When did you start playing music?
I started playing music in 2006 at the age of 32 after someone suggested that I should play banjo. After a day of researching what type of banjo to get I chose the tenor banjo.
Why did you wait until you were in your 30’s before taking up an instrument?
I never wanted to play a musical instrument as a kid or as a teenager or even in my 20’s. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind. I played golf and baseball. Later on, when I was old enough to be really into music, the idea of playing an instrument seemed out of reach because it was something your idols such as Jerry Garcia did. Not something that I myself could do. In 2004 and 2005 I went to Ireland and that sort of primed the pump. Witnessing regular people sitting around a table playing music in pubs - not up on a stage as a performance - probably broke the ice a little bit. By the spring of 2006 I guess I was ready and just needed a little nudge from a stranger. My mom taught herself how to play piano when she was in her late 40’s or early 50’s so that may have been a subliminal inspiration.
Why did you choose tenor banjo?
I’m left-handed. During that day of research in May 2006 I learned that you could buy a vintage tenor banjo and have it set up left-handed. As opposed to a 5-string banjo which would have to be purpose-built to be lefty. So that was a big factor. That, and thinking that the tenor banjo would be easier. I also found out that the tenor banjo is used in Ireland and that it can be tuned like a mandolin and that people used picks/plectrums rather than their fingers. I had no interest in playing the obvious instruments - guitar or mandolin - because the bar was too high. Tenor banjo felt obscure which appealed to me, and I realized that learning tenor banjo was kind of like learning two instruments in one, because I could later switch to mandolin if I wanted to.
Did you take any lessons starting out?
Yes I found two local teachers right away - Josh Bearman of the band Special Ed and the Shortbus in Richmond, VA and Cleek Schrey who was living in Charlottesville at the time. Josh specialized in old-timey stringband music and primarily taught clawhammer banjo, guitar, and mandolin. I was probably his only tenor banjo student. I was starting from scratch so he showed me the basics of music - scales, how to read mandolin tab, chords. I didn’t really have anything in mind but I was really interested in theory. He would write out Arkansas Traveler for me and then the next week I would come back wanting to learn a Meat Puppets or Neil Young song. It was all over the place.
Cleek, on the other hand, was an expert in Irish traditional music and assumed that I wanted to learn Irish tenor banjo, so that’s what he showed me. Cleek is known as a fiddler so most people didn’t know he even had a tenor banjo but he did. Cleek’s lessons were focused exclusively on Irish music. He would load me up with Irish trad CDs to take home and make copies of. It was as fundamental as how to hold the pick and the difference between a jig and a reel. I wasn't a very good student.
When did you first hear Irish music?
In the fall of 2004 my wife and I spent a week in Ireland on vacation. We traveled around County Clare and County Galway, but spent the first and last nights of our trip in Doolin. We happened to land in Doolin on the night that fiddler Yvonne Casey was doing the release party for her self-titled debut CD at McGann’s pub. That was my first real exposure to Irish music and it was one of the peak experiences of my life. Eoin O’Neill and Quentin Cooper were there along with James Cullinan. I can’t remember who else. Maybe Kevin Griffin on banjo. I didn't know who any of these people were at the time but I later bought every CD I could find featuring either Yvonne, Quentin, Eoin or Kevin Griffin! These local County Clare musicians were the stars of Irish music as far as I was concerned.
Do you play any other instruments?
I don’t really play any instruments, per se, so yes and no. I think of what I do as playing melodies on an instrument. I don’t have an ear for chords and I don’t enjoy singing songs or playing accompaniment or soloing. I kind of just enjoy playing the tune so any instrument I’ve ever had that’s all I did was play melodies. I have a guitar - a six-string Vagabond travel guitar - that I haven’t played in a while but during the pandemic I taught myself how to play melodies on it by tuning it in all 4ths. I also went through a glockenspiel > xylophone > marimba phase. I didn’t really learn how to play mallet instruments properly, I just learned how to find melodies on the layout of the bars/tone plates. I might be getting a hammered mbira in 2025.
