G Rockwell Rolls Well into the Uncharted
The young banjoist from Connecticut plays Bluegrass, Turkish music, Jewish Music, Jazz and beyond, pushing boundaries, envelopes, and frontiers—if you can push frontiers—in whatever he does.
G Rockwell, with a banjo, is the sparkling sophisticated sound behind the virtuosic bluegrass band High Horse, as well as Jacob’s Ladder, a band that mixes Jewish music and bluegrass (he also plays guitar with those groups and with Jacob Jolliff, but who cares about that?). He’s a graduate of the New England Conservatory, where he was the first bluegrass banjo player ever to attend: “Charting into the unknown, a little bit, in terms of an educational route for being a musician,” as he puts it. He continues to chart into the unknown with the music he’s making. His EP, Buoyancy, is filled with unexpected flavors, high speed turns, fresh wit, joyful precision, and fun. And new recordings of him with High Horse, Jacob’s Ladder, and a mystery super group, are on the immediate horizon. Here he tells us how he managed to attain such stratospheric abilities at such an early age.
Banjo Head
There are bits and pieces about you out there, but nothing that I can find that talks about how you got into bluegrass in the first place. I understand you played guitar first. Were there musicians in the family?
G Rockwell
Yeah, it’s funny you ask that, because it was never obvious that I would be a musician, by any stretch of the imagination. Neither of my parents are musicians. They’re both architects, actually, and on my mom’s side of the family there’s a long legacy of visual artists. So I’ve definitely been around artists and thinkers, and my parents had incredible taste in music when I was a kid, but there was no expectation that I was going to pick up music, and certainly not bluegrass. But my parents were really involved in the jam band scene and I grew up at a lot of these bigger venues, where there were a lot of Deadheads and a lot of that kind of music going on, running around backstage, especially at this fun festival called The Gathering of the Vibes that was run out of my home town in Connecticut. So there wasn’t an expectation that I would get into music, but there was a lot of music going on in my life.
BH
So it was bluegrassy jam bands that lead to the banjo?
GR
Well, we had a piano in the house, and when I was maybe seven or eight my mom said she would buy me a guitar if I promised to practice the piano for the next nine months. And when she saw that I was really getting serious about my regimen of practicing every day, she thought, ‘Oh, God, now I actually have to get him a guitar.’ It just spiraled from there. My uncle played banjo as a kid, so he had a banjo lying around. And after seeing that I was getting into music, he’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll give this to the kid, see if he gets into playing it.’ And the next thing you know, it’s kind of become everything I do. Weirdly enough, I have a cousin, Jojo Roses, who’s a phenomenal jazz guitarist. She’s still in high school and is winning tons of awards
BH
Oh yeah, I saw some clips of you two playing on YouTube. She’s great.
GR
Yeah, you asked if I have a musical family, and I really don’t. But I do have this cousin who’s getting to be a better guitar player than I am. It’s sort of a surprise to everybody that it turned out that way.
BH
It must be great to get together on a family vacation and play together like that.
GR
Yeah. It’s very special, for sure.
BH
So, after listening to you play, and knowing you went to the New England Conservatory, it’s obvious that you aim for precision and perfection when you practice. Was that there when you were just playing guitar, or even the piano, for that matter?
GR
I was a really little kid when I picked up the banjo, so I wasn’t particularly more developed on guitar. One thing I’ll say is that having continued to practice guitar the whole time, and making a career out of being a multi-instrumentalist, there are a lot of things, like theory and reading music, that are just easier to grasp. The guitar has been kind of a resource to help me get to be a better banjo player.
BH
I’m sure that has something to do with how comfortable you are playing jazzier tunes. It seems that, in addition to the jam band stuff, you must have been exposed to jazz at an early age. Studying with more-or-less traditionalists like Roger Sprung and Ben Freed, how many years do you think you would say you put into basic Scruggs style before you started branching out?
GR
I didn’t have the standard approach to learning the banjo in that sort of way. Roger taught me beginner level banjo into single string and melodic stuff. But his whole approach was never to say, ‘You’re gonna go and learn everything out of the Scruggs book, and then try adding in these Reno licks, and then X, Y, and Z.’ He had this unique approach, which taught me a lot about music from a musician standpoint, rather than, necessarily, as a banjo player first: learning a melody, learning where that sits on the banjo, and then being able to figure out how to input rolls around that without totally losing the melody or losing the roll. That creates banjo feeling things that we would characterize as Scruggs style banjo but aren’t necessarily Scruggs—with a capital S—licks.
