Mike Bont
Michael Arlen Bont is the banjo player of Greensky Bluegrass, the string band he started in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2000 with guitarist Dave Bruzza and mandolinist Paul Hoffman. A guitarist who came to the banjo through Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, he has played banjo and sung with the band from its first album, Less Than Supper (2004), on.
Bont started playing guitar at about ten and was in punk bands in high school. After a friend took him to a Grateful Dead concert at the Palace, he became a Deadhead. Learning that Garcia also played the banjo led him to Old & in the Way and the Garcia/Grisman album Shady Grove, and from there back to Flatt & Scruggs, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and J.D. Crowe. In college he thought about becoming a jazz guitarist. When he was about to turn twenty-one, his mother gave him a banjo for his birthday. Soon afterwards he heard a bluegrass band at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo and understood what the instrument could do. He was working mornings as a sous chef, and for the better part of a year he practiced every afternoon and evening with an Earl Scruggs instruction book, until one morning on his front porch he could play “Little Cabin Home on the Hill” the way Scruggs did.
He had known Bruzza, then a drummer around Kalamazoo, since 1997. Bruzza took up the guitar at about the same time, and the two learned bluegrass from records and from the Lonesome Moonlight Trio, which played Wednesday and Saturday mornings at the Cooper Cafe outside town. They worked open-mic nights as a duo, with Bruzza singing, until Hoffman asked to join them. Bont gave him Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs recordings to learn the mandolin chop from. The three played their first show as Greensky Bluegrass on Halloween night 2000.
On Less Than Supper (Big Blue Zoo, May 2004) Bont wrote the instrumental “Bont’s Breakdown” and, with Hoffman, the title song and “Through the Trees.” The band grew to a quintet with bassist Mike Devol in 2004 and dobro player Anders Beck in 2007. Bont is credited on banjo for Tuesday Letter (2006) and on banjo, trumpet and vocals for Five Interstates (2008). He plays banjo and sings on If Sorrows Swim (2014), Shouted, Written Down & Quoted (2016) and Stress Dreams (2022).
Bont has said that he finds writing songs hard and puts his ideas into the banjo instead. The band has no drummer, so he often uses the banjo like a snare drum, and he looks for melodies that sit outside the instrument’s usual job in a bluegrass band. When Greensky takes on a song from outside bluegrass, such as Billy Joel’s “Big Shot,” he listens for a piano part or a melody in the original that could become a banjo part. He has said he most enjoys taking solos and singing harmony. He also says he is usually the one in the band who knows all the words when it learns a cover.
He stayed in Kalamazoo after his bandmates moved away and was still the only member living there in 2021. By October 2025 he too had left Michigan. During the pandemic shutdown he worked on the technical side of his playing and took a college-level course in classical guitar, which he keeps up on the side; in January 2023 he said he had just finished memorizing a Bach piece. He was with the band when it marked its twenty-fifth anniversary with homecoming concerts in Kalamazoo over Halloween weekend 2025.
