SAN DIEGO — Grammy Award-winner Alison Brown’s status as the world’s most unlikely banjo star is as undeniable as her command of the steel-stringed instrument long synonymous with her name.
Her star-studded new instrumental album, “On Banjo,” features fellow banjo champion Steve Martin, the Kronos Quartet, classical guitarist Sharon Isbin, jazz clarinet dynamo Anat Cohen and multi-instrumental bluegrass great Stuart Duncan. He was Brown’s frequent musical partner when they were growing up in Southern California, an era the two salute on the ebullient “Tall Hog at the Trough,” one of the album’s standout cuts.
“I met Stuart at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in La Mesa in 1974, at a monthly meeting of the San Diego Bluegrass Club,” she recalled, speaking from her Nashville, Tennessee-area home. “He was 10 and I was 12. We were probably the youngest players there.”
A Connecticut native, Brown was still in grade school when her family moved to La Jolla.
Already a budding guitarist, Brown had switched from guitar to banjo after being mesmerized by Earl Scruggs’ classic 1949 recording, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” She was entirely undaunted taking up the instrument at a time when banjo players in La Jolla were as rare as bagpipers on the North Pole.
“My parents were supportive,” Brown said. “But this was not something they, or I, ever contemplated for me as a career. And there were very few role models in the bluegrass/roots-music world then — especially banjo players — you could look at and say: ‘That’s the career I want!’ “
Imminent San Diego homecoming
Brown returns to San Diego to perform June 22 at UC San Diego’s downtown Park & Market with her four-man band. The next day, June 23, will see her featured at the adjacent Digital Gym in the world premiere screening of “Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss,” a 70-minute film documentary about the founder of the San Diego Folk Festival, Folk Arts Rare Records and Adams Avenue Unplugged.
“I wish we could stay for the screening, but we’re performing in Phoenix that night,” she said. “I have a little bit of history with Lou.”
Brown was a 16-year-old student at La Jolla High School when she won top honors at the Canadian National Banjo Championship. That victory resulted in her and Duncan performing later that summer on the Grand Ole Opry. Brown’s most recent appearance on the nationally broadcast show — a country and bluegrass music institution for nearly a century — was on May 5.
Following her graduation from high school, she got a bachelor’s degree in history and literature at Harvard. After earning her MBA at UC Los Angeles, she spent several years in San Francisco working as an associate in public finance for Smith Barney. Her career track is one no other national bluegrass star can claim.
“I worked on the municipal bond side of things at Smith Barney. So boring!” Brown said. “At work I would hide a copy of Bluegrass Unlimited magazine inside The Bond Buyer — which is what investment bankers read back then.”
She laughed.
“The Bond Buyer costs $1,595 a year. Would you like me to get you a subscription?”
Brown happily left the world of high finance in 1987 to become a member of future bluegrass queen Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station. She was featured on the group’s Grammy Award-winning 1990 album, “I’ve Got That Old Feeling.”
Breaking glass ceilings
In 1991, Brown became the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Banjo Player of the Year award. She launched her solo career the same year with the release of her debut album, the Grammy-nominated “Simple Pleasures.” In 1992, she became a member of singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked’s band.
Since 1995, Brown has been the president of the Nashville-based Compass Records Group, which she co-founded with her husband and band mate, bassist Garry West.
Compass now has nearly 1,000 releases to its credit, including albums by Leftover Salmon, Molly Tuttle, former San Diego troubadours Steve Poltz and AJ Croce, Men At Work singer Colin Hay and such esteemed Celtic music groups as Altan and the Tannahill Weavers.
In 2000, Harvard Business School did a case study on Brown and Compass Records. It was a point of particular pride for her attorney father, John Brown, as he recalled in a 2014 Union-Tribune interview.
“Alison was playing one year at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco, and this gal came and struck up a conversation,” said John Brown, who died in 2020. “The woman said: ‘I’m from Harvard. We’ve been studying your daughter for a year, because she’s one of the few people we know of who has both sides of her brain — the artistic and business — equally developed.’
“Alison just loved music,” her father continued, “from the moment she first heard it, and was always a really good student. So she had kind of a parallel track going from an early age. She’d work hard on her studies and then go sit in the bathtub, which had better acoustics, to practice her banjo.”
Did Alison Brown learn much during her tenure at Smith Barney that helped her as a budding entrepreneur launching an independent record company in Nashville?
“Many things,” she replied. “The rudiments of business — starting a business, starting a speed sheet and a P&L (profit & loss statement). Having that background was enough to convince our first-seed investors to come on board at Compass.
“In a broader sense, having had that experience at Smith Barney, after I left I always knew what I wasn’t missing. Otherwise, had I stayed in banking, I would have always wondered if I should have pursued music. But having been an investment banker with an MBA — I’ve never regretted turning my back on that.
“I think that if you are going to be a musician, you need to think about your industry as multipronged spokes on a wheel. People who make a living out of doing this are not just touring musicians. They may be music teachers or songwriters with publishing deals. So, it’s usually a multipronged effort that gets you able to make a living out of it.”
Harvard thesis
Brown eventually wrote her senior thesis at Harvard on the history of bluegrass music, before making some history of her own as a banjo player talented enough to expand the stylistic parameters of her instrument.
