Applications are now being accepted to attend the 2022 Blue Ridge Banjo Camp, founded and curated by Béla Fleck. This year’s camp will be held August 17-21 in Brevard, NC.
Fleck will be teaching during the camp, alongside his hand-picked faculty consisting of Tony Trischka, Kristin Scott Benson, and Ryan Cavanaugh.
Unlike most other weekend instructional camps, not all who apply are accepted to attend. Béla and his staff look at the pool of applicants each year, and choose those they feel are most likely to benefit from the experience. There is no application fee, and they only take them from now until March 1, so it is recommended that anyone interested in coming should complete an application soon. Those accepted for registration will be notified shortly after the application period closes.
The Camp is meant for serious intermediate to advanced players, engaged learners eager to listen and learn from such a high-level faculty. Students will be challenged with new skills, but the intent is to “build up banjo players with a holistic approach, an approach that will hopefully have a long-lasting effect on each players’ ability to improve even after the camp is over.”
Registration fees are offered for both resident campers who will stay on site at the Brevard Music Center, as well as rates for commuter/local attendees without the need for accommodations and meals. An option exists for a spouse, parent, or close friend traveling with a camper to receive accommodations and food, and attend sessions with the student.
Béla himself is deeply involved in this venture, and says that he wants to dedicate more of his time to teaching going forward.
“I’ve loved the banjo and the community that surrounds it ever since I first heard it, and started learning to play. The Blue Ridge Banjo Camp is my chance to put together an amazing team of 3 finger banjoist/teachers, to pass along what we’ve each been learning over the years. I’m looking forward to expanding the teaching side of what I do, and thankful to have an amazing venue in which we can share our love, fascination, and curiosity about music and the 5 string banjo.”
Esoteric and experimental banjo player Ryan Cavanaugh has explained his reasons for leaving his post with Songs From The Road Band, after a full year on the road, and having completed recording their next album, Waiting On A Ride.
The band was created by a number of renowned pickers, singers, and songwriters on the more progressive side of the bluegrass biz who wanted to put together a more traditionally-focused group. Members include Charles Humphrey III, a founding member of The Steep Canyon Rangers, jamgrass mando favorite Mark Shimick, guitarist Sam Wharton, and fiddler James Schlender.
Never one to let grass grow under his feet, Ryan says that he is simply itching to try his hand at something different.
“I need to pursue some of the sounds and ideas I couldn’t work on due to constantly being on the road. I’m really happy with how the new Songs From the Road Band record turned out and hope people hear the great ideas that went into it! I also recently heard that it reached #1 on the bluegrass charts which is really nice to hear! I wish Charles and the rest of the crew the best with their endeavors. We had a lot of fun that first year on the road!”
Cavanaugh has worked most every side of the banjo world. He toured for a time with jazz saxophonist Bill Evans’s Soulgrass Band, with Jeff Austin, and Jenni Lyn of Della Mae. Of late he has been doing guest appearances with Jeremy Garrett of Infamous String Dusters, Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon, and Adam Aijala of Yonder Mountain String Band.
“Guesting with various artists in the acoustic music community has been a great joy for me. I really enjoy playing fresh new material and the challenge of improvising with creative players.”
He also played on releases from mandolinist, Elio Schiavo, from which he shared this cut, 10,000 After.
Ryan expects to return to playing bluegrass sometime in the near future, but wants to explore some other ideas in the meantime.
“For the immediate future I’ve completed a live solo improvisations record (on electric banjo) that hasn’t much to do with bluegrass. Some will like it and some will certainly not, however, in this modern time of complete compartmentalization of everything, I wanted to make soulful and creative music that is free of borders and labels. Just pure music. It’s soulful and I hope people hear that.
I’ve chosen the electric banjo as my paintbrush and made a very introspective work of free improvisations called, The Realist, to be released in the coming weeks. This is a precursor to an ensemble record I’m working on with trumpeter Randy Brecker and drummer Dennis Chambers.”
You can learn more about this talented 5 stringer on his official web site.
Ryan Cavanaugh has announced that he is leaving his banjo position with the Jeff Austin Band and heading back to his home base in New York City.