BH
That makes sense, but you clearly have the capital S licks down now. How did that eventually happen?
GR
I studied with Roger for a while, and then I started going to some other teachers . . . also learning guitar with some other teachers. Once I started learning with Tony Trischka, he was like, ‘Yeah, you have to work backwards at this point.’ Because I could hold my own at a bluegrass jam, but I hadn’t actually done the due diligence of learning all those pages of the Scruggs book. And then the Reno licks, and then from Reno licks into, non position based single string playing, and then getting into three-finger single string. And from there I started to build things up a little bit, but it never felt like a direct path. To some degree that was successful, and, in other ways, it held me back. Even nowadays I have friends that can, you know, play all the Ron Block solos from memory, and that kind of thing. But that was never my path.
BH
Right. You’re clearly on another journey, where the way is not as clearly lit. Can you talk about how you came to find your own style on the instrument?
GR
Tony had gotten me really far with the melodic thing, and I was really intrigued about doing the single string thing, because it felt so natural, having been a guitar player. At some point Tony said, ‘If you want to learn single string, you’ve got to go to this guy, Ryan Cavanaugh—there’s no one who really beats him when it comes to doing that.’ And I think that’s still true. Ryan was living in New York at the time, so I learned a ton from him, and then later studied a lot with Greg Liszt. The musical sensibility that Greg brings to the banjo—that was really eye opening. I had thought of things as the silos of Scruggs, melodic, and single string. But the way I try to think about banjo playing now is just ‘What is the sound on the banjo that I want to create?’ rather than ‘What’s the best single string approach to playing a certain melody.’ I’m certainly not unique for thinking that way about the banjo.
BH
Let me ask you something specifically about expanding your banjoistic toolkit. There’s a vast world that opens up when you decide to go beyond Scruggs style, and it requires tremendous efforts to become proficient at all of it. So when you decided to go to Ryan—when Tony suggested it—had you already had the idea that you were aiming to be a professional and that you needed to go to those lengths?
GR
Yeah, you know, I think I did have that kind of ambition. And part of that was the environment I grew up in. Weirdly, southern Connecticut has a lot of really great players. Particularly Sofía Chiarandini and Korey Brodsky, who are both now out on the scene professionally. They were a couple years ahead of me, a great fiddle player and a great guitarist and mandolinist. At some point I realized that it had never occurred to me that I would ever do anything else, because I just loved playing bluegrass so much. So I wanted to go and do all those other things beyond Scruggs. But then, a couple years later, I looked back and it’s like, ‘Oh, actually, there are a lot of things within the Scruggs tradition that I overlooked a little more than I should have.’ So, even with learning that upper echelon stuff, you’re always tying back into old things. To this day I’m still learning Scruggs breaks note for note and finding surprises in there.
BH
Any specific things you can point to?
GR
Oh yeah. The way that Scruggs can create tone . . . I mean, really, no banjo player sounds like Earl Scruggs did, and that sound is just so timeless. You can listen to that forever. And a lot of the ways that he hits shapes with his left hand—it’s not necessarily what you would think would be the most natural approach. If you look at the way he did Farewell Blues, for example. A lot of banjo players play Farewell Blues, but not many actually do what Earl did with his left hand on it, because it’s just a little awkward. But there’s all kinds of advanced advantages situated inside of those things.
BH
I know what you mean. I was just playing Pain in My Heart the other day. I don’t know if you know that kick off, but he goes from some G stuff straight into a D on all four strings. Not complicated at all, but he squeezes that chord so perfectly, what he plays sounds like open string licks. You wouldn’t know it if you weren’t trying to figure it out.
GR
Totally, yeah. Sometimes it’s not necessarily the most like virtuosic sounding thing, but just the timing and the placement of it. You know, those guys would go in and do one, or maybe two, takes of every song, and knock it out of the park every single time. There are benefits to all the modern recording advantages we have now, but there are disadvantages too. Back then they really had to know their stuff, and it really shows in the way that those recordings come together.
BH
So moving on from Earl, can you tell us a little bit about what you got from Ryan Cavanaugh. I know when he teaches it’s not just single string. He goes pretty deep.