In 2019, she became the first female 5-string banjo player to be inducted into the American Banjo Museum’s Hall of Fame. At Compass, she produces albums by other artists and plays a key role in marketing, business development and day-to-day operations.
“The CD table is my favorite place to be to be at a gig, because I’m fascinated by what motivates people to come to a banjo concert,” she said.
“I’m also fascinated that — once they are there — they will buy a CD when they could easily stream it for free on their phones. And I’m so grateful because streaming (compensation) rates (for artists) are so low.
“Some of the people at my concerts have come to see me for a long time. And some of them — and these are my favorites — are the beleaguered spouses of banjo players, who have been dragged to the show and come up to me and say: ‘I didn’t know I liked the banjo!’ “
CDs were the dominant form of recorded music when Brown and her husband launched the Compass Records Group nearly 30 years ago.
Today, in an age when many listen to music on their phones or computers, CDs are almost obsolete. But vinyl records have made a strong comeback and cassette tapes are also having a resurgence, albeit on a smaller level.
Does the target Compass album-buyer prefer a physical product, or a digital one?
“It kind of depends on the artist and the genre,” Brown said. “Our streaming numbers are a higher percentage of our overall revenue with younger artists or music that leans more into indie-folk and is lightly more commercial than bluegrass…
“Every release we do on Compass is available in physical and digital formats. And a lot of what we release is on LPs — or ‘vinyl,’ as the kids say. A significant number of younger people who buy vinyl at gigs don’t even have turntables. I guess they are pre-purchasing vinyl for the turntables they don’t yet have!
“So, we do have the challenge of being a record label that is existing in digital times.”
Extending banjo’s range
In any format, Brown’s new album, the vocal-free “On Banjo,” should appeal to a variety of audiences. She made it to showcase — as she has for much of her career — the range and flexibility of the banjo in, and far beyond, bluegrass.
Brown wrote specific pieces with specific artists in mind, both to showcase her musical guests on the album and to provide an eclectic mix of genres and approaches.
Eight of the album’s 10 selections were written by Brown. One, the Earl Scruggs-inspired “Foggy Morning Breaking,” was co-written and performed with Steve Martin, whose annual Steve Martin Banjo Prize Brown co-chairs.
“Sun and Water,” which features Brown band flutist John Ragusa, is a lilting mashup of the George Harrison-penned Beatles favorite, “Here Come the Sun,” and Brazilian music icon Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March.”
“Sweet Sixteenths,” another highlight, is a duet by Brown and fleet-fingered mandolinist Sierra Hull. Their sparkling, lattice-like playing is so seamless — on what Brown describes as a “chamber-grass” piece — that it’s difficult to determine what parts were rehearsed and what were created spontaneously while recording.
“Both of us played solos on the spur of the moment, but the melody was very composed,” Brown noted. “We spent a day beforehand figuring out where the mandolin should play the melody and the banjo harmony, and vice versa.
“I wrote it on the banjo, so it was easier for me. But Sierra learned it on the mandolin, and she just nailed it! She’s quite remarkable.”
“Porches” is a Stephen Foster-inspired piece that juxtaposes Brown’s deft banjo work with the pinpoint playing of the Kronos Quartet. The propulsive “Choro ‘Nuff” features Brown and Israeli-born clarinet standout Anat Cohen on an energetic romp. Its title is an homage to choro, the improvisation-fueled Brazilian music style inspired by African and Portuguese music.
Because it was partly made during the pandemic lock-down, the Kronos Quartet recorded its parts remotely at a studio near the group’s San Francisco home base, while Brown recorded her banjo part in Nashville. A similar approach was used with esteemed classical guitarist Sharon Isbin, who recorded her part for the Latin-tinged “Regalito” in her New York apartment.
Likewise, Brown and pianist Chris Walters recorded their respective parts for “Choro ‘ Nuff” in Nashville. Clarinetist Cohen recorded her part in New York, and guitarist Douglas Lora and frame drum player Alexandre Lora recorded in Brazil.
“Anat and I have yet to meet,” said Brown, a longtime fan. “If the pandemic had not happened, this album would have come out in 2020 or 2021. However, it would have been a different record — and it benefited from the extra time and restrictions the pandemic imposed on all of us.”
How so?
“Well,” Brown replied, “I think because everybody was sitting at home — especially musicians who are never sitting at home — and we got to collaborate with people we weren’t in the same (physical) space with.
“Pre-pandemic, I was thinking it would be great to work (in person) with Anat and Kronos Quartet. I learned that sending (digital audio) files to artists across the country or in other countries is also a completely legitimate way of working.
“For the song with Anat, we tracked the piano, drums and banjo parts in Nashville. We did so knowing we wouldn’t keep the drum track, but that we needed a (rhythmic) time source, and that we would replace the piano track but that Anat needed something to play along to.
“She put on her part, sent it back to me and I sent it to the guitarist, Douglas, who added his part. Then, we sent it to his brother, Alexandre, who played his percussion part, without the drum track we had done in Nashville. So, we started with the core track, and — by the end — everything had been replaced. I also replaced the original banjo part I had recorded so that I could respond to what Anat played.
“The happy surprise was how well it all worked. It opens your mind to thinking: ‘What else can I do from thousands of miles away?’ “
