Wes Corbett

His family moved to Bainbridge Island from Albuquerque before he was a year old. He started on piano at about two and a half and took up the banjo in high school, learning from the Seattle musician and teacher Dave Keenan and practicing as much as five hours a day until he graduated. At 14 he met the dulcimer player Simon Chrisman at a concert on the island, and the two kept playing together for years; in 2008 they released Corbett/Chrisman/Tice (Patuxent) with the guitarist Jordan Tice. After a year at the California Institute of the Arts, Corbett moved to Boston for its acoustic music scene, where Chris Pandolfi of the Punch Brothers helped him find his way in.

In August 2011 Berklee hired him as a part-time banjo instructor alongside David Hollender, after Matt Glaser asked him to teach there. He served as professor and grant manager in the school’s banjo program until 2015. In the same years he toured internationally with the Boston string band Joy Kills Sorrow, which appeared on A Prairie Home Companion and Mountain Stage; he was on banjo at the band’s last show, at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge on May 1, 2014. He also played with the Bee Eaters, and has recorded or performed with the Biscuit Burners, the David Grisman Quintet, Crooked Still, Tony Trischka, Darol Anger, Mike Marshall and Alan Munde, among others.

After nearly a decade in Boston he moved to Nashville and toured for several years in the Molly Tuttle Band. In January 2020 Sam Bush hired him to replace Scott Vestal, his banjo player of about 15 years, and Corbett had to learn some 30 songs in his first week. His first solo album, Cascade (Padiddle, December 4, 2020), is made up of his own instrumentals, tracked in five days with Chris Eldridge, Sierra Hull, Casey Campbell, Alex Hargreaves, Simon Chrisman and Paul Kowert.

Drift (Adhyâropa, October 3, 2025) is again his own music, with a larger cast that includes Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, Bryan Sutton, Chris Eldridge, Darol Anger, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Jason Carter, Brittany Haas, Justin Moses and Todd Phillips. “Case of the Mundes” honors Alan Munde, and on “Hartford’s Bend on the Cumberland” he plays a banjo that once belonged to John Hartford, borrowed from Béla Fleck. When the album came out he was still playing in Bush’s band. He also teaches banjo online through Peghead Nation.