WTTW channel 11 in Chicago recently aired a brief (7:30 in length) news story about Noam Pikelny of Punch Brothers. The piece ran as part of their Chicago Tonight programing.

The piece is essentially a short biographical work about Noam. It begins with Noam as a young child, his first experiences with the banjo, his first banjo teacher is briefly interviewed, and follows his career through the latest recording by Punch Brothers.

Chris Thile is interviewed as well and my favorite line from the news piece is uttered by Chris in regards to his writing of The Blind Leaving The Blind knowing that Noam was the banjo player he intended to perform the piece.

I didn’t really have to take what I perceived as the limits of the banjo into consideration.

I’ve embedded their video piece here on The Bluegrass Blog for easy viewing.

Today (2/26) marks the widely-anticipated release of Punch, the debut recording of Chris Thile’s touring band, Punch Brothers. Of course he recorded once before with this same unit on his How To Grow A Woman From The Ground CD, but they were then known as How To Grow A Band.

With Punch, the band has a new name, a new label (Nonesuch) and a new raison d’être, to wit, Chris’ lengthy composition in four movements, The Blind Leaving The Blind, which forms the major portion of this new project.

We’ve written a good bit about this project on The Bluegrass Blog, including Brance’s recent three part interview with both Chris Thile and guitarist Chris Eldridge. Today, we celebrate the release of Punch in an interview with banjoist Noam Pikelny. Noam talks some more about the recording process and about performing this challenging material live.

You can hear two full pieces from Punch on the Nonesuch web site, audio samples from all 8 tracks on iTunes, and extended selections from each of the four movements of The Blind Leaving The Blind on Thile’s MySpace page. Chris and the Brothers will also be appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Friday (2/29).

Here’s Noam on recording this CD…

We recorded at Legacy studio A509 in Manhattan. Our producer Steve Epstein suggested the room for the project. Once he signed on to the project he felt very strongly about having us in that room. And looking back on it all, I can see why. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s quite large, but has amazing natural reverb and is a big part of the overall sound of Punch.We sat in a horse shoe type of shape, with [fiddler] Gabe [Wichter] and I opposite Critter [Chris Eldridge] and Thile, with [bassist] Greg [Garrison]at the bass of the “U”. We used no headphones and relied mainly on a 3 microphone tree about 10 feet above us. There were spot mics on each vocal and instrument that were used for balancing out the mix.

We recorded for about 5-6 days, from noon to 8 pm. We did multiple takes of everything on the record, but no overdubs. We played everything live in the room with no headphones. Typically we’d play a movement 5 or 6 times until Steve and the rest of us were confident we had everything we needed. At times we’d isolate certain sections and do several takes of them. (more…)

After teaching at Sore Fingers Week in England earlier this month, Rob Ickes, Noam Pikelny and Casey Driessen did some touring in the UK as The Nashville Acoustic All Stars.

The folks at ukbluegrass.com posted yesterday with links to three video clips on YouTube from a performance of theirs in Scotland. They were shot with two cameras, and offer a nice look at these fine musicians up close in a loose, jam-like setting.

The songs from this show (at the Polish Club, Kirkcaldy, Fife) are Sally In The Garden, Aint’ Gonna Work Tomorrow and Foggy Mountain Rock.

There is one other clip from this tour on YouTube, shot at the Ex-Servicemans Club, Helsby in England. This one has the boys playing a rip-roarin’ version of Groundspeed - which also includes a couple of choice quips from the guys at the start.

UKBluegrass.com has just published a lengthly post in which they interview banjo player Noam Pikelny. Noam was in the UK teaching at the Sore Fingers bluegrass instructional camp when they conducted the interview.

If you are interested in Noam’s participation with Chris Thile and the newly unveiled Tensions Mountain Boys, then this article is a must read. It contains the back story behind the band, the name, and the How To Grow A Band metamorphosis into the Tensions Mountain Boys.

