Max Schwartz
Max Schwartz is a bassist and composer from Berkeley, California, who grew up playing bluegrass in a family band, trained in jazz as a teenager, and played bass in Laurie Lewis’s band, the Right Hands, and with the mandolinist John Reischman, including on Reischman’s 2021 album New Time & Old Acoustic.
He picked up his first stringed instrument, a guitar, at the Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival in Grass Valley, California, when he was in first grade. His father and brother were learning instruments at the same time, and the family soon had its own bluegrass band, with which he gigged and recorded; at eleven he was playing “California Cottonfields” with a bluegrass band called OMGG. As a teenager he also played bass in jazz ensembles, among them the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars, the California All-State Jazz Band and the Grammy Jazz Combo.
In the summer of 2015, at seventeen, he toured Europe for two weeks with the Jazzschool Studio Band of the California Jazz Conservatory, playing festivals in France, Switzerland and Italy, and then studied in Berklee’s Five-Week Summer Performance Program in Boston. Straight afterward Laurie Lewis invited him to play with the Right Hands at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco. He was the band’s bassist in August 2018, when it appeared on Mountain Stage with Tom Rozum on mandolin, Tatiana Hargreaves on fiddle and Justin Hiltner on banjo.
He played bass on John Reischman’s instrumental album New Time & Old Acoustic (Corvus, 2021), including the new recording of Reischman’s “Salt Spring” with Molly Tuttle on guitar, Alex Hargreaves on fiddle and Allison de Groot on banjo. In July 2024 he played bass with John Reischman & Old Acoustic, alongside the fiddler Trent Freeman and the guitarist Bryan McDowell, on the main stage at RockyGrass in Lyons, Colorado.
