There is something about performing a bluegrass or Appalachian folk tune that I can’t put my finger on. I grew up in Kansas and that’s where I learned most of my technique on the banjo and in singing, such as it is. However, I think I always understood that, not having grown up in the tradition, that is, in the South, that I needed to bring my own interpretation to the music. That’s why, as a guy who grew up in the city, I chose to find more urban-influenced ways of approaching the music.
I mean, as I was learning, I was going to clubs and listening to celebrated jazz guitarist Jerry Hahn who liked to push jazz to the extremes. At the same time I was studying percussion with the astounding J.C. Combs and, as a result, was playing as an alternate in the Wichita Symphony. Variously over the years I was playing in percussion ensembles, bands, both rock, reggae, and otherwise, and under the baton of such luminaries as John Cage, Robert Shaw, and Gunther Schuller (with whom I later studied composition). Perhaps it was this potpourri that I was trying to integrate into my playing. I recall playing banjo on one piece written conducted by Cage and later on an afternoon concert of ragtime arrangements by Schuller.
In later years I combined the banjo and folk tunes with computer electronic manipulations and I played one of these during an interview on an Asheville, North Carolina, classical station. The interviewer asked me why I was doing these sorts of things with the banjo and with folk music materials instead of just playing the tradition. I responded that there were plenty of great 19 year old banjoists who could play the tradition much better than me and that I was using the instrument and the folk music I love for a different kind of expression.
A couple of years later I was playing a gig at a taproom in Asheville and the bass player that evening had grown up in the tradition. Usually I sang “Little Cabin Home on the Hill,” but the leader of the band that evening asked this guy to sing it. His phrasing, styling, everything was just right – he sang it in a manner I’d never be able to duplicate. There is something about roots that one brings to the table in music. That something is both the advantage and the limitations of my own background.
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