'Every note, clear and strong': Tony Trischka thrives at RockyGrass

 

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.

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.”

CU in outer space: Missions, experiments aim at deep-space exploration

From Boulder Magazine! Photo by Bonnie Chaim.

 A half a century after the last human visitor stepped on the moon, mankind is looking to the stars again – and the University of Colorado at Boulder is leading the way.

Boulder’s hometown university is a key player in space science and exploration, and has been since 1948, when CU scientists participated in the launches of captured German V-2 rockets on suborbital missions at a missile range at White Sands, New Mexico. Since then, CU has worked with NASA (founded in 1958) and other space agencies to provide expertise, research, and personnel for expeditions beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

CU-Boulder receives $120 million in aerospace-related research yearly, and the university boasts of more than 20 aerospace-related academic departments, centers, and institutes. To date, 20 CU-Boulder scientists, faculty, and alumni have gone into space, on 52 missions. Hundreds of CU-Boulder-built scientific instruments have flown into the outer reaches as well.

One of the most significant upcoming journeys to feature CU involvement will be this spring’s Polaris Dawn launch. This commercial flight will spend up to five days in orbit and will feature the first-ever all-civilian spacewalk, laser-based communications testing, and much scientific research.

One member of the four-person crew, Mission Specialist, Sarah Gillis, 29, is an almost-Boulder native (she got here at three months of age), and a graduate of CU-Boulder. If the launch goes as scheduled, she will be the youngest American ever to orbit the Earth.

Her primary focus will be to conduct many of the 38 scheduled science and research experiments during the mission. Many are focused on human health, both on Earth and on long-duration space flights. One of her collaborators on the ground is CU Assistant Professor Torin Clark, assistant professor in BioServe Space Technologies, who with fellow CU-Boulder aerospace engineer Allie Anderson will lead five experiments that study how astronauts experience motion sickness, disorientation, and similar issues during space flight and upon their return to Earth.

“We’re studying how the astronauts’ brains are affected by the environment,” Clark says. One experiment involves inducing motion sickness. “That’s not one we’re looking forward to,” he quips.

One long-term goal of the mission? To prepare humans to return to the Moon, and to reach for a landing on Mars, by the end of this decade.

“I was in high school when Apollo 11 landed,” says Dr. Jack Burns, CU professor and head of the Network for Exploration and Space Science, a collaboration among several universities, NASA, and significant regional commercial entities such as Ball Aerospace and Lockheed Martin. “If you would have told me then that it would have been more than 50 years before returning, I would have said you’re crazy.”

Burns is an articulate exponent of space science and exploration, over a 50-year career that includes 21 years at CU. He posits the creation of what he terms a sustainable space program.

“When you look at the history of American space missions, Apollo was not sustained once the political goals were finished. Now we are concerned not with a one-and-done, ‘flags and footsteps’ approach, but a public and private infrastructure for space exploration, something that would grow and develop over time, including what NASA calls an Artemis base camp on the Moon by the end of the decade,” he says.

“We look to set up a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon,” Burns continues. “We will be learning to live of what the Moon provides, doing things like getting water from the ice at the poles. All this with an eye to look forward, to going to Mars.”

Of CU’s dominant affiliation with space studies, Burns says, “It just all came together. As a strong and well-known research university, it just continued to build over time. Of course,” he adds, “Boulder’s a wonderful place to live as well.”

Jayme Stone assimilates new rhythms in “Room of Wonders”

Jayme Stone creates, but he also excavates, building on patterns of the past and pushing them into the future.

A banjo player, he’s strongly grounded in the traditional, acoustic North American sound patterns. But he uses music to travel the world. 16 years into his career as a composer and player, he maintains an inquisitive insistence in all aspects of his life that leads him from project to project. On his last two albums, he has begun by immersing himself in and absorbing certain genres or cultural traditions. The result? Thematic albums that avoid an apish or overly curatorial feeling.

An e-mail from a publicist clued me in about his new album, “Room of Wonders,” and a string of engagements in the region in the months ahead. I dug into his three solo albums and set up a phone interview. (Why didn’t we meet face to face? Although I have mastered the art of paying complete attention to someone while writing down what they say accurately, it’s a hell of a lot easier for me to read a voice and intuit where to go next in an interview via the telephone.)

From Toronto, he began his musical work in a Canadian jazz/roots group, Tricycle. He’s made his home in Boulder, Colorado for years. He describes himself as a long-time listener before he moved into making music.

“I was a passionate listener with my ear to the ground,” he says over the telephone. “I fell in love with old-time music and banjo. I listened to people like Earl Flatt, Mike Seeger and the Stanleys.”

His recent efforts illustrate his wide-ranging sensibilities. He’s producing a record in Ghana, has worked with fellow banjoist, composer and Boulderite Kyle James Hauser – and just produced two recordings of string-band arrangements of his kindred spirit in ethnomusicological exploration – Bela Bartok.

