https://www.facebook.com/pages
/Banjo-Roots-Banjo-Beginnings/146459448740018
Playing Since: 1976
Experience Level: Purty Good

Gender: Male
Age: 67

My Instruments:
5-string regular banjo, 4-string early gourd banjo (three long strings and one short 'thumb-string'), 4-string tenor banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, ukulele, dulcimer, button accordion, and concertina.

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Profile Info:
Visible to: Public
Created 7/8/2015
Last Visit 9/3/2015

I'm a banjoist who has been playing since the the mid-1970s. In addition to the 5-string banjo, I also play and teach a variety of other instruments such as tenor banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, ukulele and more. You could say that I've been a fixture of NYC’s old-time and traditional music scenes since the early 1980s. I'm also an independent ethno-organologist and ‘banjologist’ who researches the origins, history, development, and globalization of the banjo, as well as the family of 80 distinct traditions of plucked spike lutes found throughout West Africa, the wellspring of the African heritage of the African American ‘early gourd banjo’ (c.1620-1860). I served as a consultant on the traditional music instruments of West Africa and other parts of the world for the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in the development of two permanent exhibitions: Music Mix (1998) and World Brooklyn (2006). In 2008, Greg C. Adams and I founded Banjo Roots Research Initiatives (BRRI), a unique scholarly partnership to further the study of the banjo’s early history and West African heritage, as well as to increase public awareness through proactive educational outreach. I have the unique distinction of being the first banjo scholar to present the findings of banjo-focused research to the international organologist community when I was invited to give a paper at the joint meeting of the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS) and the International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections (CIMCIM) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) in May 2012.