Mark Schatz

He was born on 23 April 1955 into a musical family. He began formal training on the cello at ten and later switched to string bass, and his first performance, in 1971, was on electric bass in a high school rock band. A love of folk and traditional music led him to the guitar and mandolin. Between 1973 and 1978 he earned a degree in music theory and composition at Haverford College and spent a year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston; in those years he also took up old-time banjo, went to his first old-time fiddlers’ convention at Fiddler’s Grove in North Carolina, and began to clog, first through his work with the Boston folk dance group Mandala in 1976.

In 1977 he met Béla Fleck in Boston, the start of a long partnership. They played together in Tasty Licks and Spectrum, and Schatz played bass on Fleck’s Crossing the Tracks (Rounder, 1979). In 1983 he moved to Nashville and played country music on electric bass, then returned to acoustic music in 1985 when he joined the Tony Rice Unit. He is heard on Rice’s Me & My Guitar (Rounder, 1986) and Native American (Rounder, 1988), and on Fleck’s Drive (Rounder, 1988), recorded in Nashville in December 1987 with Rice, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan.

From 1990 to 1998 he was one of Tim O’Brien’s O’Boys, playing bass and, in the old-time numbers O’Brien always included, banjo; on O’Brien’s Red on Blonde (1996) he is credited on banjo, bass and vocals. Both of his IBMA Bass Player of the Year awards came in those years. The banjo work with O’Brien and his association with the dance troupe then called the Fiddle Puppet Dancers, later the Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, which began in 1989 when he met its founding director, Eileen Carson, led to his first solo album, Brand New Old Tyme Way (Rounder, 1995), produced by Fleck and built on his clawhammer banjo and his own compositions.

Between 1998 and 2002 he became Footworks’ musical director and road manager, producing two CDs and two videos for the troupe, and freelanced with Fleck, Laurie Lewis, John Hartford and Linda Ronstadt. He played bass on Fleck’s The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2 (1999), formed his own touring group, Mark Schatz and Friends, and recorded with it a second Rounder album, Steppin’ in the Boiler House.

From 2003 to 2007 he played bass with Nickel Creek, and he rejoined the trio for its 2014 reunion tour; he plays on Why Should the Fire Die? (2005) and A Dotted Line (2014). From 2008 to 2016 he was a member of the Claire Lynch Band, adding hambone, clawhammer banjo and clogging to its shows; Lynch’s North by South was nominated for a Grammy in 2017, and he also played on Sarah Jarosz’s Grammy-winning Undercurrent. In 2017 and 2018 he taught at camps in the United States, Canada and Britain, among them Common Ground on the Hill in Westminster, Maryland, toured with the songwriters Jonathan Byrd and Corin Raymond, and produced Jeff Scroggins & Colorado’s Over the Line.

In November 2019 he launched a one-man show, Mark Schatz – The Solo Concert, combining bass, banjo, singing, stories and dance. In January 2020 he began a duo with Bryan McDowell, his former bandmate in Claire Lynch’s group; their album Grit & Polish, recorded largely live in Schatz’s basement studio, reached No. 1 on the Folk DJ chart in 2021. He also played on several tracks of Fleck’s My Bluegrass Heart (2021) and on most of the tour dates that followed, including the Ryman Auditorium and Carnegie Hall; the album won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2022 and was the IBMA’s Album of the Year.