Stone’s 2008 CD with Mansa Sissoko, “Africa to Appalachia” neatly bookends the efforts of fellow banjoist and Boulderite, Otis Taylor, whose project from the same year, “Recapturing the Banjo,” looked hard at how white culture assimilated and mutated the banjo’s African sound.

“You can hear strains of West African music in old-time music,” Stone says. “But I was interested in what didn’t get transmitted.”

“When I do an album,” he continues, “it’s larger than just a collection of tunes. I like to go deep into a particular theme or concept. I see it as a field of research.”

A chance encounter with Bulgarian music became the impetus that sent him digging up and auditing field recordings, in the spirit of the aforementioned Bartok, as well as other Nationalist composers from the early 20^th century, Janacek and Kodaly.

“I kept finding kinship in the music of the region,” he says.

Stone enjoys putting together an effective ensemble that can take a piece and expand on it.

“I like to dial in the dynamics as we work the piece out,” he says. “I really love having parts of the tune stay open, leaving it open . . . my fellow musical adventurers play their instruments in different ways, because they come from different worlds. The music gets changed by having all these different voices working through it.”

Stone is cutting back on his touring schedule, or at least is breaking it into smaller pieces. He has an 11-month-old daughter now, and he doesn’t want to be away from her for long periods of time.

“The last album, we toured pretty steadily – 16 weeks, I think,” he says. “I think I tour more now but keep the trips shorter.”

Jayme Stone can be heard at the Stage Stop in Rollinsville on April 23; on May 6 at the Eldorado Springs Arts Center; and on June 3 at the Sounds of Lyons Festival. For complete information, please visit jaymestone.com.

 

Jayme Stone

“Room of Wonders”

Jayme Stone

2011

Jayme Stone is a composer and banjoist. He’s part of the progressive, world-music-embracing wave in acoustic music, which has been led by examples given by such as the Turtle Island String Quartet, Psychograss, Strength in Numbers, and Bela Fleck and Tony Trischka, the latter two of whom were Stone’s teachers.

His solo debut, “The Utmost” (2007) was very much in the mellow acoustic/jazz groove; his second work, a 2008 collaboration with Mansa Sissoko, “Africa to Appalachia,” is immersed in the logic and sensibility of the music of that continent. It’s an album very much in the vein of Ry Cooder’s numerous collaborations with world musicians such as Ali Farka Toure and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.

In “Room of Wonders,” Stone takes dance music – ethnic dance music from around the world, that is – as his subject. This is by far Stone’s most infectiously listenable creation to date, pulsing with urgency and tight virtuosity. The 10 cuts on the album leap and pop with the possibilities these folk templates inspire.

Stone and his group clamber into the adopted melodies and rhythmic patterns, but leave islands of sequences open that they fill with fast-moving improvisational phrases, pushing the beat forward. The breaks essayed by the fiery fiddle of adventurous Casey Driessen on cuts such as the opener, “Krasavatska Ruchenitsa,” are marvelous.

Old Stone hands Grant Gordy, drummer Nick Fraser, and trumpeter Kevin Turcotte are here. The ensemble is expanded with Olov Johansson on the nyckelharpa, Greg Garrison on bass and William Carn on trombone.

The danger in efforts like this is that they either dissolve into unimaginative musical quotation (Puccini, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the limited charms of Mannheim Steamroller and Renaissance) or come off as cultural colonialism disguised as fascination with the unfamiliar (the Putumayo Syndrome).

Some are just stunt pieces – “Hey, I know, we do a Croatian kolo in reggae time, and add bass clarinet!” Some are faddish, despite their inherent worthiness. Remember the Bulgarian Women’s Choir? The Gypsy Kings? Harry Belafonte? Gregorian chant backed with a dance beat?

Stone and company use traditional structures, but build on and transcend them. The precise interplay of the performers, a tribute to their professionalism and a sense that they are of one mind on this record, results in such moments as a beautiful rendition of the Allemande from Bach’s French Suite #6. But the music opens up and mutates, creeping even into the jazzy languor of Turcotte’s solo in “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders” and the percussive arpeggios of “Planinsko Horo.”

Virtuosity in the service of discovering new things is what’s needed here, and Stone and his friends deliver it. It’s superheavy, and deeply felt. Good one!

Nice guys finish first: 'Hangover' writer speaks

(Originally published on dscriber.com on Sept. 18, 2009)

Life is good for Scott Moore. Well, life would be good for anyone who helped create the top-grossing R-rated comedy in film history. Yeah.

That's bigger than "Borat." Bigger than "There's Something About Mary." Bigger than "Animal House," for chrissake!

Scott Moore loves it.

"It's so great," he says via phone. He's getting ready to visit Boulder for a screening of his film, the summer's big smash hit "The Hangover," which he wrote with his long-time writing partner Jon Lucas, on Saturday, Sept. 19. He'll stick around for a Q-and-A session afterwards.

"It's both rewarding on a personal and a professional level, after nine years of doing lots of good work without seeing our names on it," he says.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Moore graduated from CU-Boulder in 1989, with a degree in economics. Huh?

"Actually, I started off with an engineering major," he says. "And it was very boring. One day in statics class, I realized that I was studying . . . concrete."

So he switched. Economics sounds fairly frivolous after that.

He took a lot of film classes, too. There was no film studies major at CU at the time, but the small size of the department was a boon for him, as it allowed him much more hands-on experience.

"If you wanted to write, you wrote," he said. "If you wanted to shoot, you shot. It was a lot of fun, very close-knit - it was a great place to learn about filmmaking."

He never really joined a comedy scene, either. "We'd rather write the jokes down and have someone else deliver them," he says. Right out of school, Moore went to work as a intern at Disney.

"I started by trying to be a producer, but that was no fun," he says. "It was a lot more fun to write," and he "scratched and clawed" his way into the business.

Along the way, he bumped into Jon Lucas.

"We were both working for one of the guys who was responsible for ‘Beverly Hills Cop," says Moore. "Each of us was writing on the side, with minimal success. We started working together, and we have such a great dynamic - it really paid off."

Soon the duo was known around town as go-to guys for punching up a script, performing uncredited rewrites on properties such as "Wedding Crashers," "27 Dresses," "Chicken Little" and "Mr. Woodcock."

"A pretty typical Hollywood writer's career is, when you're writing, you're writing on spec," he says. "But there always scripts in development out there - people are needed to rewrite and develop them further. Especially in the comedy world, people say, ‘This needs to be a little funnier.' So we did that, meanwhile always trying to pitch originals."

The genesis of "Hangover" came from the two thinking about the conventions of the "bachelor party" film genre.

"It's been done a lot," he says, "and a lot of them are terrible. The thing is, a party is fun to watch for about five minutes. Talking about it the next day is funnier, a lot funnier. Think about ‘Jaws' or horror movies, too - it's better if you don't see the monster. The audience can paint a picture in their heads of what happened that's more extreme than anything we could film.

"Most people can really relate to the next morning, too - ‘Oh God. I did that. Didn't I?' And we've all been that person looking on, saying, ‘I'm glad I'm not you!' Half-a-dozen people we know think it's based directly on their lives."

"Plus, we've always liked stupid detectives. We love ‘The Big Lebowski.' So we hit on the idea of amnesia as kind of a neat way to tell it."

A sequel is already in the works, although Moore and Lucas aren't in on it.

"(‘Hangover' director) Todd Phillips is great," Moore says. "He's a well-respected writer himself. He did some work on our script as filming progressed. He wants to push the characters forward, so they're going to start filming next fall, I think. Already he's got Scot Armstrong (Phillips' co-writer on ‘Old School') on it, and Jeremy Garelick (‘The Break-Up')."

Meanwhile, More and Lucas are on to the next challenge - what they term a "body-switching" comedy titled "Change Up."

Moore begins to talk about the body-switching subgenre. Even my movie-minutiae mind balks - "There is?" I blurt.

"There is a canon," he asserts. He starts reeling off titles: "Freaky Friday," "Face/Off."

"Actually, ‘Face/Off' is so good that at times you stop thinking about Travolta and Cage and really get into it," he says. (For completists, I will throw a list of titles at the end of this story.)

"A lot of them are cheesy," he says. "But when they're well done, they're entertaining. We're thinking about it in a really fun way - the two who switch are a married guy and a single guy. Jon and I are both married, and I think everyone who is married definitely thinks about being single again. There's that ‘I wish I had your life' thing. And the single guy is a total slacker, he sees the guy with a wife and kids and thinks, ‘What would that be like?'"

David Dobkin ("Wedding Crashers") is attached to direct.

Moore's sitting pretty, and as I type this up, I think - hey, he didn't have to talk to me. He doesn't have a product to pimp, he's got no reason to give me his time. Plus it was 7 a.m. where he was when I called him. That's pretty cool. He's a nice guy.

I stick him with one more question: what was the unexplained chicken doing in the hotel room in "Hangover"?

"There is actually a reason the chicken is there," he admits. "I'm not I'm sure allowed to talk about it."

THE BODY-SWITCHING SUBGENRE

Flames (1917) Dir: Maurice Elvey
Turnabout (1940) Dir: Hal Roach
Vice Versa (1947) Dir: Peter Ustinov
Skazka O Poter yannom Vremi (1964) Dir: Alexander Ptushko
Freaky Friday (1976) Dir: Gary Nelson
Summer Switch (1984) Dir: Ken Kwapis
Like Father, Like Son (1987) Dir: Rod Daniel
Vice Versa (1988) Dir: Brian Gilbert
18 Again! (1988) Dir: Paul Flaherty
Dream a Little Dream (1989) Dir: Marc Rocco
Prelude to a Kiss (1992) Dir: Norman Rene
Freaky Friday (1995) Dir: Melanie Mayron
Face/Off (1997) Dir: John Woo
A Saintly Switch (1999) Dir: Peter Bogdanovich
The Hot Chick (2002) Dir: Tom Brady
Berzauberte Emma Oder Hilfe, Ich Bin Ein Junge (2002) Dir: Oliver Dommenget
It's a Boy Girl Thing (2006) Dir: Nick Hurran

Catching up with Dr. Banjo: Pete Wernick juggles projects, work with Steve Martin

Pete Wernick is a busy, busy banjo man. (Photo by Kevin Ferguson/Courtesy www.drbanjo.com)

Reprinted from the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society's Pow'r Pickin

Banjo legend Pete Wernick is also one heck of a juggler.

