Join world-renowned Banjo player & educator Tony Trischka, for an exciting workshop at The Front Porch. This workshop will be a deep dive into the playing of Earl Scruggs. Tony will be sharing a small sampling of previously un-heard tunes from jam sessions that Earl did with John Hartford in the late 1990s. Earlish tidibits will be covered, like his focus on syncopation, and playing the melody exactly. Tablature will be provided and attendees are welcome to to audio or video recording. This workshop is geared towards intermediate/advanced students, but beginners are welcome to join. You must bring your own banjo, and a notebook.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Tony Trischka, known as “the father of modern bluegrass”, was born in Syracuse, N.Y, and raised in a home filled with music. There were Broadway scores and a sweeping range of classical music, from Stravinsky to Beethoven. (The first thing Trischka learned to play on the banjo, in fact, was the Ninth Symphony.) The wide- open American vistas of Aaron Copland had an especially potent spiritual and visceral impact on him, as did the folk music his left-leaning father held dear. The Almanac Singers, the solo work of its founding members Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly’s children’s LP were in constant rotation. Trischka fell in love with the banjo by way of the Kingston Trio’s 1963 recording of “M.T.A.,” and was able to experience the New York-centered folk revival by trekking to the Newport Folk Festival in the early to mid-’60s. He moved to the city in the early ’70s and hit the ground running, settling in among a peer group of extraordinary musicians who saw American roots music as a thriving, living language that could be expanded and combined with other influences and sensibilities. Alongside other young masters like mandolinist Andy Statman and fiddler Kenny Kosek, in such units as Country Cooking and Breakfast Special, Trischka found his purpose. Jaw-dropping musicianship was certainly encouraged, as was comic and literary irreverence, earnest songwriting and a record shop’s worth of touchstones beyond bluegrass, from the avant-garde to fusion and R&B.
That’s essentially the m.o. that defines Trischka’s landmark solo debut, Bluegrass Light, released on the Rounder label in 1974. “For the first album,” Trischka recalls, “I was just doing what I loved, music I was hearing.” That’s a characteristically understated way to describe his synthesis of a vast swath of the 20th century’s most interesting sounds: bluegrass staples, Van Dyke Parks’ orchestral psychedelic pop, Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, the heyday jazz-rock fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea, Weather Report and Zappa, and more. Many other milestone albums followed, among them 1983’s A Robot Plane Flies Over Arkansas, which refined the eclecticism of Bluegrass Light and featured such West Coast newgrass royalty as violinist Darol Anger, guitarist Tony Rice and mandolinist David Grisman.

To read more about Tony, please visit https://www.tonytrischka.com/bio