Greg Garrison

He was born on 16 July 1974 in Edina, Minnesota, and started on the bass in the fifth grade. His family moved to Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago, where he went to Rolling Meadows High School with the future Yonder Mountain String Band mandolinist Jeff Austin. As a teenager he listened to Rush and Iron Maiden for the bass parts, then played in his school’s orchestras and bands and went deep into jazz, from John Coltrane’s Crescent to the Oscar Peterson Trio’s Very Tall, while covering the Grateful Dead, the Band and the Allman Brothers in a group called the Mighty Pranksters. He studied classical music at the University of Illinois, where bluegrass took hold of him through records by David Grisman, Tony Rice and Old and in the Way. After graduating he moved to Colorado, where he played in Fireweed with Austin and Dave Johnston and in the Motet, a band that mixed jazz with Afro-Cuban music and funk.

In 2000 he replaced Tye North as Leftover Salmon’s bassist. He is on the band’s live album of 2002 and on its self-titled studio record of 2004, which includes his song “Fayetteville Line,” a remembrance of the banjo player Mark Vann, who had died in 2002. When Noam Pikelny left the band in 2004 the group decided to stop, and Garrison went on tour with Drew Emmitt’s band.

Pikelny, who had played beside him in Leftover Salmon, recommended him to Chris Thile, and Garrison played bass on Thile’s How to Grow a Woman from the Ground (Sugar Hill, 12 September 2006), with Pikelny, Chris Eldridge and Gabe Witcher, an album nominated for a Grammy. The quintet became Punch Brothers, and Garrison was its bassist on Punch (Nonesuch, 2008), built around Thile’s forty-minute, four-movement suite “The Blind Leaving the Blind.” Paul Kowert took his place in November 2008. Garrison later said his time in Punch Brothers did more than anything else to set him studying how jazz and folk music meet.

Leftover Salmon came back in 2007, and Garrison has stayed through every album since, among them Aquatic Hitchhiker (2012), High Country (2014), Something Higher (2018), Brand New Good Old Days (Compass, 2021), which he produced, Grass Roots (2023) and Let’s Party About It (2025). The band was named to the Colorado Music Hall of Fame’s class of 2021.

His jazz work grew alongside the band. While working on a doctorate in jazz at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which looked at where jazz meets bluegrass, country and folk, he started the Improvised Roots Series at the Denver jazz club Dazzle, opening with two nights featuring the trumpeter Ron Miles, the guitarist Bill Frisell and Bryan Sutton. His first album as a leader, Low Lonesome (2011), was recorded live in Denver and Boulder with Miles, John Gunther, Erik Deutsch and Marc Dalio. Sycamore (2020) brought in the clarinetist Don Byron and the trumpeter Shane Endsley. With the guitarist Grant Gordy, the mandolinist Joe K. Walsh and the fiddler Alex Hargreaves, whom he had met on the staff of the Sore Fingers bluegrass camp in England, he made the instrumental album Bluegrass and the Abstract Truth, which reached No. 8 on Billboard’s Bluegrass Albums chart in May 2021. Miles died in March 2022, and about a month later Garrison gathered musicians who had worked with him to record pieces from Miles’s book and new ones written in his memory; the session was released as Ronsongs on 28 March 2025.

Mighty Poplar began as his idea, modeled on the Bluegrass Album Band records of the 1980s, and in 2020 he formed it with Eldridge and Pikelny from Punch Brothers, Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse and Hargreaves. He plays bass and sings harmony with Marlin and Eldridge on its self-titled first album (Free Dirt, 2023), which was one of the nominees for Best Bluegrass Album at the Grammys in February 2024. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, a master’s in bass performance from the University of Northern Colorado and a doctorate in jazz studies from the University of Colorado, and as of 2026 he is on the full-time faculty of CU Denver’s Music and Entertainment Industry Studies department, teaching bass, theory, improvisation and the bluegrass ensemble.