The 62-year-old instrumentalist, composer, singer, bandleader, educator and doctor of sociology (thus the Dr. Banjo monicker) is working in four different musical ensembles these days.

In addition to his own group, Flexigrass, he performs as half of a duo with his wife, guitarist and singer Joan; as an addition to the relatively new local ensemble, Long Road Home; and of course an as integral part of the periodic reunion concerts given by the seminal progressive bluegrass group Hot Rize.

He also spends many weeks a year teaching at bluegrass camps across the country. He is editing two more instructional videos this month (he’s got seven under his belt, plus “about seven books”).

He writes a monthly column for Banjo Newsletter. He works diligently on his Web site, www.DrBanjo.com (over 150 questions answered in his “Ask Dr. Banjo” column to date!).

Oh yeah, did we mention a new Pete & Joan CD is in the works? And, hey, he just finished collaborating on Steve Martin’s new CD The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo, a departure into serious bluegrass for the famous comedian that has attracted a great deal of popular interest.

“A lot of people seem interested in Steve Martin,” Wernick says in his usual wry, understated way.

The two developed a friendship a few years ago, after Wernick learned that Martin cited him as an inspiration – “it was very strange to hear an icon of American culture saying that he admires me!”

They eventually met, jammed, and started hanging out together. Hot Rize wound up playing at Martin’s wedding in 2007. Martin began to work on some original banjo tunes.

In 2008, Martin passed around a demo recording of 18 pieces for possible use to Wernick, Tony Trischka and John McEuen, the last a friend of Martin’s since high school. The project jelled into being fairly quickly, with recording sessions last summer in the studio of Dae Bennett, Tony Bennett’s son, in New Jersey, a short distance from Manhattan over the George Washington Bridge.

Over 30 bluegrass and country greats ended up contributing to the recording. Wernick co-wrote one cut, “Words Unspoken.”

“Of those 18 initial pieces, I liked the last one, which was only about 30 seconds long,” he says. “I asked Steve, ‘What are you going to do with it?’” Wernick asked Martin if he minded if Wernick tried to add a second part to it.

“I wrote a second part for it, and we expanded it. Then I said, ‘It sounds like a song.’” The two wrote lyrics separately and then combined them over the course of a lengthy long-distance call.

(The album’s liner notes state that “the lyrics are practically finished,” and as yet it’s still an instrumental piece.)

Wernick doesn’t know if Martin is interested in touring with his music, and he wonders if the quiet, private writer and performer might like resuming the rigorous life of a touring performer.

Wernick certainly does. He is traveling quite a bit with Flexigrass, a heady mix of bluegrass and classic jazz sounds. Wernick is clear that the emphasis is on roots music with unique instrumentation, to wit: clarinet (Bill Pontarelli) in place of a fiddle, vibraphone (Greg Harris) in lieu of guitar, and drums (Kris Ditson) fulfilling what Wernick calls the “pulse function” of a mandolin.

The group, now in its 17th year, “carries the same kind of musical density” as a bluegrass outfit, says Wernick, and it’s been welcomed across the country.

Wernick appreciates events such as Merlefest “giving this kind of music a home.”

On top of that, Wernick recently joined the straight-ahead ensemble Long Road Home, working with Martin Gilmore on guitar, Justin Hoffenberg on fiddle, and Jordan Ramsey on mandolin, as well as Nashville Bluegrass Band vet Gene Libbea on bass.

“‘I’m dying to do (traditional) bluegrass,’” he told Hoffenberg when he was told that the band needed a banjo player. The group has been touring, and recording sessions last month in eTown Hall in Boulder should yield a live album in the near future.

Meanwhile, Hot Rize endures. The groundbreaking group, which stopped touring full-time in 1990, survived the death of guitarist Charles Sawtelle in 1999, reformed in 2002 with Bryan Sutton on guitar.

They return to the RockyGrass festival in Lyons, north of Boulder, in late July – and the rumor that Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers, Hot Rize’s wacky country-swing alter egos, are back is confirmed.

“The Trailblazers will be back this year,” says Wernick, smiling. “They did a long set at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival last year – nearly two and a half hours at the dance stage.”

Wernick still sees Hot Rize as his “peak experience,” a life-changing achievement that, in his eyes, “helped make Colorado a center for bluegrass.”