It’s a great interview and well written. I encourage you to read it.

The summer of 2007 will feature a brief reunion of the popular jamgrass group Leftover Salmon, who disbanded after the 2004 season. They will perform at two larger festivals in July, The High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy, CA and the All Good Music Festival in Masontown, WV.

Featured on these reunion shows will be Drew Emmitt, Vince Herman, Jeff Sipe, Greg Garrison, Bill McKay and Noam Pikelny.

There are no other dates for this summer currently announced, but the band has a form on their web site where fans can sign up for email updates.

We’ve posted a few times recently about the upcoming Rounder project from banjoist Tony Trischka, Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular. It features Tony paired in the studio with some of the most celebrated banjo players alive, including Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck, Bill Emerson, Tom Adams, Noam Pikelny, Scott Vestal, Kenny Ingram and even comedian-cum-banjo picker Steve Martin.

The CD is due for release on January 23, and Tony has been out touring this month in support of the project. Last Friday (1/12), Tony brought his double banjo show to The Kennedy Center Millenium Stage in Washington, DC. Noam Pikelny supplied the second banjo, and they were supported by Michael Daves on guitar, Brittany Haas on fiddle and Skip Ward on bass.

The concert was recorded, and the video can be viewed online at the Kennedy Center web site. It’s an hour long video (in Real Media format), so save some time when you can linger over the performance.

There are actually three Trischka shows which can be viewed on The Kennedy Center site - the Trischka/Pikelny concert from last week, plus shows from 2001 and 2004.

On another Noam-related note: we found a piece on the John Cowan Band site that included a Detroit Free Press obituary for Noam’s grandfather, Nate Shapiro, who passed away earlier this month. Mr. Shapiro was a prominent and admirable member of the Detroit community, and his life is recounted in brief in the obituary.

Our condolences go to Noam and his family as they mark Mr. Shapiro’s passing.

Our friends at UKBluegrass.com just let us know that they have posted to their blog an interview with John and Moira Wirtz who organize Europe’s largest bluegrass/old time music camp, Sore Fingers. The camp has been running each year since 1996 and is scheduled for April 9-14, 2007 this year.

The interview is quite readable and contains a lot of background historical information about the camp. They also talk about the goals they have for the camp this year and in the future. And in describing the camp’s atmosphere, they bring up one of my favorite things about this music, the accessibility of the players.

The instructors for this year’s camp are some of the best players bluegrass music has to offer including, Janet Beazley, Noam Pikelny, Casey Driessen, Rob Ickes, John Lowell, Chris Stuart, and others.

“The event is up there with any other camp,” says John, “but it’s uniquely British in the social aspect and the humour.” Most of the tutors get stuck in to the socialising without difficulty, mingling in the bar and taking part in the sessions. “I love seeing the kids jamming with the tutors,” says John.

What a great opportunity for these youngsters.

If you missed the last interview UKBluegrass.com posted you might want to check it out as well. It’s a good interview with current IBMA Board Chairman, Greg Cahill. You’ll find that interview here.

We posted last week about the upcoming project from Tony Trischka, Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, which will feature Tony in duets with Earl Scruggs, Béla Fleck, Steve Martin, Alison Brown, Tom Adams, Bill Emerson, Kenny Ingram, Scott Vestal and Noam Pikelny. It is due for a January 23, 2007 release on Rounder.

At the time, we noted that no audio samples were available online, but Rounder now has snippets from all 14 tracks on their site, in both RealAudio and Windows Media formats.

I had a chance to discuss this new CD recently with Tony, and was especially interested in how he decided on a twin banjo project.

“After doing two electric band albums, I’d approached Rounder about doing a bluegrass album, a la my Hill Country record from the early ’80s. Ken Irwin thought it might be more fun, and have more of a commercial hook if I turned it into a double banjo album. And that’s what it became.

