Michael Kang
Michael Kang is a mandolin player and violinist who was one of the four founders of the String Cheese Incident, the Colorado jam band that began in Crested Butte in 1993 as a bluegrass and covers band. He plays acoustic and electric mandolin, violin and electric guitar with the band.
He started on the violin, playing classical music, and in high school took in rock, from Neil Young and the Grateful Dead to Crosby, Stills & Nash and Led Zeppelin. On a trip to Alaska in 1990 he discovered bluegrass and took up the mandolin. After a summer in Alaska he moved to Crested Butte, where that winter he met the bassist Keith Moseley, the guitarist Bill Nershi and the hand drummer Michael Travis. Nershi, looking for an après-ski gig, was told about “this guy, Mike Kang, who plays the fiddle.” The two played happy-hour shows that earned them ski passes for playing in the lift line, and the four first played together in December 1993 at the Arts Center in Crested Butte.
Kang helped bring the keyboard player Kyle Hollingsworth into the band. Hollingsworth met him through Dave Watts of the Motet, and Kang first asked Hollingsworth’s band to open for String Cheese, then asked him to join. In the early 2000s Kang and Travis were drawn to electronic music, which they began bringing into the band’s sound, and for a time Kang played bass sounds from a computer on stage. Away from the band he recorded the album Head West (2000) with the group Comotion, with Darol Anger, Mike Marshall and Paul McCandless among the players, and he played with the African-rooted band Panjea. On 7 December 2013, at a Rex Foundation benefit at the Fillmore in San Francisco, he played violin in Keller Williams’s Grateful Grass, with Jeff Austin on mandolin and his bandmate Keith Moseley on bass, bluegrass versions of Grateful Dead songs released in 2014 as Dos.
The String Cheese Incident stopped touring after August 2007 and came back in 2009, and Kang has been part of every lineup since its founding.