Austin had started his group when he left Yonder Mountain String Band in the spring of 2014, starting the group with Danny Barnes on the five. Ryan came aboard when Danny left in August of last year.
Never one to let grass grow too thick under his feet, Cavanaugh says that he’ll be open to whatever comes his way over the next little while.
“After a year on the road and a great sounding EP with the Jeff Austin Band, I have decided to leave the band to peruse other musics. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting acquainted with the artists and fans on the jamband/grass scene and hope to join forces with other artists of the like in the near future. In the meantime, I’m very excited to go back and forth between my home in NY and Nashville for various music endeavors, including work on my own new projects.”
Ryan is a particularly adept banjo technician and an artist of the first order.
You can sample some of his original music online. Here’s one of his compositions called No Capo For Andy.
Jazz banjo pioneer Ryan Cavanaugh has a new album coming out later this year with guitarist C Lanzbom. Titled Every Note the Heart Can Play, it features original compositions by the two noted instrumentalists, engineered and mixed by Lanzbom at his Sherwood Ridge Studio just outside New York City.
A debut single, Colorado, has been released for download purchase, with a number of other track releases expected before the album hits.
Ryan said that they are expecting a good bit of attention from the jazz and mainstream music media for this project, and he’s excited to see if it generates some buzz for the five string.
“C and I basically produced one another, and it really extracted some banjo styles and playing that I may have never explored on my own. There is a lot of uncharted territory for the banjo that we covered on the record. I’m very happy C asked me to make it with him.
I’m playing acoustic banjo on the entire record. We used two AEA microphones, which are exact reproductions of the famous ribbon microphones RCA made in the early 20th century. We experimented with a variety of vintage compressors and mic preamps, to explore a variety of cool tones for the banjo.”
Here’s a sample of the single, which is now available for download from all the popular digital media sites.
Much of the full album includes music similar to this first single, according to Cavanaugh, along with “some blues, jazz, and even some flemenco type stuff.”
A release date for Every Note the Heart Can Play has not been announced.
The national popularity of bluegrass music might ebb and flow with social and artistic trends, but the quality of picking and musical ability has stayed on an impressively upward trajectory throughout the decades. Anyone who keeps up with the music knows that this is especially true in the world of banjos. We see the newest generation exploring the instrument and its various playing styles in unique and creative ways. While Bela Fleck, Bill Keith, and Tony Trischka might have set a high bar for melodic playing, there are just too many combinations of 3 fingers playing 4 note phrases on 5 strings to ever stop exploring and creating. Most of us, I assume, are well aware of the hot players in today’s music scene, but you might not be aware of a rare banjo anomaly who has spent the last 9 years playing jazz throughout Europe, Russia and all parts of the world. I use the word “anomaly” because “amazing” and “talented” just do not properly describe the improvisational skills and musicianship of Ryan Cavanaugh.
For a guy that sight reads John Coltrane solos for fun (more on that later), Ryan came into bluegrass honestly and simply. “One of my earliest memories is hearing the banjo on records and watching my father play,” says Cavanaugh. “From Doc Watson records to Disney children’s songs, I heard banjo from day one of my recorded memory.” From a young age, Ryan’s father not only consistently played the banjo for him, but he also laid down an impressive musical foundation by exposing him to the basics of all western music: orchestral, jazz, and The Beatles. At 10 years old, Ryan found his father’s banjo in the closet and has been hooked ever since. “I was immediately intrigued with the sound and wanted to play like Earl Scruggs.”
Two years later, Cavanaugh heard Bela Fleck and describes it as an “ah-ha!” moment. “I heard Charlie Parker in my father’s record collection, and I immediately made the connection between that and the piano and harmonica in Béla’s music.” (I don’t recommend comparing what you were doing at 12 with Ryan sonically connecting Charlie Parker with Bela Fleck.) “I really liked what Béla’s concept was in this music, I also quickly understood the traditional bebop role that his other instrumentation was bringing to the musical table,” says Ryan.