He sees his work as a teacher as his most lasting influence, however.

“You really affect people’s lives when you get them to play with others,” he says. “Many, many people love to play but they play by themselves, they are stuck in this box. We call it ‘closet picking.’ They stay in that stage, they get discouraged, and they give up. Playing well is only half of it – you have to learn to give and take with other musicians. So, hopefully, we save these people from undeserved oblivion.”

Taken all in all, how does he balance all these commitments? He states that he thinks and plans only about three months in advance, staying “pleasantly busy.” When he finds himself with an open week, he’s glad to catch up on things at home, his two acres north of Boulder, which is crossed by Left Hand Creek.

“People ask, ‘Do you have a little studio where you create?’” he says. “And I do – I have a funky little shack I built in the back, down by the creek. It’s strictly functional, not built for looks, and that’s where I work out a lot of my ideas. It’s so nice – a spot by a creek, a pleasant place to be.”

For more information about the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society, please click this link.

BLUEGRASS BLAST: Dr. Banjo to the Rescue!

(A profile from 2003. UPDATE: Pete and his band Flexigrass have a new release titled "What The," and he can also be heard on Steve Martin's new album "The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo." For more information, please visit www.drbanjo.com.)

Pete Wernick tromps across a field in the baking afternoon heat, trying to get a better connection on his cell phone. Considering his busy schedule, and his status as one of the world’s outstanding acoustic instrumentalists, he’s a heck of a friendly and accommodating guy.
The banjo master, singer, composer, band leader and educator took time out from his duties at the RockyGrass Academy, a week-long acoustic music seminar that precedes the annual RockyGrass Festival, to speak about his past, present and future. Though best known in the bluegrass world for his work with Tim O’Brien, Nick Forster, and the late Charles Sawtelle in the seminal progressive bluegrass group Hot Rize, the 57-year-old Wernick was and is one of the key innovators in the genre’s history -- from his early days with Country Cooking in the 1970s, through his 16-year term as president of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), to his current helming of the jazz/bluegrass hybrid Live Five band.
Speaking with a rapid-fire intelligence that’s a mirror of his playing style, Wernick touched on a constellation of subjects, beginning with his affection for the annual Lyons hoedown -- “It’s my favorite,” he says. “There’s goodness in all of it. I’m immersed in the bluegrass community, and there’s certainly a good one here in Colorado.”

BRONX BEGINNINGS

A native of the Bronx, Wernick got turned on to acoustic music via the urban folk boom of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
“My friends ... around 1960, when I was 13 or 14, were already learning guitar and banjo, and they were sort of following in the Pete Seeger tradition,” he says, citing the popularity of such groups as the Kingston Trio as well. Without the availability of instruction manuals or tablatures in that period, Wernick picked up his skills the hard way.
“Everybody ... learned to play by listening and doing a lot of experimenting, and that’s how I learned how to play... Slowly but surely I caught on to what was necessary -- but before I even started to play, I had heard Earl Scruggs on a record and he seemed like the ultimate, (most) incredible musician I’d ever heard in my life, and I just loved what he did,” says the musician.
He continued to play for pleasure through his college years at Columbia University and at Cornell, where his studies resulted in his earning a doctorate in sociology (thus his eventual “Dr. Banjo” title). He hosted a bluegrass radio show at Columbia, which deepened his knowledge of the music, spurred his contact with other enthusiasts and musicians, and whetted his appetite to be a participant in the scene himself.
“For a guy with a doctorate from an Ivy League university to quit his job and say, ‘No I’d rather actually be playing bluegrass,’ which is what I did, that’s a statement in my life,” he says.
He recalls faithfully attending four-hour jam sessions he attended on Sunday afternoons in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, where he met David “Dawg” Grisman, Jody Stecher, and one to two dozen others in the New York metropolitan area -- “one in a million,” as he puts it -- who shared his love for the music.
Eventually, he and others began attending bluegrass gatherings and competitions in the South, carpooling down to Virginia and North Carolina and, surprisingly to them, coming away with prizes. He also gained insight from contact with the place and the people that spawned the music. Although bluegrass is now truly an international phenomenon (the IBMA now boasts members in 30 countries around the world), he sees it as a gift from Southern Appalachian culture.
“That’s when I really got acquainted more with the culture that bluegrass comes from. ‘Cause you learn one set of thing on a record, but some stuff you don’t learn until you go into a cafe/ down there or you’re in the parking lot of a festival just hanging out with Southern people and getting to know life from their perspective,” he says.

