Tony Trischka

He was born in Syracuse in 1949 and grew up in a house full of music: Broadway scores, classical records from Stravinsky to Beethoven, and the folk records his father loved, among them the Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Lead Belly. The Kingston Trio’s “M.T.A.,” which he heard in 1963, turned him to the banjo, and the first thing he played on it was the “Ode to Joy.” As a teenager he made trips to the Newport Folk Festival, and from 1965 to 1971 he played with the Down City Ramblers.

In 1971 he made his recording debut with Country Cooking, a two-banjo band formed in Ithaca with Pete Wernick, on 14 Bluegrass Instrumentals, recorded at Cornell in May and issued by Rounder that October; he and Wernick wrote the liner notes. Moving to New York City in the early 1970s, he fell in with players such as the mandolinist Andy Statman and the fiddler Kenny Kosek, and in 1973 he began a three-year stint with Breakfast Special, whose mix of bluegrass, rock, Hawaiian music and klezmer found an audience beyond the bluegrass world. In those years Rounder issued his first solo albums, Bluegrass Light (1974), which drew on influences from Coltrane and Eric Dolphy to Mahavishnu Orchestra and Van Dyke Parks, and Heartlands (1975), both built on his own compositions, followed by Banjoland (1977). He also wrote the instruction book Melodic Banjo (Oak, 1976).

He was then musical leader for the Broadway show The Robber Bridegroom and toured with it in 1978, the year he also played with the Colorado band Monroe Doctrine. With Peter Rowan and Richard Greene he recorded in Tokyo for Rowan’s Hiroshima Mon Amour and on Bluegrass Album by Rowan, Greene & the Red Hot Pickers (both Better Days, 1979). In 1981 he made Fiddle Tunes for Banjo for Rounder with Bill Keith and his former student Béla Fleck, who had come to him for lessons as a teenager; Trischka soon told him he no longer needed lessons, and the two have played together since, as on Solo Banjo Works (1992).

In the early 1980s he formed Skyline, which played a blend of folk, pop and bluegrass for about nine years and recorded for Flying Fish, including Stranded in the Moonlight (1984) and Skyline Drive (1986), before its final album, Fire of Grace, in 1989. Under his own name in the same years came A Robot Plane Flies Over Arkansas (1983), with Darol Anger, Tony Rice and David Grisman, and Hill Country (1985), recorded in Nashville. He played on Hazel Dickens’s Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People (1980) and Alison Krauss’s first Rounder album, Too Late to Cry (1987), appeared in the film Foxfire, and co-wrote Masters of the 5-String Banjo (Oak, 1988) with Pete Wernick.

The Tennessee Banjo Institute, held every other year from 1988 to 1992, opened his ears to minstrel-era and classic banjo and to the gourd banjos of Scott Didlake, and it led to World Turning (Rounder, 1993), a history of the banjo in his own compositions with guests including Grisman, Van Dyke Parks, Alison Krauss, the Violent Femmes, Peter Buck and Bill Berry of R.E.M., and William Burroughs. It became the basis of his live banjo-history shows. Glory Shone Around: A Christmas Collection (1995) followed, and he recorded Bend (1999) and New Deal (2003) with a jazz-leaning group. From 1993 he was a member of Psychograss, with Darol Anger, Mike Marshall, David Grier and Todd Phillips, and he played banjo with the Wayfaring Strangers on Shifting Sands of Time (2001) and This Train (2003). He also played on Richard Greene’s Wolves A’ Howlin’ and on True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe (Sugar Hill, 1996).

Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular (Rounder, 2007), produced by Trischka, Fleck and Ronnie Freeland, paired him with banjo players from Earl Scruggs and Bill Emerson to Fleck, Noam Pikelny, Alison Brown, Tom Adams, Kenny Ingram and Scott Vestal, with Steve Martin and Tony Rice among the guests. It was IBMA’s Recorded Event and Instrumental Album of the Year, he was named Banjo Player of the Year, and it was nominated at the 50th Grammy Awards. Territory (Smithsonian Folkways, 2008) went back to historical banjo styles. In July 2009 he started an online banjo school with ArtistWorks. He was musical director and co-producer of the PBS documentary Give Me the Banjo (2011), narrated by Steve Martin, produced Martin’s Grammy-nominated Rare Bird Alert (Rounder, 2011), and was named a United States Artists Friends Fellow in 2012. Later albums include Great Big World (Rounder, 2014), with Martin among the guests, Dust on the Needle (2015) and Shall We Hope (Shefa, 2021), a Civil War song cycle with Michael Daves, Maura O’Connell, the Violent Femmes, Guy Davis and John Lithgow.

During the COVID-19 lockdown he received a thumb drive of private recordings of Earl Scruggs jamming with John Hartford at Scruggs’s home in the 1980s and 1990s, more than 200 pieces in all. He transcribed Scruggs’s solos from them and built two albums on that material for Down the Road Records: Earl Jam (7 June 2024), with players including Stuart Duncan, Ronnie McCoury, Darol Anger, Molly Tuttle, Brittany Haas and Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and Earl Jam 2 (2026). The opening track of Earl Jam, the Delmore Brothers’ “Brown’s Ferry Blues” with Billy Strings singing, Béla Fleck on second banjo, Sam Bush, Michael Cleveland and Mark Schatz, was IBMA’s Collaborative Recording of the Year in 2024; the album was nominated for Best Bluegrass Album at the 67th Grammy Awards, and Neil V. Rosenberg’s notes for it won IBMA’s liner notes award in 2025.