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| Photo by Bonnie Chaim |
Tony Trischka thrives at RockyGrass
By BRAD WEISMANN
It’s always a good time when Tony Trischka comes to town.
The 77-year-old master of the bluegrass banjo is one of the many of the genre’s elite who gather in Lyons, Colorado once a year in late July. They do so for a week of teaching music at Planet Bluegrass’ RockyGrass Academy, followed by three days of continuous bluegrass performances at the annual RockyGrass festival.
A young and enthusiastic attendee at the first Fincastle Bluegrass Festival, the model for the modern bluegrass music festival, in 1965, Trischka moved quickly from group to group as his skill and breadth of knowledge increased. Quickly expert at traditional bluegrass banjo techniques, Trischka was motivated to innovate, and he began to include all sorts of different musics – “jazz, avant-garde, psychedelic, klezmer and various non-Western musical elements” – into his playing. This approach came to be known as “newgrass” or progressive bluegrass, and now, decades later, encompasses the work of numerous prominent individuals and ensembles such as Tony Rice, Leftover Salmon, Hot Rize, and Alison Kraus.
He’s produced nearly two dozen solo albums, made music with Skyline and Psychograss, and has collaborated on a myriad of projects with others. He’s played on Broadway and in film.
But once a year, Trischka loves RockyGrass. “It’s the greatest,” he says. “I have always taught at the Academy here every year. And it’s just the best. This is my favorite year so far. I’m in here so many times I know everybody so it’s like you walk three feet, (you meet) 10 people. It’s a great hang, and the students are great. They had me by the river this time. And the setting, and to see all your friends. Play music. So I just . . . it’s fantastic. It’s just a great vibe here.”
Trischka, surprisingly, received a lot of pushback for his innovations from the traditional bluegrass community. “Yeah, I mean, I was out there in a lot of heavy-duty – I was playing a lot of festivals about that time. In 1973 I was with a group called Breakfast Special in New York City, and we were really weird. We would do Jewish music, Hawaiian music, and Sam Cooke gospel tunes, and some bluegrass. In the evening shows we would hve a saxophone and drums and so we’d do a standard bluegrass sort of thing in the afternoon and then for the motorcycle gangs and the hippies that was the crowd at least in part in the ‘70s because all the rock festivals had shut down. But yeah I would definitely get pushback. And I get it! It was weird stuff, I don’t blame them.”
Trischka persisted, releasing the seminal album Banjoland in 1976, continuing with recordings such as Robot Plane Flies over Arkansas in 1983 leading to the immortal Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular in 2007. He contributed music to the soundtrack of Driving Miss Daisy, he played the banjo in Broadway’s The Robber Bridegroom. He is now one of the gray eminences of the genre – but he still keeps busy.
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| photo by Bonnie Chaim |
Currently, he is promoting his second album of famed banjo player Earl Scruggs’ transcriptions, titled Earl Jam 2. Trischka received a thumb drive containing jams Scruggs did with John Hartford in the 1980s and ‘90s. Trischka painstakingly reconstrued these musical passages, and is playing them for an appreciative audience, as evinced by the enthusiastic response to the initial Earl Jam in 2024.
A lot of the tunes on the Earl Jam albums are simple, traditional tunes, a marked contrast to his usual wide-ranging musical explorations? Was this deliberate, or was it dependent on the source material available?
“It’s both I guess you could say. There were a lot of tunes that were traditional, and there were tunes like ‘Chinese Breakdown’ that are really obscure. A lot of it had to do with what did Earl play on that jam. Like I did ‘Bill Cheatham’ because I never knew the right way to play that, and I’ve been playing it for 60 years, I had this real clunky way to play it, and everyone plays it the same way. Then I found out how Earl did it in these jams and I’m like, ‘That’s so cool.’ The main thing is that I want everyone else in the band world to hear what Earl did. I transcribed everything that I could, That particular tune ‘Bill Cheatham’ when people say, ‘So that’s how you play it!’ That’s the cool thing. So a lot of time they were his solos but not always and sometimes you give someone three or four choices of these tunes and they’re going to have cool solos. It varies, Every tune is a little bit different.”
As to future projects – “I’ve been putting music to Emily Dickinson poems. I recorded four tracks already. And this chamber piece -- I wanted to have a soprano in there singing a Emily Dickinson poem. So that’s the next main thing I’m going to do. And if the label wants Earl Jam 3 I guess I will do that. There are over two hundred tunes. So it would be an inexhaustible supply. And every one of those tunes – I’ve never actually counted, but I’ve estimated. You know, there can be three or four solos in each tune, and you could do a whole album with just three or four solos. It’s infinite.”
Trischka is known as a mentor to younger players, especially to that modern whiz of the banjo, Bela Fleck. He described his relationship with him thusly: “He had it, He already had it. He had taken lessons from two other banjo players before he came to me. And he played some Scruggs things and some fiddle tunes, but he wanted to learn some of my weird stuff. It attracted him for some unknown reason. And so he would show up for a lesson and and he would ask me to play some traditional tunes and just jam out for three minutes; he’d record it and then come back the next week playing every single note perfectly. So it was that sort of thing. So we’d worked together for two months, maybe, it was like let’s just hang out together and pick.”
When asked what his favorite area of endeavor is today, he replies: “Besides live performance? I like to go into the studio. I have a friend in the Czech Republic wanted me to do an overdub on something he’s recording, a week ago or something like that. And so it was really fun creating this solo with this tune that he’d come up with. So, yeah, there’s new challenges that keep the brain engaged. As you get older, it’s a good thing to have that avenue.
"I’m not out there every weekend, and I don’t want to be out there every weekend. I play every two weeks, every three weeks. I play enough to keep me really happy. Sometimes I’ll do five dates in a row. So it varies but I’m not like OK, here’s our solid band.”
And in terms of advice for the up and coming banjo player, Trischka says, “Listen to Earl Scruggs a lot. I always like to suggest that people listen to the early bluegrassers, like the Stanley Brothers, check out Ralph Stanley, Jim and Jesse, Bill Monroe. ‘Cause that’s where it started. And there’s a lot of great bands today, but go to the roots.
“And listen to all the banjo players that you can. And work on your timing– timing is everything, as John Hartford once said, and I think everyone would agree with that. Work with a metronome, make sure your timing is really good. And have really good separation of notes which is something that J.D. Crowe said, which means every note you play should be really clear. ‘Cause a lot of times people do a banjo roll and the last note will be kind of quiet, then you’ll lose drive and you’ll lose the syncopation. Every note, really clear and strong.”