Do you ever write your own music?
I went through a phase of writing my own melodies as a creative outlet. Starting in June of 2017 I gave myself the task of writing a tune a week for a year. I never missed a deadline and actually kept this up for three years straight. These weren’t tunes in any style. And they weren’t entirely original. For example, I might hear a snippet of melody in an old field recording from South America and write an A part based on that. Then I might hear a snippet of melody 20 minutes into a Phish Chalkdust Torture jam and write a B part to the tune based on that. I wasn’t transcribing these note-for-note because I’m not capable of doing that. But I was using my ear to transcribe what I thought I was hearing and make sense of it as conforming to a scale or mode, and then transposing it into a tune of my own. The more wrong I got it the more original it was. This definitely was good ear training if nothing else because I had no music to look at when “writing” these tunes.
What kind of music did you listen to growing up?
When I first got my driver’s license and had a paycheck to burn I would spend it on cassette tapes. This was 1990 or ‘91 just before CDs became a thing but after vinyl had gone out of fashion. I was really into 60’s folk and folk-rock and early 70’s singer-songwriter stuff. Some of my first cassettes would have been Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, James Taylor, Eric Clapton and John Prine. Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd too! The only tapes I had by current bands of the time were Against the Grain by Bad Religion and Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde.
The Grateful Dead would have also been in my purview but didn’t stand out from the pack just yet. However, when Eric Clapton’s Unplugged came out, a record store clerk turned me on to Reckoning by the Grateful Dead, their all-acoustic live album from 1980. That is the one that did it and then I was off to the races buying every Grateful Dead and Grateful-Dead related CD there was like Jerry Garcia Band, Garcia/Grisman, Kingfish, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna and Old and In the Way. This deep-dive led me backwards and sideways to all kinds of acoustic, roots-based, folk, blues, stringband, and bluegrass music such as New Grass Revival, the Red Clay Ramblers, Norman Blake, Hot Rize, Cephas and Wiggins, and John Hartford. Lots of stuff on Rounder and Flying Fish records. I soon found Phish and now I had a contemporary band to obsess over as well as other mid-90’s jambands like Leftover Salmon, and .moe.
Do you have any favorite music books?
Improvise for Real by David Reed. Helped me better understand modes and their relationship to the major scale, such as Dorian and Mixolydian. Also where I learned how to write out melodies by scale numbers 1 through 7, similar to Chinese jianpu.
The Pattern System for the Bass Player by Ariane Cap. Taught me the importance of proper finger technique, and where notes on the fretboard fall in relation to the major scale.
Best Practice by Judy Minot. Designed with the adult learner in mind.
Musical Scales of the World by Michael Hewitt. Reinforced how almost everything can be seen in comparison to the major scale.
Do you have any musical influences?
Thank you for asking. I wish I could say that I do, but as an adult learner who memorizes Irish tunes from a combination of sheet music and play-along tracks, the closest thing I have to an influence is the ice cream truck version of Turkey in the Straw!
My favorite musician of all time is Jerry Garcia. He's a very expressive, very musical player with a gift for melody. Listen to how to how he can go several times through and around on a traditional song like Peggy-O. That's likely where I got my initial interest in plucking melodies from.
The band I've seen the most and listened to the most in my life is Phish. If I take anything away from that which could pertain to Irish music, it is the way the four band members of Phish listen so attentively to one another in a live setting. At any moment, all four members are responding and I think that's a good characteristic to have.
Irish tenor banjo tends to be flashy, and I shy away from that. If I was going to be influenced by actual players of the instrument I play in the style of music that I play, it would be by the sensitive, more subdued players such as Angelina Carberry, Mick O'Connor, Paddy "Paahto" Cummins, and Brian Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, I don't know how much I've taken the time to actually approach it this way though.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m still focusing almost exclusively on familiarizing myself with the tunes played in Irish sessions. Every single day there’s a new tune to learn. I’ve put ornamentation on the back burner, but occasionally I’ll practice triplets and double stops or other variations.
***
