We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue, we will assume that you agree to our privacy policy which includes details of cookie usage. Hide this notice

Marc Nerenberg You must sign into your myHangout account in order to contact Marc Nerenberg.

"Simply put, the banjo comes alive and takes audiences to some fascinating places when Nerenberg is pickin'." -Bill Brownstein, Montreal Gazette, June 18, 2008. Marc Nerenberg first wandered in to the Yellow Door Coffee House (Canada’s oldest Coffeehouse) in 1966, to hear an anarchist New York taxi driver’s poetry reading. A few years later, that was the first place, other than street-corners, that he performed, being introduced as “a banjo player who plays stuff you don’t expect to hear on a banjo” (which is still a fairly apt description). He hung out so regularly at the Yellow Door that he was asked to help run the place, which he did for a couple of years, while continuing to perform. He also went to West Africa, researching the African origins of the banjo and its playing styles, and told the story of this trip in a variety of concert settings, including an hour on CBC Radio. His "discovery" in Mali of the "Kona", a Dogon instrument consisting of a skin-covered gourd on a stick, with fishing line tied on as strings, played claw-hammer style, was also the subject of a Ken Perlman column in the "Banjo Newsletter" in the early 1980's. (Ken had also earlier included one of Nerenberg's arrangements in his "Clawhammer Style Banjo" book.) Then, one day, he went to law school, and became a criminal lawyer, and stopped performing in public. When the occasion presented itself to return to Africa, as a member of a defence team in the trial of the alleged “architects” of the Rwandan genocide, he headed off to Tanzania, where he spent several years, and where, oddly enough, he seriously took up song-writing again. As well, he found himself frequently sitting in with many local bands, as well as pick-up bands of ex-patriots from all over the world, playing a wide variety of different styles of music. In 2009, he joined other defence teams, and has continued to travel to Tanzania frequently. Most recently, he has joined the defence team of Jacques Mungwarere, in Canada, and is busy in trial preparation for this genocide trial that will take place in Ottawa. After his initial 4 year stay in Tanzania, he returned to Montreal with a pile of excellent new songs, and he's written a whole pile more after having come back. Almost all of Nerenberg’s new songs tell stories, some comic, some tragic, often quirky, sometimes just about a moment in time, sometimes with characters, settings, plot and dialogue like a movie script. Nerenberg accompanies his singing with banjo and harmonica. In June 2009, Nerenberg was elected President of the Yellow Door, whose main function is as a charitable organization looking after the elderly, but which also runs the Coffeehouse. The last couple of years, Nerenberg has also been running the Yellow Door’s weekly Open Stage, hosting, playing some, encouraging the young folk, and sitting in on banjo or harmonica whenever asked. Nerenberg finds that his time spent at the Banjo Hangout has been an enriching and educational experience, that has fostered his ongoing growth and development as a banjo player.