All the duets were recorded live except for the one with Scott Vestal. I was going to have JD on one cut and at the last minute something came up and he wasn’t able to make it, so I cut the track by myself as part of the Sam Bush sessions. After a week or so I decided to have Scott add the double part. He did it at his home studio and when he emailed it back to me, I flipped. His playing is ridiculously amazing.”

Tony told me that the project was exciting, both putting it together, and recording with so many of his favorite players, but that it took a long time to complete, given the difficulty of scheduling nine different banjo players. Still, he says the whole thing was a thrill, and well worth the trouble in the end.

“The biggest treat was getting to record with Earl. It was a huge honor and more than that, a gift. Sitting across from him while running it down I was impressed with the power of his right hand. I’ve heard him live on various occasions, but hearing him from three feet away is another story.”

Another highlight for Tony was working with Steve Martin. (more…)

I meant to post about this yesterday as John did, but got caught up working on a Ron Stewart DVD, more about that soon. Here are my thoughts about Saturday’s performance.

I was as impressed as John was with the concert. The technical mastery these guys display is truly astonishing. And what’s more, the music is thoroughly enjoyable. Chris has a knack for selecting great songs a la, Wayside (Back In Time), Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, O Santo De Polvora, not to mention the classic Brakeman’s Blues. His own compositions are equally impressive in their own right.

In all fairness, Track 12, Heart In A Cage, has been a topic of discussion amongst bluegrass fans both on this site and elsewhere due to the profanity contained in the opening line of the first verse. The song is a rock tune that, as Chris said from stage, makes a great bluegrass song. But take heed, he does perform the song with offending word included. Chris did warn the audience beforehand that it was coming, giving ample time for a person to decide to use the restroom or get a drink of water during the tune. (more…)

Brance and I had the opportunity this past weekend to catch Chris Thile and his How To Grow A Band show in concert at The Jefferson Center in Roanoke, VA. As the band name implies, they are on tour in support of Chris’ new release, How To Grow A Woman From The Ground.

Band members were the same as the CD: Thile on mandolin, Noam Pikelny on banjo, Chris Eldridge on guitar, Gabe Witcher on fiddle and Greg Garrison on bass. Chris handled the great bulk of the lead singing, and all band members sang harmony parts.

Over the course of the program, they performed each of the 14 songs from the CD, along with a few of Chris’ from other projects, and ones chosen to highlight the various members of the band. For instance, Gabe Witcher sang his bluesy version of The Band’s Ophelia, and Chris Eldridge offered up a grassy Don’t Give Your Heart To A Rambler.

The primary focus, of course, was on Thile and the songs from the new release. In addition to being perhaps the most technically gifted mandolinist to ever play American string music, he is also a natural entertainer and a gutsy vocalist. And by gutsy, I don’t mean a gritty, smoky-voiced singer - I mean an artist willing to take tremendous risks in styling the vocals for a song.

It takes a lot of confidence, and a sense of adventure to hop back and forth between natural and falsetto voice with such abandon, and Thile seems to have what it takes. It also takes an ability to find humor in the effort, and that part of watching this stellar young artist is as enjoyable for me as are his striking feats of fretboard acrobatics.

The song choices, and the arrangements were adventurous as well. Some of our readers could get stuck on the classic, “but that’s not bluegrass” mantra, and it would be a great shame if they did. (more…)

Surely a highlight of IBMA week for me so far was the showcase performance last night from Chris Thile & How To Grow A Band. (more photos here)

Regular readers of The Bluegrass Blog will have noted that I have expressed great enthusiasm for the new Thile CD, How To Grow A Woman From The Ground, and for Thile’s and banjo player Noam Pikelny’s musicianship demonstrated therein.

The showcase featured the same group of players who recorded the new project: Chris Eldridge on guitar, Noam Pikelny on banjo, Gabe Witcher on fiddle, Greg Garrison on bass, and Thile on mandolin and lead vocals. Their short set was wholly drawn from the CD as well, and the material came across as even more polished and authoritatively performed than on the recording. That shouldn’t be - and wasn’t - a surpise, since they spent only a few days preparing to record, and have been out on a mini-tour in support of the CD of late.

