A great many bluegrass musicians have felt the urge to dabble in other genres of music. Once you become proficient on an instrument, it’s natural to experiment with all the sounds it can produce, and we’ve seen artists try their hand at classical music, rock and blues, and even jazz.
But jazz is a very special form of music, one that requires a tremendous amount of study in order to improvise over complex chord changes. It’s one thing to learn the melodies of jazz numbers and throw licks against the chords, and quite another to solo like a real jazz musician.
In the banjo world, a number of players have approached the study of jazz, and been accepted by jazzers for their efforts. Béla Fleck quickly comes to mind, but before him Pat Cloud had showed the way by learning the sort of scales and arpeggios that make up the vocabulary of the music, just as one must do to play bluegrass effortlessly.
Another to succeed on banjo is Ryan Cavanaugh, who not only is conversant in bluegrass, roll-style banjo, but plays jazz well enough to earn his living doing so with jazz saxophonist Bill Evans’s Soulgrass band where he was called on to do both.
Here he is with them back in 2010.
Ryan is a respected crossover banjoist, in demand as an instructor both privately and at camps and workshops, where he demonstrates how to work roll-style, melodic, and single string techniques into an amalgamated modern approach to the banjo.
He has worked with a number of bluegrass acts as well, including the Jeff Austin Band and Songs From The Road Band, and records under his own name as well.
Now Ryan has released a banjo instruction manual, specifically geared to how he approaches the instrument, titled Introduction to Linear Melodic Technique for 5-String Banjo.
He offers a brief description of the book.
“My e-instruction book, Introduction to Linear Melodic Technique for Five String Banjo, is a student primer for my personal style of playing the banjo. I’ve received so many inquiries and requests for lessons over the years, I decided to document my student-novice lessons in a volume.
This book covers what is otherwise known as the ‘single string’ style as it is known in depth; with of course my own personal twists!
There’s a secret studio track embedded in the bandcamp audio links that I recorded with Indian Carnatic violinist, Apoorva Krishna, Nate Roberts on mandolin, and Eli Bishop on strings.”
The book is delivered as a PDF (12MB) and can be ordered online for $30.