HOT RIZE REDUX

Fast-forward to today, as Wernick talks about his recent resurrection of Hot Rize with O’Brien and Forster, and the addition of young guitar virtuoso and Nashville session player Bryan Sutton, who takes over the duties, but respectfully never seeks to take the place, of Charles Sawtelle, who passed away in 1999 after a long battle with leukemia.
“It’s about as big of a treat as I could ask for,” he says, relishing the opportunity to perform the tunes he and his compatriots crafted over the course of a quarter-century. He estimates that Hot Rize performed over 1,500 shows during their career together until Sawtelle’s death put an end to their original configuration.
“When we lost Charles, it really popped a big bubble in all of our heads,” says Wernick. “Not just losing a very dear friend, but maybe losing the sound of a band that was a very big part of our lives.” After a period of mourning (“when your spouse dies, you don’t remarry two months later,” he says), the surviving members decided to have a go of it again, especially after a long-delayed, Sawtelle-dedicated live album taped in 1996, “So Long of a Journey,” saw release last year.
The band accepted six gigs without knowing who their guitar player would be, then aimed high and decided to ask Sutton, who happily agreed. “He’s a delight to be around and play with,” says Wernick, and the successful recombination of talents meant that seven Hot Rize concerts were scheduled for this year as well.

‘FLEXIGRASS’

After the end of Hot Rize’s primary phase of activity in 1992, Wernick continued the innovations he had begun decades before. Always enamored of jazz and particularly the sound of clarinetist Benny Goodman, Wernick put together an ensemble that would fuse genres. The result, dubbed “flexigrass”, features Wernick and George Weber on vibraphone, Bill Pontarelli’s clarinet, the drum work of Kris Ditson, bassist Roger Johns, and featured vocalist Joan Wernick. The group has produced two albums to date, both of which combine jazz and bluegrass influences.
Pete was ready for a change. “Honestly, when you get into your 50s and you’ve been part of a phenomenal bluegrass band for about half your life, which in my case is Hot Rize ... it’s nice to do something after you’ve been doing the same thing for a while and mix it into the mix,” he says, although he admits meeting resistance from purist bluegrass aficionados.
“Some bluegrass hardcore people really think I’m out of my mind,” he jokes, “and it’s like I got infected by some weird disease, (like) I won’t be the same Pete anymore. I’m just the same Pete, just growing in different directions. And I have and will continue to play hardcore bluegrass on one day and the very next day I might have a Live Five gig.”

TRADITION/INNOVATION

Wernick straddles the historical line between the originators of bluegrass and the current third, and even fourth, generations of practitioners, many of whom have been emboldened to widen the genre’s stylistic and subject boundaries by the innovations he and his contemporaries first implemented decades ago. Even today, it seems that a schism between traditional and progressive bluegrass musicians and fans persists; one that Wernick expresses a unique and unifying perspective on.
“My whole career is based on showing that I truly appreciate and understand the bluegrass sound as well as I can,” he says, “and then saying, ‘Well, I’m not here to just reproduce the tradition from another era, I’m here to be myself as a living, breathing musician -- and I’m going to use the same palette of colors that hey have used, but I’m going to add a few.’“
He continues, “The hardcore bluegrass is very sensitive to being disrespected. Bluegrass has spent most of its life as a music being ignored and even mocked. You know, people say, ‘Oh you play bluegrass -- yee-hah!’ you know, and you get this real condescending thing going. To me it would be comparable to ... a Catholic listening to someone mock Mother Teresa ... and I’m thinking, ‘You don’t get it, and go away, you know, you don’t get it -- just leave!’
“And I really like the bluegrass people more than the academic people.... It’s a delight, because the people who love this kind of music are definitely more, I think, in touch with earth-centered values, you might say, than a lot of the people who are into the tight-pants-loud-electric-guitars-and-screaming kind of music that really doesn’t reference anything about the beauty of music, it’s all a vehicle for being angry or something. I don’t have much use for that, I like hearing music that sounds good and that means something.”
Now matter how much some fans might look askance at his musical explorations, Wernick is confident that he is on the right track. His abiding passion for the music sustains him, as it did the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe, of whom he shares a relevant memory.
“I have a very deep appreciation for the roots and the main stream of bluegrass... I got to see Bill Monroe stay up all night playing music ... he was actually dancing with some of the women at the party as the sun came up, and, believe me, I’ll never forget that, I haven’t yet ... that’s a lot more than learning licks out of a book. It’s a lot deeper message.”

The Talented Mr. Christie

This profile of Colorado Music Festival Music Director Michael Christie first appeared in Muso magazine's summer 2005 issue.

