Chris Pandolfi

His grandparents, Frank and Carmela Pandolfi, founded the Connecticut Opera Association in 1942, and his grandmother started the children on piano young. His older brother, a bass player, took him to see Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, and in the summer of 1997, as a high-school senior who had never heard of bluegrass, he bought his first banjo. He began with Fleck’s progressive music and worked back to Earl Scruggs, from whom, he has said, his own technique, timing, tone and drive all derive. He majored in environmental studies at Dartmouth College, graduating in 2001. Banjo was not one of the principal instruments Berklee offered, but with help from his teacher Tony Trischka he made his case to the head of the string department, sent an audition tape and was admitted as the college’s first banjo principal; there he mostly studied with guitarists and transposed what he learned to the banjo. He made a first album of his own, The Handoff, in 2003.

In 2004 he moved to Nashville. He and the guitarist Chris Eldridge, both Berklee students, followed the Dobro player Andy Hall there and met Hall’s bandmates in Ronnie Bowman’s Committee, the mandolinist Jesse Cobb and the fiddler Jeremy Garrett, and with the bass player Travis Book, found at an audition in the fall of 2005, they became the Infamous Stringdusters. Bluegrass was the common ground among them, he has said, and it became the bedrock of the band. Their first album, Fork in the Road (Sugar Hill, 2007), won three IBMA awards that year, among them Album of the Year. Pandolfi has played banjo on the band’s records since, from Things That Fly (2010) and Silver Sky (2012) to Ladies & Gentlemen (2016), with guest singers such as Joan Osborne, Lee Ann Womack and Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Laws of Gravity (Compass, 2017), which won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy in 2018, and on the tribute albums to Bill Monroe (2021) and Flatt & Scruggs (2023). Since 2011 the lineup has been Hall, Andy Falco, Pandolfi, Garrett and Book.

He released a second solo album, Looking Glass, on Sugar Hill in 2009, producing, recording and mixing it himself. In 2011 he gave the keynote address at the IBMA business conference, and in 2019 he was elected to the IBMA board of directors. After moving to Colorado in 2013 he set up a studio in Golden and worked as a producer, with credits including two albums by Trout Steak Revival (2015 and 2017) and Never Come Down’s Greener Pastures (2024). Under the name TRAD PLUS he makes music that combines his banjo with keyboards, beats, vinyl samples and synthesizers; Trance Banjo (Americana Vibes, 2021), begun three years earlier and finished during the pandemic lockdown, is the best known of these records. With Hall he leads the Bluegrass Generals, an all-star group with a changing cast whose guests have included Sam Bush, Billy Strings and Larry Keel; in April 2019 it sold out two nights at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom in Denver. He also hosts the interview podcast Inside the Musician’s Brain.