They opened with the bluesy, a capella If The Sea Was Whiskey, and then right into the instrumental tour de force, Watch ‘at Breakdown.

I watched the show with Barry Crabtree, banjo player with Wildfire, and we marveled together at the sheer joy of seeing these talented musicians on stage. We both were already familiar with the material from the CD, and had in common a tremendous admiration for the players.

He and I shared a humorous exchange that captured well the degree to which Thile and his crew stand above their peers. (more…)

Banjo player Noam Pikelny is a mighty busy guy this fall. It seems like any time you investigate what is happening in the world of progressive bluegrass and acoustic music, his name pops up.

Until recently, Noam was a member of The John Cowan Band, a position he held for a little over two years, and left just this past weekend. Tony Wray is taking that gig.

Noam is prominently featured on the new Chris Thile CD, How To Grow A Woman From The Ground, and is currently touring with Thile and the other players on that recording. They are being billed now as How To Grow A Band, but will shortly fold that into The Tension Mountain Boys, as Chris reported in his recent GrassCast interview. (Chris’ MySpace page indicates that the new band will be introduced in a Carnegie Hall concert on March 17, 2007.)

Look for Noam to also sub for Greg Liszt on two tours with Crooked Still - on the west coast in early October, and on the east in early November. Greg had done shows with Bruce Springsteen earlier this year, and will be out with him again in the fall.

You can sample Noam’s music on his web site, or his MySpace page.

David Royko has a nice feature in today’s edition of The Chicago Tribune on Noam Pikelny, Chicago native and current banjo man with The John Cowan Band. Noam is also a prominent part of the upcoming Chris Thile CD, How To Grow A Woman From The Ground, and Thile is quoted repeatedly in the article about his admiration for Noam’s musicianship.

“I get this feeling from Noam that I envy,” Thile says, “utterly remarkable. A lot of times, that diligence comes in the absence of talent–people that are that diligent because they have to be, where Noam is one of those very rare musicians that is that diligent in addition to being ludicrously talented.”

Current banjo pickers - and fans of the five string - know well the history of the instrument’s spikes in popularity, fueled in the 1950s -1970s by Earl Scruggs and the tremendous popularity of Flatt & Scruggs, and again in the present day by Béla Fleck and his making the banjo conspicuous to music fans and consumers outside of bluegrass.

Still in his mid-20s, Pikelny falls squarely within the realm of young players who challenge the notion, once more widespread, that “you can’t do that on the banjo.” He has more than just a prodigious command of the technical aspects of manipulating his instrument, however, as he both composes and improvises with a flair and creative spirit that marks him as a true artist.

Cowan is quoted in Royko’s piece as stating that he sees in Noam the sort of passion he saw in Fleck when they were working together as members of New Grass Revival in the 1980s.

“He’s doing this thing that Bela used to do,” says Cowan about Pikelny, “which is, he’s playing his banjo from the time he gets up ’til the time he goes to bed, just non-stop.”

Noam gives a lot of credit for his development as a young banjo player to another Chicago banjo fixture, Special Consensus’ Greg Cahill.

Cahill’s influence “was immeasurable in my progression as a musician,” says Pikelny about his former teacher. “I really enjoy finding a way to play something on the banjo that hasn’t been played before, or an arrangement that hasn’t been played before, and I think Greg was the guy who sparked that for me.”

The full article is available on The Chicago Tribune web site, but a fairly cumbersome registration process is required to get to it online. It only takes a few moments to navigate, and will be worth the effort for admirers of Pikelny’s tremendous talent as a banjo player, or those interested in learning more about him and his music.

You can also visit the offical Noam Pikelny site, or his MySpace page, to learn more, and hear audio clips from his In The Maze CD.