A regular guy.
That’s the impression Michael Christie makes the first time you see him. In fact, that’s a fundamental truth about him. In a profession not exactly conducive to the cultivation of a laid-back personality, one strewn with divas and dictators, this youthful conductor is disarmingly relaxed. Congenial. Unpretentious. Dare we say, even, nondescript?
Yet underneath that lies an essential reserve, a piercing intelligence and a quiet authority that complements his aw-shucks, Jimmy Stewart demeanor. Matched with his keen musical sensibilities, the sum total of these qualities makes him one of America’s leading young possessors of the podium.
“I’m inspired by the challenge of not being the ‘know-it-all’ conductor,” he says with a grin.
We meet at a homey yet well-appointed restaurant in the heart of Boulder, Colorado. Clad in jeans, loafers, and a sweater, his dark head of hair neatly trimmed, he looks like just one of the hundreds of graduate students who pedal the streets of this picturesque, health-conscious university town, which sits nestled at the foot of the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains.
Here Christie is busily preparing an intense six-week summer season of Colorado Music Festival concerts. Christie has served as Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Festival since 2000, beating out a number of competitors for the position at the tender age of 25.
Burdened during his first few seasons at the CMF with the reputation of a wunderkind, his impeccable musicianship, mature manner, imaginative programming and ambitious out reach efforts have overcome all of his audience’s possible apprehensions. In 2001, he also assumed the role of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Queensland Orchestra, a position he relinquishes this fall as he takes over as the Music Director of the Phoenix (Arizona) Symphony.
Top this off with a continuing rush of guest-conductor appearances around the world that include forays into ballet and opera, including works as diverse as “Cosi Fan Tutte” and Adams’ “The Death of Klinghofer.” Isn’t it all too much at times?
“This trajectory doesn’t feel extreme,” he exclaims brightly before digging into a veggie burger. “It doesn’t feel unplanned, certainly. I have incredible support – family, friends, colleagues. They look after me.”
Christie’s first exposure to the world of classical music in his childhood home in Buffalo, New York, a town almost tragically far from the towers and concert halls of Manhattan, came from a hilariously lowbrow source.
“It was ‘Hooked on Classics,’ actually,” he admits with a laugh, referring to the famously cheesy and immensely popular classical compilation album of the mid-’80s. “That’s how I got to know anything, actually.”
Something about it grabbed his ear, and his parents supported his interest.
“My parents started taking us to Buffalo Philharmonic concerts once a month, and then I started going myself,” he says. Fortunately, the orchestra was helmed at that time by baton-wielders such as Julius Rudel, Semyon Bychkov and Maximiano Valdes. This fascination led to him dedicating his life to music, taking a degree in trumpet performance at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. All the while, though, conducting was in the back of his mind.
His principal conducting mentors were Franz Welser-Most and Robert Spano. The turning point for Christie came when he entered the First International Sibelius Conductor’s Competition in Helsinki in 1995. He was awarded a special prize for Outstanding Potential, and shortly after was invited to become an apprentice conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Even today, he bears a special fondness for Finland’s culture, landscape and musical contributions.
“There’s a respectful pride in their national character,” he says, “but beneath that there’s a fire in the belly. That’s apparent in their music – an understated grandeur that brings to my mind those beautiful stretches of pine and birch forest there… the society is tight-knit but diverse. I love their care for individuals, for education, for families.”
Under the tutelage of Daniel Barenboim, Christie’s expertise grew by leaps and bounds, and his directorates have taken him into yet another realm – the complex responsibility of shaping an ensemble, establishing an aesthetic regimen and direction, juggling a myriad of administrative tasks, and, of key interest for Christie, developing and satisfying the audience.
First and foremost, however, is the stick work, and in that the maestro is assured beyond his years. I have been fortunate to observe him for several seasons both in concert and rehearsal in Boulder. These take place in the cavernous confines of Chautauqua Auditorium, a barn-like wooden venue overlooking Boulder that was constructed in 1898, through which swallows swoop during performances. Christie throws open the orchestra’s rehearsals to the public, and sometimes upwards of 100 people can be found in the worn wooden seats on a weekday morning, soaking up the sound.
His primary asset is clarity – there is no ambiguity or hesitancy in his communication with his musicians, and they respond to this with precision and commitment (“an orchestra can be such a dry machine,” he says). Often, this deceptively simple ability to go straight to the essence of the task at hand seems to free the ensemble, giving it the time and space to find depths and emphases that it might not under a less certain leader. A revelatory performance of Bruckner’s 5th Symphony last year, for instance, overcame the composer’s lumbering, logy tendencies with ease.
“You don’t have too many chances to convince people to make this music a part of their lives,” Christie says of his warm and direct style. “They must be instantly engaged.”
The travels that are a necessary part of the life of an aspiring conductor don’t faze him; he speaks enthusiastically of the places and people they have brought into his purview. He gracefully sidesteps a question about what instrumental bodies might be more or less welcoming to the journeyman conductor.
“There is something of a conductors’ hotline,” he says, noting that experiences good and bad tend to get around in what he terms his fraternity. He bases his willingness to return to a given stage on what he calls “chemistry – would my next experience be a significant expansion of my abilities?”
Likewise, he rejects the idea of a cutthroat competitiveness in his chosen profession. “It’s true that sometimes people wonder, ‘Why didn’t I get that position,’ but there’s usually a good reason for it,” he says. “Also, in my work, the competitive criteria is not clear – it does not translate into anything quantitative.”