Ryan then made the next logical leap in those pre-internet days, by tracking down the instructional melodic banjo books by Tony Trischka. Tony’s books opened up the fretboard for countless banjo players through the ’80s and ’90s, but something was still missing from what he was hearing in his head and what he was playing. As he was turning 16, Cavanaugh met someone who would ultimately change his life: Tom Marino, his high school music teacher. Marino, a jazz keyboard player from New Jersey, taught Cavanaugh how to read notation and to understand basic diatonic chord movement. “I had also just started using my 3rd finger in some single string passages [a technique he’s become well known for]. This was another big ‘ah-ha’ moment,” says Ryan, “and the beginning of a long journey into jazz and bluegrass.”
When you see Ryan play, you quickly realize that his single-string technique is unique and freakishly clean in both tone and tempo. In fact, several years ago, Cavanaugh and his good friend, teacher, and fellow banjo/fiddle master, Rex McGee, showed up at a bluegrass jam in Winston-Salem, and we all noticed that Ryan was playing high-speed bluegrass standards in the key of B without a capo. (For the non-banjo players out there, the speed and precision of the banjo sound relies on using open strings while the fingers of your left hand are changing fretted notes. The key of “B” with no capo only has one open string so your left hand has to move 2 or 3 times as fast to achieve the bluegrass sound. This physical feat is practically unheard of outside of Don Reno.)
Cavanaugh has released three albums, all completely unique in identity and style. Songs For The New Frontier would be considered his “bluegrass” album, recorded in 2004-2005 and featuring John Garris on guitar, Darrell Muller on bass, Danny Knicely on mandolin, Billy Cardine on dobro, and Rex McGee on fiddle. This album, a virtuosic project in every measurement, features the expected great picking, but listening to it closely you start to hear Ryan’s unique sense of melody and composition. Darrell Muller, bassist on the album and also for Love Canon (known for their amazing bluegrass renditions of classic ’80s music) remembers the project: “I was privileged enough to be invited to be the bass player for Songs For The New Frontier, and it was an unbelievable experience. Ryan sent me the demo tracks to work on prior to recording, and I knew this would be a life-changing experience. The odd time signatures, blistering fast melodies and solos, and captivating chord changes: this album has it all.”
The quicker songs on the album are all impressive and exciting, but it’s in the slower songs that we notice the depth of his compositions. The Ballad of Edgar Boone, The Guns of El Ridoggo, and Song For The North State all build around a type of sonic patience that can be so rare in today’s music, especially in the bluegrass realm. Ryan’s melodies and phrasing are allowed to just exist within their own time, as if giving the listener a moment to comprehend each note’s relation to the next, and to understand their place within a harmonic context that is both weirdly odd at one moment and soothingly comprehensible the next. There’s always a tense energy in his playing that he could be showing off, but he instead consciously chooses to go where the song and melody leads.
In the early 2000s, there were whispers floating around bluegrass circles of a young player learning Charlie Parker solos on the banjo. Young virtuosos are neither common nor rare in the bluegrass world—one of the unique traits of this music—but this was different. To have both the physical and mental ability to read and play some of the most complex western music of modern times is not common within bluegrass and caught people’s attention. “I learned how to read standard music notation and began applying it to the banjo,” explains Ryan. “Reading music was the easy part. Placing it on the banjo was an entire process very different from the bluegrass language. It took patience and a lot of hard practice. After I learned all of my scales and their modes, I then learned them in every key. That in itself is like learning an alphabet for a language, but then you need words to speak, followed by sentence construction (phrasing). So, it took a while and a ton of experimenting to apply the scales and modes to music I already knew (bluegrass). After the process of finding where all the notes in all the keys were, I began reading easy songs out of a fiddle book. Once I was able to read fiddle tunes easily, I transitioned to reading Charlie Parker solos.”
After spending the latter part of his teenage years immersed in jazz and fusion, Cavanaugh decided it was time to start touring. “I was experimenting with electric banjo at that time,” Ryan says, “and delving into some serious avant-garde music for the banjo. I formed SpaceStation Integration to use as a platform for my compositions and to educate myself in the electric band forum.”
After 5 years with SpaceStation Integration, Ryan released Songs for The New Frontier and thought his career was headed back into the bluegrass world, but things took an interesting turn. “I was recommended to play in saxophonist Bill Evans’ band. I was recommended for the gig by fusion guitarist John McLaughlin and Béla Fleck.” This was a huge decision for Ryan as he realized that Bill Evan’s career was overseas and he would be giving up his focus on bluegrass. One of the determining factors ended up being McLaughlin’s recommendation. “He is my biggest hero, and I was delighted to take the gig and to become friends with my hero.”