GR
In the first lesson I had with Ryan he gave me a couple of records to listen to and to jam along with. One of them was this soul jazz record called Damn! by Jimmy Smith. That was the first time I had really sat with some of these records, in single string thought mode the whole time, where you need to come up with lines rather than just licks. You know, in bluegrass, it’s so easy to become someone that just regurgitates licks. You can do that really successfully and really compellingly, too. Tony Rice is a lick-based player. Almost all of his solos are different variations on Tony Rice licks. So I don’t want to put that down, by any means. But I had to transition from, ‘Oh, these are the banjo licks that I know how to use in certain ways,’ and start really thinking more traditionally improvisatorily. Having stuff to jam along with, and make mistakes with, was huge. Staying in single string mode and trying to get up and down the neck without shifting—that’s, that’s one of the big challenges at first, and it takes a while.
BH
How long does it take before that specific thing becomes natural?
GR
You know, that’s a great question, because it never really becomes natural. And part of that is because you’re always trying to expand what your ability is, right? Sometimes, especially with the banjo, I find I’ll come to moments in my practicing, and in my playing—months long moments—where I’ll learn how to do a bunch of really tricky things, but not how to incorporate them successfully into an improvisational space, and then having to reimagine ways to actually incorporate them through the experience of playing with other people. You know, it’s one thing to be able to play a crazy lick in a bunch of different keys with the metronome in your room, but that’s different from being in a solo and trying to go from a line into that lick for a second and then out of it back into a line. All of that is tricky. You can learn one thing and then master using that one thing. But every time you add more color to that palette, you’re making it easier to expand the horizons even further. Part of the journey is having fun in that challenge. The challenge grows, and the fun grows along with it.
BH
I’ve seen that video of you playing along with Charlie Parker, and you just nail the clarity and timing and phraseology of it. Was there a point where you weren’t just using the modes, and the techniques of jazz, for the purpose of bluegrass, but decided to go ahead into jazz?
GR
To some extent yes, and to some extent not nearly as much as I would have liked. I studied a lot of jazz at school, and I’ve been to jazz sessions, played with jazz musicians, and done all this stuff where you could say, I’m “deep into jazz.” But the reality of the situation is, if you take me out of some random bluegrass tour I’ve just been on and put me where I need to know the changes to Stella by Starlight and Body and Soul, and Green Dolphin Street—I’ve never quite gotten to that level of being so intimate with the genre that I can really speak it as a first language. With bluegrass, I don’t have to review how to play X kind of tune, even if it’s really complicated. Part of that is just what your first spoken language is as a musician. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never been in an environment where I’ve needed to have my jazz chops quite at that level. It’s not second nature for me, in the same way that, you know, it is for Ryan.
BH
It’s always heartening to hear other people have some limits. Since you were already playing at such a high level, in bluegrass and beyond, what did you hope to get out of the New England Conservatory instead of, say, jumping right into professional musicianship?
GR
I had known a lot of people that were going to Berklee to really learn how to become productive bluegrass musicians. And I think I definitely had—and still have—a lot to learn, as far as that goes. But I didn’t feel like I needed a college education to become the best bluegrass banjo player I could be, or guitar player for that matter. But NEC had a massive composition approach to seeing things, and how to arrange in a really powerful way. And also just the kind of nuts-and-bolts skills of being a really good sight reader, which I really sucked at before going to NEC. When you’re dropped in a class—Solfège One, or whatever—and your peers are mainly classical violin students that have been reading their whole life, you’ve got to learn quickly. And I was the first bluegrass banjo player to be in that program. There had been a couple old time oriented people that played some banjo in the program, but never a Scruggs style player. But the program had so much to offer. I did a ton of study on Turkish music and stuff that challenged me beyond just the scope of being able to be a great bluegrass session musician.
BH
So when you show up at conservatory with a banjo, are they like, ‘Well, we don’t know anything about how your instrument is tuned, but you’re just going to do exactly what these violin players do. I mean, are you following a formula they have for all musicians?
GR
Well, the cool thing about my program is that if you come into it with enough technical skills, that you learned from your teachers beforehand, they’re going to help teach musical, theoretical skills. I did study with Greg Liszt while I was there too, so I definitely got a lot of great banjo technique advice, but my main purpose wasn’t necessarily to improve my chops as much as it was expand my horizons.
