Edgar Meyer

Meyer grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and graduated from Oak Ridge High School. His father, Edgar Meyer Sr., who directed the string orchestra program in the Oak Ridge schools, started him on the bass at the age of five, and in high school he began exploring jazz improvisation. He studied with the bassist Stuart Sankey at Indiana University and earned a Bachelor of Music there in 1984.

In Strength in Numbers he played with Fleck on banjo, Sam Bush on mandolin, Mark O’Connor on fiddle and Jerry Douglas on dobro; their album The Telluride Sessions was recorded in January 1989 and released by MCA that year. In 1993 Sugar Hill released Skip, Hop & Wobble, a trio record with Douglas on resonator guitar and Russ Barenberg on guitar that includes the fiddle tune “Big Sciota.” With Ma and O’Connor he recorded Appalachia Waltz (1996), which the trio toured and played at the 1997 inaugural gala, and its follow-up, Appalachian Journey (2000). Other collaborations of these years were Uncommon Ritual (1997) with Fleck and Mike Marshall and Short Trip Home (1999) with Bell, Bush and Marshall. Fleck’s classical album Perpetual Motion brought them two Grammys in 2002, one of them for their arrangement of Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum,” and the two made the duo album Music for Two (2004).

As a classical soloist he recorded three of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites on the bass, and a concerto album with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff that includes Bottesini’s Gran Duo with Bell and Meyer’s own Double Concerto for Bass and Cello with Ma. He wrote the double concerto for Ma, who premiered it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa, and a violin concerto for Hilary Hahn, who premiered and recorded it with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. His Double Concerto for Double Bass and Violin had its premiere with Bell and the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in July 2012, and in the 2011–12 season he was composer in residence with the Alabama Symphony. On his self-titled 2006 album he wrote all the music and played piano, guitar, mandolin, dobro, banjo, gamba and bass himself.

With Fleck and the tabla player Zakir Hussain he wrote a triple concerto for bass, banjo and tabla, commissioned for the opening of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville and recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin for The Melody of Rhythm (2009). His duo with Chris Thile produced Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile (Nonesuch, 2008) and Bass & Mandolin (2014). With Ma, Thile and the fiddler Stuart Duncan he made The Goat Rodeo Sessions (2011), which won the Grammy for Best Folk Album, and Not Our First Goat Rodeo (2020); with Ma and Thile he recorded Bach Trios (2017). The trio with Fleck and Hussain, joined by the flutist Rakesh Chaurasia, released As We Speak in 2023, and in 2024 he made a duo album with the bassist Christian McBride, But Who’s Gonna Play the Melody?

Meyer has taught bass at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, as adjunct instructor since 1994, and joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 2003. The MacArthur Foundation cited him for fusing classical and bluegrass styles.

• 1994: Avery Fisher Career Grant
• 2000: Avery Fisher Prize
• 2001: Grammy Award, Best Classical Crossover Album, Appalachian Journey (with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor)
• 2002: Grammy Award, Best Classical Crossover Album, Perpetual Motion (Béla Fleck)
• 2002: Grammy Award, Best Instrumental Arrangement, Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” (with Fleck)
• 2002: MacArthur Fellowship
• 2013: Grammy Award, The Goat Rodeo Sessions (with Ma, Chris Thile and Stuart Duncan)
• 2015: Grammy Award, Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, Bass & Mandolin (with Thile)
• 2024: Grammy Awards, Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, As We Speak, and Best Global Music Performance, “Pashto” (with Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia)