Tony Trischka
Down The Road Records is proud to introduce their first album, featuring banjo virtuoso Tony Trischka.
Several years ago, Tony was given cassette tapes of jams of Earl Scruggs with John Hartford. He was blown away by Earl's banjo solos. During COVID, started transcribing and learning his favorites. Then he put together a band to present them in a show at Joe's Pub in New York City.
Down The Road’s Ken Irwin says: “We heard a recording of that show and spoke to Tony about doing an album. Months later, we have an album recorded with guest vocalists Del McCoury, Gibson Brothers, Billy Strings, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Dudley Connell, Molly Tuttle, Bruce Molsky.” And others...
Tony Trischka playing Earl Scruggs with today’s leading bluegrass and old-time stars – an aural treat!
Master of five-string banjo bluegrass and beyond, Tony is a bold innovator who’s drawn from a panoply of modern music genres to synthesize an eclectic approach that ranges far beyond his bluegrass roots. The Wall Street Journal has called him “Father of banjo fusion.”
Not only is he a concert soloist and a band leader, he’s a teacher -- most famous of his many pupils is Bela Fleck.
As part of his banjo pedagogy Tony mastered the art of tablature. Earl Scruggs’s bluegrass banjo music was originally published on records. Striving to play like Earl, banjoists struggled to understand how he did it. By the seventies Tony was showing bluegrass banjo pickers how to pick like Earl using “tabs” -- tablature transcriptions.
With tabs, sound recordings of the 20th C have taken the role played by the sheet music of the great composers of earlier eras. Ultimately Tony Trischka’s recreations of Scruggs’s jam solos reflect the same kind of woodshedding that Glen Gould did with Bach’s published scores.