The 2015 California Banjo Extravaganza is set to roll across the northern sections of the Golden State later this week. Host and performer Bill Evans has brought top banjo pickers from the eastern and central portions of the country to entertain in his backyard each Fall for the past several years, and it’s that time again.
This show will incorporate a widely diverse stylistic range, reaching back a ways with stellar old time practitioner Riley Baugus and looking forward with jazz and progressive banjo wizard Ryan Cavanaugh. Those two, along with Evans, will offer concerts in four different cities this week, plus a one day mini-camp for students of the instrument on Sunday.
The live concerts will also feature a powerhouse band featuring Chad Manning, John Reischman, Jim Nunally, and Sharon Gilchrist. Bill, Riley, and Ryan will be showcased individually and jointly with the band, demonstrating their own unique approaches to the instrument.
Shows are scheduled for:
Thursday, November 12 – The Rio Theatre for the Performing Arts; 7:30 p.m.; Santa Cruz, CA
Friday, November 13 – The Palms Playhouse; 8:00 p.m.; Winters, CA
Saturday, November 14 – Etz Chayim Hall; 7:30 p.m.; Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, November 15 – Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse (mini-camp); 4:30 p.m.; Berkeley, CA
Sunday, November 15 – Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse (concert); 8:00 p.m.; Berkeley, CA
More details about the various shows can be found online.
The Jeff Austin Band has announced that Ryan Cavanaugh has joined the group on banjo, taking the spot recently vacated by Danny Barnes. This has been Jeff’s performing vehicle since he left Yonder Mountain String Band in 2013.
Cavanaugh joins Austin on mandolin, Ross Martin on guitar and Eric Thorin on bass.
Over the past few years, Ryan had been performing with jazz master Bill Evans and his Soulgrass ensemble.
Jeff sent along this statement as Ryan joins the group.
“It is with endless excitement that the Jeff Austin Band would like to welcome banjo master Ryan Cavanaugh into the fold. Ryan brings with him a great sense of musical adventure and intense creativity…something we have built our whole world upon. We look forward to many great musical times ahead with him. Learn more about Ryan at ryancavanaugh.com.
We also wish the best to Danny Barnes as he moves forward…continuing to make music that will inspire us all.
See you all out on that big road sooner than later.
Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka and six other banjo greats honored 75-year-old Bill Keith Friday, July 17 at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in what was dubbed the Keith-Style Banjo Summit.
Fans packed the Creekside Stage tent to listen to the tribute and get a glimpse of Keith, who was helped on stage with the aid of a walking cane. Wearing a gray Keith Banjo Tuners jacket and a black NY Banjo cap, the “banjo Jedi master,” as Ryan Cavanaugh described him, was too frail to bring a banjo on stage and play. Instead, he listened along with the audience in the best seat in the house.
Joining Fleck, Trischka and Cavanaugh were Noam Pikelny, Mike Kropp, Eric Weissberg, Marc Horowitz and Mike Munford.
“Most of us wouldn’t be up here today without Bill,” Trischka said.
Born in Boston in 1939 and graduating from Amherst College in 1961, Keith spent nine months with Bill Monroe & the Blue Grass Boys in 1963, recording a groundbreaking song — Devil’s Dream — with what became known as the Keith style of banjo picking. The song, recorded a year earlier with Jim Rooney on the Livin’ on the Mountain LP, wasn’t groundbreaking because of the song itself but because of the way Keith was playing.
“Do you want to say anything about Devil’s Dream?” Trischka asked.
“I first heard this tune played by a Nova Scotian fiddler, and it just dawned on me, I could see in my mind how to play it in the melodic style,” Keith said. “Fortunately, it was a simple tune because if it were anything more complicated, it might not have happened.”
For those in the audience unfamiliar with the Keith style, Fleck said it is “sometimes oversimplified to ‘playing fiddle tunes on the banjo,’ but it’s a whole lot more than that.”
“Is there anybody who could elegantly explain the fiddle tune part of it?” Fleck asked. “Maybe Tony Trischka.”
