The Kruger Brothers

Uwe was born in Germany in 1961 and Jens in 1962, and the family later moved to Switzerland, where the brothers gave their first public show in 1973. Chet Atkins, Doc Watson and Bill Monroe drew them in, and in 1976 a Flatt & Scruggs album, Strictly Instrumental, turned them toward bluegrass. From 1979 they worked as street musicians across Europe before forming a band, Rocky Road, with the Galfano Brothers of New York. CBS Records signed Rocky Road in 1981, but a year later the brothers went separate ways, Uwe into country music and Jens to the United States. There, in 1982, Jens met Bill Monroe, played with him at Bean Blossom and appeared as a guest with the Blue Grass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry, quite likely the first European banjo player on that stage.

Uwe and Jens came back together in 1987, first as the Appalachian Barn Orchestra and then as an acoustic group of guitar, banjo and bass, signing with Canaris Records and later with K-tel. In 1989 Swiss National Radio gave them a show of their own. That same year they met Joel Landsberg, a New York-born bassist who had just moved to Switzerland; he began working with them then and became their exclusive bassist in 1995. By 1993 they were officially the Kruger Brothers, with three albums for K-tel, and Behind the Barn, Vol. 2 (1997) came out on Blue Martin Records, K-tel’s Swiss division. After 1996 Jens put all his work into the band and co-founded Double Time Music, the label that released Travel the Gravel (1998) and the albums that followed.

In 1997 they played MerleFest in North Carolina, where they have been asked back every year since, and that autumn they began touring the United States. After five years of spending half of each year there, they moved: Uwe to the Carolinas in 2002, and the trio’s business and families in 2003. Double Time issued Up 18 North (2002), Choices (2004), Between the Notes (2009), Forever and a Day (2010) and Remembering Doc Watson (2013), and in 2018 they returned to Blue Martin for a Swiss project, Fernweh Heimweh, with Maja Brunner and Carlo Brunner.

In 2006 an American flag was flown over the US Capitol in Jens’s honor, in recognition of his cultural contributions. His commissioned works began with Appalachian Concerto (2011) and went on through Spirit of the Rockies (2014), Lucid Dreamer (2015, recorded with the Kontras Quartet) and Roan Mountain Suite (2017) to Moonshine Sonata (2023). On 27 September 2013 the trio played “Jack of the Wood” on the Late Show with David Letterman with the Kontras Quartet and Steve Martin, and Jens was presented with the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass Music. He was inducted into the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame in 2011 and the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame in 2021, the band entered the Wilkes County Hall of Fame in 2020, and on 6 August 2024 the trio made their Grand Ole Opry debut.