Jeff Picker

He was raised in Portland, Oregon, and Dallas, Texas. In seventh grade, at an arts magnet school in Beaverton, Oregon, the band director Thara Memory introduced him to jazz, and by fifteen or sixteen he was playing professionally around Portland, including standards gigs with the pianist Randy Porter and dates around the Northwest with the Ghanaian drummer Obo Addy. At eighteen he was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts in Jazz by the U.S. Department of Education, and he moved to New York on a full-tuition scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music, finishing his studies at Columbia University.

In New York he discovered string-band music, and from the age of twenty-three his main work was in that world. He spent several years on the road with the singer and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Jarosz, whom he later married, and worked with Mark O’Connor among others. In December 2017, after eleven years based in New York, he replaced Scott Mulvahill as the bassist in Kentucky Thunder.

Moving to Nashville, he freelanced in the studios. He played bass on the mandolinist Jacob Jolliff’s Instrumentals Vol. 1 (2018), with Alex Hargreaves and Stash Wyslouch; on the guitarist Jake Workman’s Landmark (2019), with Russ Carson, Sierra Hull and Stuart Duncan; and on Bronwyn Keith-Hynes’s Fiddler’s Pastime (Sugar Petunia, 2020), with Jake Stargel, Wes Corbett and Harry Clark, and her I Built a World (2024), with Bryan Sutton, Dominick Leslie and Jerry Douglas.

His first album, With the Bass in Mind, came out on 9 October 2020: original instrumentals he wrote, arranged and produced, played with Mike Barnett on fiddle, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, Jake Stargel on guitar and Cory Walker on banjo on two tracks, and engineered by Brent Truitt. Liquid Architecture followed on 21 October 2022, with the fiddler Billy Contreras and the alto saxophonist Eddie Barbash as its main lead voices.

He had subbed with East Nash Grass at the bar in East Nashville where the band played before joining it formally. With James Kee, Cory Walker, Harry Clark, Maddie Denton and Gaven Largent he played on the band’s Mountain Fever singles from September 2022 and on Last Chance to Win, released on 18 August 2023. That year he also toured with Nickel Creek on their return to the road and was nominated for Instrumentalist of the Year by the Americana Music Association.