“It’s a banjo workshop suddenly,” Trischka said. “I’m sorry, we’re going to geek out just for a second. Bear with me. When you’re doing the Scruggs style, a lot of the notes are not melody notes; they’re just kind of filler notes. Like you take the chord and just break it up into the individual notes. In the melodic style that Bill developed and created on his own and popularized when he was with Bill Monroe back in 1963, he came up with a style with is based on scales, which suddenly allowed you to play fiddle tunes note for note.”
When Fleck said “oversimplified,” he was just talking about the technique.
“But what Bill has brought to the banjo is so much more from the jazz chords, but mostly an elegance in his playing,” Fleck said.
“Thank you,” Keith said.
“We always talk about Earl Scruggs starting with three-finger style,” Fleck said. “There were other guys who played three-finger around that time, but it was the musicality that is why we’re still talking about it. And I think that’s also true of Bill.”
Fleck then played Devil’s Dream and Sailor’s Hornpipe before reading the first of a couple of quotes from other famous banjoists who weren’t at the summit.
“Here’s a note from Steve Martin, the banjoist, actor, writer, comedian,” Fleck said. “‘There is Earl Scruggs. There is Pete Seeger. And there is Bill Keith. They are the towering founders of modern banjo playing.’ Are we embarrassing you enough yet, or should we step it up a little bit?”
“Is my face red yet?” Keith replied.
After a few words about Keith, Pikelny played Beating Around the Bush.
“I haven’t written a lot of pieces of music, but that’s one of my favorites,” Keith said after Pikelny finished. “In some ways, I think the level of difficulty adds to my enjoyment … and I think it met its match with you guys.”
Another quote was read by banjoist Murphy Henry, who wasn’t in attendance. She referred to Keith’s contribution to the Earl Scruggs instructional book. When he was learning banjo, Keith spent hours listening to Scruggs’ records and wrote down the tablature, which Scruggs eventually used for his book.
“It’s not only the men who have been influenced by Bill Keith,” Murphy wrote. “I am just one of the many female banjo players who owes a great deal to the musical prowess of this master of the five-string. Bill Keith was my door into Scruggs style of banjo playing. As a newbie, I didn’t yet know about Bill, but I had the Earl Scruggs banjo book. Knowing just enough about reading music to hurt my playing, I found I could only make sense of the tabs by slowing down vinyl LPs of Earl’s playing. I would figure out as much as I could and then turn to Bill’s immaculate tabs to see if I got it right. I trusted Bill’s tabs with my entire banjo being. Later on I came to admire Bill’s own playing. Much later I got to meet Bill himself and hear all about the circle of fifths. I always felt honored to be in his mighty presence, and I am with you all in spirit today.”
Cavanaugh told a story about the first time he met Keith. It was 1997, and he was 17 years old attending the Winterhawk Bluegrass Festival, which is now called the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. Cavanaugh was looking for his uncle.
“This man was extremely overweight,” Cavanaugh said. “He wore black Velcro shoes with black crew socks and a Harley-Davidson shirt. He had a mullet, and he wore an Abe Lincoln top hat with a parrot feather in it. I didn’t know where this man was until I saw a teepee on the horizon.”
Cavanaugh had never met Keith before, so he didn’t recognize him at the teepee.
“I would have known who he was if he looked like the man on the tuner box, but I hadn’t seen a picture of him in years,” Cavanaugh said. “And he said to me, ‘Are you related to this guy?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m related to this guy.’ He goes, ‘Well get him the hell out of here. He’s driving me nuts.’ And I looked at my uncle, and I said, ‘Get the hell out of here. You’re driving this guy nuts.'”
So Cavanaugh sat down and played banjo with his 17-year-old friend and Keith. Then his friend left.
“It was just me and Bill,” Cavanaugh said. “I said, ‘You know I should probably leave right now. Thanks for sitting here for like two hours and playing Autumn Leaves with me. Who are you, man?’ He’s like, ‘I’m Bill Keith.’ And I was like, ‘Holy shit! You’re Bill Keith.’ I hung out for another two hours, and we’ve been friends ever since.”
