John Reischman and the Jaybirds

Reischman had made his name in the San Francisco Bay Area, playing in the Good Ol’ Persons in the early 1980s and as an original member of the Tony Rice Unit. In Vancouver he recruited musicians from the Pacific Northwest on both sides of the border. The first Jaybirds were Reischman on mandolin, Trisha Gagnon on bass, Nick Hornbuckle on banjo, Greg Spatz on fiddle and Jim Nunally on guitar, with Gagnon singing most of the leads and Nunally and Reischman adding harmony. Hornbuckle plays the five-string banjo with an unusual two-finger roll, and all five members write for the band.

Their first album, John Reischman and the Jaybirds (Corvus/Copper Creek, 2001), mixed Reischman’s originals with traditional pieces such as “Bravest Cowboy” and newer songs by Susan Crowe and by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Its successor, Field Guide, sixteen tracks of traditional bluegrass, old-time music and new songs by band members, was nominated for the Roots & Traditional Album of the Year (Group) at the 2003 Juno Awards. The Road West, with more originals and songs by Don Stover and Harold Hensley, was nominated for an IBMA award, and Stellar Jays, which included Spatz’s fiddle piece “Bash Bish Falls,” brought a second Juno nomination in the same category in 2008. Vintage & Unique (2011) drew eight of its fourteen numbers from new material by all five members. The band followed it with On a Winter’s Night (2014), eight seasonal folk songs, and On That Other Green Shore (2017), which opens with Hornbuckle’s instrumental “Wellesley Station” and includes a Beatles song.

In 2017 the Los Angeles guitarist Patrick Sauber, who had played with Doc Watson, Peter Rowan, Tim O’Brien and John Fogerty, joined the band in place of Nunally, its only change of personnel. By then the members were spread across Chilliwack and Nanaimo in British Columbia, Spokane, Washington, and Los Angeles, and Sauber and Gagnon came to share the lead vocals. The FreshGrass festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art commissioned Reischman to write a “bluegrass concerto,” The Salish Sea, a set of three pieces that the Jaybirds played with Darol Anger on second fiddle and Sharon Gilchrist on second mandolin. Its first movement, in a version for the quintet, is the title track of the band’s eighth album, The Salish Sea, which the Jaybirds launched in December 2025, their first recording with Sauber. Gagnon contributed two songs to it, Hornbuckle “Creekwood Drive” and Spatz “The Reunion.”