Come study old-time or bluegrass banjo with some of today's best players. Hands-on classes, demonstrations, two faculty concerts, and lots of great jams. Also tracks in guitar, fiddle, mandolin and bass. www.midwestbanjocamp.com
As a young banjo player, I once stared, mouth agape, while this man (Munde) played an entire set of songs in EVERY KEY, with the Country Gazette decades ago...without a capo. It was before anyone else had attempted it, or perhaps even contemplated it, and I'm not referring to the standard playing in C, or even open D. I'm talking about the incredibly difficult keys of A, Bmaj, Bb, E, etc. I had only known of one other person, Sandy Weltman of the 1970s-1980s St. Louis Alley Cats fame, to accomplish this incredible feat. What a spectacle for an aspiring student banjo player in the audience to watch such mastery! I vividly recall, now 40 years on, seeing the guitar player song after song, apply his capo, only to observe Munde just stand there never touching one, and then kick off the song in some exotic new key. In a word it was...well...mesmerizing. In order to pull this off, one must first possess extremely "outside the box thinking" uncharacteristic for the typical 5 string player, for whom playing in minor modal tuning is about as daring as it gets. In order to play in these highly challenging keys, one must also possess almost "secret knowledge" of fretboard geography, not used in normal Scruggs playing, a retrained left hand with sufficient dexterity to use those non-bluegrass "chord configurations" in their respective obscure fingerboard locations, and most critically, the superhuman ability to coax the brain's well-worn, Scruggs style neural pathways, into executing completely different, unfamiliar, non-standard rolls...at speed! If playing the banjo [well] in traditional bluegrass style is at the level of, let's say, "NASA," then being able to play FLUIDLY, sans capo, at the level of Munde, in the keys of F, Bb, B maj, A, or even E, is at the level of Alien technology. No, I'm not suggesting that Alan is an ET, but I AM submitting to you, that his pioneering ability to play "capo-less" in nearly any key you can name, is something out of this world.
Well, having played the instrument myself for 5 decades, I can assure you this pure banjo duet, represents the maximum achievable "mellowness" by two of the instruments that even individually are notorious for causing headaches in the other band members when played long enough and long enough. This is truly beautiful and literally the best you'll ever hear two banjos sound together. Period.
