Kenny Kosek

He grew up in the Bronx, where a friend, Andy May, drew him into traditional music. As a teenager he climbed to the fifth-floor walk-up of a collector of old fiddle-band 78s, Loy Beaver, and taped the records on his father’s reel-to-reel machine. His first recording date, at about eighteen, was with the Yankee Carpetbaggers, a straight fiddle-and-banjo band with the banjo player John Burke.

He met Tony Trischka around 1971 and that year played fiddle on Country Cooking’s first album, 14 Bluegrass Instrumentals (Rounder 0006), recorded at Cornell University with Pete Wernick and Trischka on banjos, Russ Barenberg on guitar, Harry Gilmore on mandolin and John Miller on bass. The band then backed Frank Wakefield on his Rounder album of 1972, and on Barrel of Fun (Rounder 0033, March 1974), with Andy Statman on mandolin, Kosek played fiddle and piano and contributed his own “U.S. 40.” He also played on Country Cooking with the Fiction Brothers (Flying Fish, 1976), recorded in 1975 at Celebration Sound in Enfield, New York, and on Trischka’s Rounder albums Bluegrass Light (1974) and Heartlands (1975). In the same years he worked in David Bromberg’s band, recording with him on Demon in Disguise (1972), and played sessions for Loudon Wainwright III, Steve Goodman and Doug Sahm.

In Breakfast Special, a New York band, Kosek played alongside Trischka on banjo and pedal steel, Statman on mandolin and saxophone, Stacy Phillips on Dobro and trumpet, Jim Tolles on guitar, Roger Mason on bass and Richard Crooks on drums. Phillips had first played with Kosek after Kosek heard him at a party and invited him to perform. The band’s one album, Breakfast Special (Rounder 3012), made in Baltimore and Boston and released in 1977, has Kosek on fiddle and lead vocals, and he wrote its liner notes. He also played fiddle and piano on Bill Keith’s Something Auld, Something Newgrass, Something Borrowed, Something Bluegrass (Rounder, 1976), cut with Jim Rooney, Tony Rice, David Grisman, Vassar Clements and Tom Gray, and fiddle on Keith’s French album with the singer Jim Collier (Hexagone, 1979). He was on Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard’s Rounder album of 1976, and with Phillips he wrote Bluegrass Fiddle Styles for Oak Publications.

His first album under his own name was Hasty Lonesome (Rounder 0127, 1980), shared with the fiddler Matt Glaser, which opens with three long pieces the two wrote together and closes with a medley of songs from Marx Brothers films. Later Rounder records with him include Statman’s Flatbush Waltz (1980), Trischka, Keith and Béla Fleck’s Fiddle Tunes for Banjo (1981) and Keith’s Banjoistics (1984). Through the 1980s his studio work took in Leonard Cohen’s Various Positions (1984), James Taylor’s That’s Why I’m Here (1985) and Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels (1989), and his credits also include John Denver, Willie Nelson, David Byrne and Chaka Khan. He played in the Broadway musicals The Robber Bridegroom, Foxfire and Big River, and with the New Blue Velvet Band.

In 1987 he joined the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, with Garcia, David Nelson, Sandy Rothman, John Kahn and David Kemper. In October that year the band opened each of the Jerry Garcia Band’s shows at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway, and its fall concerts produced Almost Acoustic (Grateful Dead Records, 1988) and, much later, Ragged But Right (2010). His solo album Angelwood (Rounder) followed in November 1996.

From the end of 2001 he played fiddle with the clarinetist Margot Leverett in Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys, a band that melds klezmer and bluegrass. He has also composed for film and television, written comedy and taught; he was among the fiddle instructors at the Augusta Heritage Center’s summer workshops in 2026. In September 2024 he released Twisted Sage on Shefa, mostly fiddle-and-banjo duets with Trischka, with Statman, the banjo player Marty Cutler and the guitarist Mark Cosgrove on some tracks. The album mixes old fiddle tunes such as “Lady Hamilton” and “Forked Deer” with a klezmer piece learned from Statman and some of his own compositions; it began when Peter Rowan, after a set they had played together, suggested he record the pieces he and Trischka had played privately for years.