The nattily bow-tied restaurant owner stops by to check on us, and he and Christie exchange warm greetings. Christie’s easy likeability has much to do with his appeal, and it speaks well of his efforts that the CMF audience has steadily grown during his tenure.
The growth is due to many factors. First, his programming is an adroit combination of old, new, and genre-crossing musics. For instance, his CMF schedules have become notable for his well-received incorporation of visits by a number of world music ensembles, an evening a week dedicated to chamber music, forays into jazz, and cross-disciplinary collaborations with dance companies, actors, popular vocalists, and regional choruses.
Most remarkably this season is “Moving Pictures,” an evening that will pair short, original films crafted by members of the University of Colorado’s Film Studies Program and The Shootout 24-Hour Filmmaking Festival Boulder with original compositions by Mark Grey and Philip Rothman, culminating with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 thriller “The Lodger,” with the CMF Orchestra providing live accompaniment through a new score by British composer Joby Talbot.
Christie’s refusal to be crusty about high and low art is refreshing. He eloquently defends the sometimes-besmirched reputation of Boston Pops conductor and avid populist Arthur Fiedler, citing his pioneering use of free concerts and ticket packages to bring auditors into the concert hall.
However, if there is a conductor that Christie brings to mind, it is that other great popular communicator, Leonard Bernstein, whose “Young People’s Concert” telecasts from 1958 to 1972 influenced a generation. Unconsciously, he echoes Bernstein when he refers to his employ of up-and-coming soloists as “putting arms about the creative element” – witness Bernstein’s credo “Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”
Christie’s openness to relative unknowns can be a burden. “I have an immense pile of scores in my garage,” he admits. “I will receive anywhere from six to 10 press packets a week from potential guest artists, and from composers, about half as many. I have such sympathy for them – it can just be overwhelming to go through them all. There are interesting discoveries to be made, though.”
Christie is proud of his commitment to audience-friendly innovations, ones that include such concert features as “Keeping Score,” programs with educational information about each composition that listeners can follow during performances, keyed to numbers that are projected above the orchestra as it plays; and “intermission insights” -- interviews and discussions among Christie, the audience and visiting soloists during concert breaks. Many times, I’ve seen him jump down into the audience on a warm summer night, microphone in hand, passing questions on to a soloist like a formally dressed talk-show host.
Christie describes these as “little things to help… the artist’s task is to break it down – to give preparation for the experience, not just the experience itself. Those who want that can have that … anybody who wants to be drawn into what we’re doing in the concert has more doors open to them than anywhere I’ve seen.”
He plans to utilize these techniques in his new position at the Phoenix Symphony as well. He looks forward to developing a relationship with his musicians over a 40-week season, and describes this opportunity as “a larger palette.”
He is confident in the abilities of its administrative staff, but he is the first to refer to the current classical scene as an industry, and makes choices and establishes priorities in line with this concept.
“To begin with, I will be conferencing with all the players, the whole orchestra,” he says, “which I don’t think many of them have ever done before. And I will ask them three things. What is your musical pedigree – your training and experience; in what way has the organization met or failed to meet your expectations; and, what can we do to support your personal and artistic growth?
“To date, orchestras have not been helping in cultivating professional development. Most of the time, you have years of intense technical training and then you are abandoned, basically. If we continue together – multi-tasking ,cross-training, doing outreach – I think we will see that this … leads to a better listening environment.”
I veer away mentally for a moment, thinking back to a conversation we had a year ago, when he spoke of his taste in non-classical music.
“Actually,” he said then, “I’ve spent some time kind of going back and trying to listen to groups that I really didn’t have a chance to listen to when I was really immersed in the development of classical music for myself ... groups I heard people talking about but never really got a chance to listen to.”
The memory prompts me to ask him if there is a style or period of music that he hasn’t fully explored yet, but wishes to. His eyes light up.
“Early music,” he exclaims. “From Byrd to earl Bach.”
He goes to say that he feels that many mainstream orchestras are reluctant to tackle late Renaissance/early Baroque works due to the intensive specialization of the genre, mastered by such groups as the Academy of Ancient Music.
“It’s not all religious in outlook, and composers such as Monteverdi are now popularly accepted. It’s music – why wouldn’t you play it?” he says.
Looking into the future, he sees what he is attempting – integrating audience participation into a traditional artistic format – as a unique contribution to the continued viability of classical music.
“Perhaps America’s contribution is to be the proving grounds of what we can do,” he says, “to open up a process we are all familiar with… This is an evolutionary process, and classical music is in a time of transition. We have to keep it creative and interesting. The shape of the orchestra may be different … who knows, we could have virtual reality, and you could put on a helmet and end up in the middle of the string section. I think that in some way each of us longs to be a part of that experience.”
Christie is banking on this basic human desire, constantly seeking ways to both stimulate and feed it, on and off the podium. His eagerness and energy shine through. Of those not yet seduced by the beauties of the music, he says:
“People are busy, not stupid. They can be sophisticated without having to be part of an elite.
And of his place in all this, he says, quietly and confidently:
“This is a good moment. I’m thankful to be around in our time.”