Tony Trischka

“I first met Molly Tuttle at Shasta Camp in northern California,” recalls banjo master and ringleader of the upcoming Earl Jam: A Tribute To Earl Scruggs, Tony Trischka. “There were three banjo teachers, myself and two others, and there was only one banjo student, Molly Tuttle.” It wasn’t long before Trischka invited Tuttle to be part of his Of A Winter’s Night holiday show where the group recorded an album by the same name at Levon Helm’s Barn in Woodstock, New York.

When banjo extraordinaire Tony Trischka opened his mail one afternoon during the height of the Covid lockdown, he certainly wasn’t expecting to get a visit from his old pal, the late great Earl Scruggs. Of course, it wasn’t Earl at the door, but a mysterious thumb drive full of rare recordings of Scruggs jamming with John Hartford, mostly taken from private gatherings at Earl’s house during the 80s and 90s.

With its 10th anniversary approaching, the Earl Scruggs Center is proud to announce the return of its annual Remembering Earl benefit concert, taking place Saturday, January 13, 2024 at Malcolm Brown Auditorium in Shelby, NC.

Earl Scruggs rests in a vast suburban cemetery just outside Nashville, Tennessee, beside his devoted wife and manager, among countless other memorials to the departed. A short distance away, the Country Music Hall of Fame displays his banjo alongside the instruments of his bluegrass peers, Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt. While Scruggs might not have single-handedly birthed bluegrass, he undeniably propelled it to prominence with his groundbreaking three-finger playing style, relentless touring, and fusion of bluegrass with rock and pop.

They nearly always come back. All the people that leave bluegrass. I had a strong feeling that I’d be coming back as well. My Bluegrass Heart is my first bluegrass record in over 20 years. It comes out September 10th but you can hear Charm School (featuring Billy Strings on guitar and Chris Thile on mandolin) right now.

Join the Bearded Banjo Santas Holiday Hang with Messrs. Béla Fleck, Alan Munde, and Tony Trischka.

From the North Pole, 15 strings will resound and conversation propels across great distances. Be sure not to miss the tintinnabulation as picks click strings on Wednesday, December 23, 8pm ET for an hour of fun and frolic.

Tune in to any of these Banjo Santas' Facebook page to watch! Donations will gladly be accepted for Action Against Hunger USA.

Can you call Billy Strings a newcomer? Maybe not anymore, seeing as how the twenty-something-year-old virtuoso bluegrass guitarist, along with his band of three other members, is now known for selling out large venues around the country. And yet, the word newcomer feels right in the context of making important notches.

“The question is not, how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?” asked Rhiannon Giddons during her keynote at the 2017 IBMA conference.  The answer is Nefesh Mountain.  Yes, Beneath The Open Sky is a bluegrass album. Yes, some of its lyrics are sung in Hebrew. No, it isn’t a gimmick or a parody. And, no, it’s not klezmer music. 

Sometimes I think I am so full of shit. Ask my wife, and it’s probably safe to drop sometimes I think. But coming to Grey Fox Bluegrass Music Festival, a festival I come to every year, trying to think of a new way to make you, fair reader, understand that it is unlike anything that you have or ever will experience? I am full of shit to think I can do this. But thankfully, this year mother nature is co-writing this review, and she’s writing in the blurry ink of rain.

To return to a point in your life that you have already lived is metaphysical. Déjà vu, as most of us call it, feels mystical, even if it has a chemical explanation. Scientific evidence aside, to relive something that you have lived before is an experience that seems to connect us with something beyond ourselves. We can both be in the moment and be able to predict (or at least have the feeling that we are predicting) what is coming around the next corner. But to experience déjà vu and to be able to improve upon the actions that once were? Now that is something different altogether.

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