As an inventor, Keith has also made contributions to the mechanical side of the banjo, developing what is known as the Keith Banjo Tuner. This banjo peg allows banjo players to quickly change from one open tuning to another while playing, and it is still a product of Keith’s business, the Beacon Banjo Company, based in Woodstock, New York.
Fleck demonstrated the Keith Banjo Tuner by playing Katmandu.
“I also use them because they are better tuners,” Fleck said. “They were finer tuners, and so it gave me a more refined tuning peg to use. Also I discovered, strangely enough, that they change the sound of the banjo in a way that I found to be very positive. There was a tonal change by having the four pegs on. A part of the sound of this banjo is not just that it’s a pre-war flathead from the ’30s, but it’s also got these four bulky metal pegs that change the mass of the neck. To me, it’s a positive thing.”
The tribute lasted more than 90 minutes with all guest banjoists given a chance to talk and play. The summit was the first opportunity Grey Fox had to honor Keith after he was given an International Bluegrass Music Association Distinguished Achievement Award in October 2014.
Editor’s Note: The video above contains audio of Bill Keith performing Devil’s Dream live on stage with Bill Monroe & the Blue Grass Boys in 1963, taken from the Acoustic Disc album, Bill Monroe & The Blue Grass Boys Live at Mechanic’s Hall. In the clip, Monroe refers to Bill as Brad, the name he assumed when he joined the band, as Big Mon wouldn’t have two Bills in the band.
New York banjo picker Ryan Cavanaugh has created a pair of videos where he is demonstrating the efficacy of the new ACM-5 banjo pickup from EMG. To do so, he performs two new pieces of his, destined for his next album, The Realist, due during the winter of 2015.
Those in the electric guitar world know EMG as a premier manufacturer of guitar and bass pickups. They are especially noted for their high-output active pickups, favorited by metal bands and performers starting in the 1980s when they were first widely available in the US and Europe.
EMG has more recently become interested in pickups for the acoustic market, and the ACM-5 joins their guitar and bouzouki models. It is a dual coil (side-by-side) pickup that is shipped with the necessary mounting hardware for a traditional dual co-ordinator rod banjo pot. They are available for $229.99 in either, 4, 5, or 6 string configurations.
Ryan’s video for EMG find him working in his familiar milieu, blending a bluegrass-oriented roll style with his jazzy implementation of a single string style.
In the first, Mr. CJ, his take is modern bluegrass, with just a touch of reverb and delay…
… but on Dear Dragon he is wide open, mixing a variety of effects with a beat.
You can find out more about Ryan at his web site, and about the pickup at the EMG site.
Jazz and progressive 5 string banjo player Ryan Cavanaugh has announced his exit from Bill Evans Soulgrass, a hybrid effort by noted sax man Evans to blend funk, jazz and bluegrass grooves.
“After 9 years, over 25 countries, and thousands of airline miles logged, I have decided to depart amicably from Bill Evans Soulgrass. Alongside Bill Evans (saxophone) I had the opportunity to bring bluegrass music and the 5-string banjo to a world stage and to ears on whom they may never have fallen. When Béla Fleck and John McLaughlin (fusion guitarist) recommended me in 2005, I departed North Carolina to engage on an adventure that few banjo players will get to experience. While playing with Soulgrass I was privileged to tour and make records with Béla Fleck, Sam Bush, Victor Wooten, Warren Haynes, John Medeski, John Popper, and many others. As my education in music continues, this particular journey ends.
I feel extremely fortunate to have temporarily explored beyond bluegrass music as a genre and to have entered the international jazz circuit as a banjo player. I’ve studied jazz harmony and theory under some of the greatest living jazz players; people who played with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin. At times I was concerned that my bluegrass playing would suffer, but I fully immersed myself in this once-in-a-lifetime education. Little did I know that it would make me a better and more creative bluegrass player than I ever could have imagined.
Having emerged enlightened and fulfilled from my experience, I now have a greater appreciation for both jazz and bluegrass music, and I am especially very excited to get back in touch with my roots in bluegrass.”
Ryan says that he will be going back and forth between New York and North Carolina for the time being, and working on a duo project bridging rock and bluegrass music. He will be booking performances with that project soon for 2015 and 2016.
