Kyle Hollingsworth

He was born on 2 March 1968 in Maryland and studied music at Towson State University, concentrating on jazz piano. While at college he played in Black Friday, a psychedelic rock band from Baltimore.

The String Cheese Incident had begun in Crested Butte, Colorado, in 1993 as a string band of Bill Nershi, Michael Kang, Michael Travis and Keith Moseley. In 1996 its members quit their day jobs and moved to Boulder, and wanting to widen their sound beyond strings, they invited Hollingsworth to join. He was not on their first album, Born on the Wrong Planet, and was first heard with them on A String Cheese Incident, a live album recorded at the Fox Theatre in Boulder. He played on ’Round the Wheel (1998), Untying the Not (2003), One Step Closer (2005) and A Song in My Head (2014), which was produced by Jerry Harrison, and through the band’s heavy touring of 1998–2001, which ran to more than 500 shows and included Woodstock ’99. Some of his songs for the band were written with Robert Hunter.

His first solo album, Never Odd or Even (2004), featured the saxophonist Joshua Redman and the pedal steel player Robert Randolph. It was followed by Then There’s Now (2009), Speed of Life (2014) and 50 (2018). Outside the String Cheese Incident he toured with the Mickey Hart Band in 2007, alongside Steve Kimock and George Porter Jr., played second keyboards with the Fiery Furnaces in the spring of 2008, and has toured as 3 Foot Icon with Speech of Arrested Development and Chief Xcel of Blackalicious.