Four will hopefully be a charm for The New American Banjo Festival, the brainchild of Greenfield musician Michael Nix, which has been postponed three times so far. He’d originally scheduled the first of what he hopes will become an annual and international celebration of all things banjo at Hawks and Reed Performing Arts Center last April.
Then the pandemic swept into the region, so it was postponed until November — that didn’t happen. It was again scheduled for last weekend at The Shea Theater Arts Center in Turners Falls, but as live music hasn’t yet returned, Nix gave up on the live event and moved the entire thing online.
“We figured out it wasn’t going to happen at the Shea because vaccinations weren’t happening fast enough,” Nix said.
Fingers crossed, The New American Banjo Festival, featuring a selection of streaming concerts, Zoom discussions and banjo-themed films, will take place digitally April 24 and 25.
While the banjo might be associated with southern music these days, Nix noted there’s a strong tradition of the banjo in New England, such as the Arthur E. Smith Banjo Co.
“There’s such a rich history of the banjo in New England, so I thought I would start there,” Nix said. “In the late 1800s, really high-quality banjos were made in Boston and Groton, Connecticut.”
Performers include Aaron Jonah Lewis, a classic fingerstyle virtuoso; Shingle the Roof, an old-time string band; Nix, who will play selections from his New Classic Banjo Project; and Ken Perlman, who’s known internationally as a pioneer of a banjo style known as melodic clawhammer — a combination of classic clawhammer style, alternating plucking and strumming, and melodic style, which is recognizable by its singular and sustained notes.
“You’re working across the strings, you’re working in melodic banjo shapes,” Nix said. “He’s able to play, note for note, any of the fiddle tunes.”
Along with those performances, Kate Spencer will give a video presentation and Q&A Zoom session on the Arthur E. Smith Banjo Company, one of the first revival banjo manufacturing businesses that was located in Franklin County. “Linefork,” a film featuring Kentucky banjo legend Lee Sexton (Smithsonian Folkways) will be screened followed by a live Zoom question-and-answer session with Vic Rawlings, the documentary’s co-director.
“You might call it an ‘observational documentary,’” Nix said. “Vic Rawlings and his partner (Jeff Silva, filmed) for three years and just recorded their everyday life. Rather than any kind of voiceover, it (captures Sexton’s) life in Kentucky — his playing and his mulling over music.”
Nix, who grew up playing violin, classical piano and from the sixth-grade on, guitar, is steeped in both historic and modern banjo tradition. In the 1970s, he began playing “bluegrass, newgrass” with a few friends and acquaintances from college. From 1977 to 1992, Nix toured and performed at folk and bluegrass festivals with singer and songwriter Rick Fiske playing the five-string banjo.
At that time, Nix said their musical style pushed at the boundaries of what people associated with the banjo’s iconic brassy sound, experimenting with “atonal music” and “Jimi Hendrix on the banjo,” he continued. “It was a second job. Back in those days, you could be a working musician and make hundreds of dollars doing that.”
Simultaneous to this banjo-inspired musical endeavor, Nix was playing the classical guitar. He taught guitar at Northfield Mount Hermon School before landing a teaching job at Keene State College. He took a 24-piece guitar orchestra on a tour of Asia and was chosen as Composer of the Year in 1991 by the Massachusetts Music Educators Association.
By 2000, having retired from teaching, Nix was looking to “combine all those different parts of myself” and become “an artist with a singular voice,” he said. “That’s where I birthed the idea of a banjar.”
Combining elements of the five-string banjo and the classical guitar, the banjar features two additional bass strings for a total of seven, including the “drone” string, which gives the banjo its recognizable sound. Those additional strings allow Nix to play in multiple musical “voices” at the same time, broadening his ability to incorporate classical and chamber-inspired composition techniques into the banjo’s sound. The instrument, which was designed by Nix and made in 2003, is a physical representation of his boundary-pushing approach to the banjo — an approach he hopes to push more abstractly through the New American Banjo Festival.
“For the past five years I’ve been involved with a group called ‘the banjo gathering,’” Nix said. “This is a somewhat academic conference of researchers and people who write books on the banjo — high-level inquiry into the banjo as a cultural and historical instrument and its significance in culture and history. But they don’t have any performances because a conference is not a festival.”
By melding this more academic approach to the instrument with innovative and exciting performances, Nix wants to see the local genre-bending festival expand into a global event through which banjo enthusiasts can appreciate the instrument’s history — via traditional old-timey performances and talks with experts like Spencer. But in this, Nix envisions the New American Banjo Festival as “stepping away from the typical bluegrass and old-timey banjo festivals,” as it will also be an opportunity for enthusiasts to learn about unique and up-and-coming styles, such as banjo-inspired chamber music and the implementation of the banjo into modern pop and rock genres.
Noting the use of the banjo in “Take It Easy” by the Eagles, Nix said, “This has been going on since the ’70s.” And in classical music, “The banjo has been used by experimental composers for a long time,” he continued. “If you’re a composer looking for color options in a chamber music setting or in a pop music setting, you have this wonderful option for an ‘oh, what’s that sound?’ moment.”
To that end, this year’s entirely digital inaugural festival is being put together by Nix’s music business, NixWorks and Northampton-based couchmusic.live, which will facilitate the streaming performances. Detailed information on artists, presenters, schedule and registration can be found on the festival’s webpage, nixworks.com/p/1033/New-American-Banjo-Festival, and on its Facebook page at facebook.com/NewAmericanBanjoFestival.
Sponsors for the festival are The Shea Theater Arts Center, RiverCulture and Greenfield Cooperative Bank. The program is supported in part by a grant from the following local agencies, which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency: Buckland, Conway, Gill, Greenfield, Leyden, Montague, New Salem, Northfield, Shelburne, Shutesbury.
The annual New American Banjo Festival will start Saturday, April 24 at 6 p.m. with Spencer’s discussion on the local history of the Arthur E. Smith Banjo Company and conclude Sunday at 9 p.m. with Perlman’s melodic clawhammer banjo performance. Admission is donation-based. Tickets can be purchased through Eventbrite at bit.ly/2RvKZud.
Andy Castillo can be reached at acastillo@recorder.com.