full time in Bozeman, Montana. Marcus has been helping with the
mandolin building experience since 2006.