Talking Banjo with Noam Pikelny, Kristin Scott Benson and Ned Luberecki

In one of the early sequences of the celebrated new grateful dead documentary Long Strange Trip from Amazon studios, much is made of Jerry Garcia’s first real girlfriend. She’s feisty and adorable and ablaze with love for art and the bohemian life. She’s planning to make a life with Jerry until! He picks up the banjo and starts practicing hours a day. And she leaves him.

Man I wish Jerry could see the roots music scene today. Banjo has been, to use a term that’s ubiquitous now in politics, normalized. It's’ still essential to bluegrass and its progressive manifestations of course, but it’s also reconnected to its folky traditions, strummed lustily if simplistically in the music of Mumford and Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show. And in recent years, the banjo wended its way back into pop country and into indie rock as a texture on records by Modest Mouse, Sufjan Stephens and others.

The most visible and in-demand banjo player of this decade is and has been Noam Pikelny of the band Punch Brothers. The Chicago area native discovered the instrument and bluegrass culture before he was ten years old. In 2010, he became the inaugural recipient of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass.

In this hour Craig talks banjo with Pikelny as well as leading players Ned Luberecki and Kristin Scott Benson.