Andy Statman

He was born in 1950 into a family with a long line of cantors, composers and classical and vaudeville musicians, and grew up in Queens. Klezmer records at family gatherings, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs, rock and roll, jazz and classical music were all around him; when his older brother began bringing home bluegrass records, he took up guitar and banjo and then switched to mandolin, studying with David Grisman. As a teenager he was already playing with local bands and on Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park. At seventeen, after hearing Albert Ayler, he also began studying saxophone and played it in free jazz, funk, rock and blues bands.

In 1970 he joined Country Cooking, a group of young bluegrass players experimenting with the music, and on its Rounder album Barrel of Fun (1974) he played mandolin alongside Pete Wernick and Tony Trischka on banjo, Kenny Kosek on fiddle and John Miller on guitar. He then spent time in David Bromberg’s band and joined Breakfast Special, a New York band whose recordings had him on mandolin and saxophone with Trischka, Kosek, the Dobro player Stacy Phillips, the guitarist Jim Tolles, the bassist Roger Mason and the drummer Richard Crooks. In Japan he recorded with Peter Rowan’s Red Hot Pickers, with Trischka, Richard Greene on fiddle and Mason on bass, at Nippon Columbia in Tokyo; those sides, among them “Willow Garden,” “Old, Old House” and “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” appeared on Peter Rowan with the Red Hot Pickers (Spindrift, 1984) and later on the CD edition of Rowan’s The Walls of Time.

Meanwhile he had taken up the clarinet and studied Greek, Albanian and Azerbaijani music, and in 1975 he sought out Dave Tarras, the klezmer clarinetist. He became Tarras’s protégé; the older man wrote melodies for him and left him four of his clarinets, and Statman produced Tarras’s last recording. His own first albums came at the end of the decade: Jewish Klezmer Music (1979), which became a touchstone of the 1970s klezmer revival, and the mandolin album Flatbush Waltz (Rounder, 1980), with John Carlini on electric guitar. With Grisman he made the mandolin duet album Mandolin Abstractions (Rounder, 1983), and Nashville Mornings, New York Nights (Rounder, 1986) put him on mandolin, clarinet and guitar with Russ Barenberg, Vassar Clements, Kenny Kosek and Matt Glaser. Andy’s Ramble (Rounder) returned to bluegrass with Jon Sholle on guitar, Trischka on banjo, Clements and Kosek on fiddles and Mason on bass.

As a clarinetist he came to focus on Hasidic melodies, which he joined to bluegrass, klezmer and jazz. He recorded a run of albums for the Shefa label, several of them with his trio, the bassist Jim Whitney and the percussionist Larry Eagle: East Flatbush Blues (2006), whose version of Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide” was nominated for the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance; the double album Old Brooklyn (2011), with Byron Berline, Ricky Skaggs, Béla Fleck and others; Superstring Theory (2013), with Michael Cleveland on fiddle and Tim O’Brien on guitar; Monroe Bus (2019), with Michael Daves and Cleveland; and Bluegrass Tracks (2024), cut in New York in September 2019 with Bryan Sutton, Ron Stewart, Ricky Skaggs, Byron Berline and Mike Bub. He also played clarinet with Matt Glaser’s Wayfaring Strangers on This Train (Rounder, 2003), and by 2012 he had appeared on more than a hundred recordings, twenty of them under his own name. The National Endowment for the Arts announced his National Heritage Fellowship on 19 June 2012.