BH
There are all kinds of horizons on your album Buoyancy, which is your main banjo statement so far, I’d say. Were there any bands you were in leading up to that recording that we should mention?
GR
I started playing with Jacob’s Ladder—which is my band that does Jewish bluegrass music—at the beginning of college. We still play. That wasn’t something that ever overlapped with my school life, though NEC actually does have an incredible faculty that knows a lot about Jewish music. And then I had also met these Berklee cats while I was at NEC, and I cut an EP with those guys called Cahaba Roots. Two of them have gone on and formed Mountain Grass Unit, so they’re touring pretty big time. And then right at the end of my time at NEC, I started playing with my band, High Horse, and that’s sort of the main thing going on for me right now in terms of touring.
BH
Before we leave the subject: You’re in Jacob’s Ladder; Roger Sprung and Ben Freed are Jewish. Is there a subset of Jewish bluegrass that you want to talk about?
GR
It’s a great question. My, bandmate, Sofía—who I mentioned earlier, and who plays with me in Jacob’s Ladder—just did her whole grad degree focusing on this topic. There is a weird scene of Jews in bluegrass music, and there are a lot a lot of different theories as to why. But I’ve met a lot of interesting people as a result of that. We’ve come to know Gene Lowinger, who was the fiddle player for Bill Monroe at the time that Bill Keith and Del McCoury were playing with him. He’s a big fan of our music and we got to play a show where he sat in with us for a few songs in New Jersey, which was amazing. He told us about bringing Bill Monroe to a synagogue.
BH
What’s the story, if you don’t mind?
GR
So, you know Lonesome Moonlight Waltz? Basically, he took Bill Monroe to synagogue, and afterwards Bill told Gene, ‘I’ve got to put some of those Jewish notes in one of my tunes,’ and then he came back with Lonesome Moonlight Waltz. And that he said that that one was Jewish inspired. Whether or not you actually hear any Jewish inspiration in that, I’m not sure. It’s just in minor, really, as far as I’m concerned. But, you know, it’s a great story.
BH
That is a great story, about a great tune. Let’s talk about Buoyancy, which clearly draws inspiration from all over. Such a great set of wildly different tunes. One piece, Fish Bowl, seems kind of classical. It reminds me a bit of an Ira Gitlin composition, Allegretto con Melanzane. There’s a great video of you playing it with Mr. Liszt. I’m wondering if it’s a product of the learning you were doing at NEC?
GR
Yeah, a little bit. What happened was I was going to compete at the Fresh Grass banjo competition, and I needed to write an original piece. And, you know, it’s easy to find banjo players that can play really fast, and I’m not going to be the fastest banjo player in the world, but there aren’t tons of banjo players out there that can write a piece of banjo music that modulates to a bunch of different keys. I’m not really sure where the idea for that specific tonality came from, but I had this idea that I wanted to write something in 6/8, because I think it’s a beautiful time signature, and it lays out nicely with, you know, three fingers on the right hand. The intro part, that’s kind of slow and rubato, is more or less an outline of what the rest of the harmony of the song becomes. The whole intro stays in the key of C, but fits all these cool funky chords into it to get you back to C at the end. My goal was to write a tune that actually modulated to each of those different moments throughout the course of it. So it starts in C and then goes to C minor to get you to E-flat, and then from E-flat up to A-flat, and F minor, and eventually, somehow, to G, which gets you back to C again. I was at school at the time, so there were a lot of things floating in my head. One thing I’ll say is that I love Jens Kruger, especially the Kruger Brothers album Spirit of the Rockies. There are a couple of cool moments on that album, of really awesome banjo playing that traverses the finger board, but still sounds very melodically compelling. Not just a bunch of notes hitting you at random. So I wanted to make something that felt similar to that, but still my own in some way.
BH
It’s an amazing intricate piece. How did you convince Greg Liszt to learn the whole thing?
GR
Well, Greg is such a genius, and he was my teacher at NEC for a lot of the time. I wanted to include him in my recital when I graduated. I think I played the melody and he played the harmony part. I sent him a recording of what I wanted him to play. We got together to rehearse it once before the recital, and I roll up and he’s got the whole thing tabbed out. I was so shocked. He was like, ‘Yeah, I’m in a mood right now where I’m tabbing out everything I learn.’ It’s a really long thing to tab out. I thought that was impressive from a pedagogy standpoint. As a teacher, he’s going commit fully to learning the thing. It’s just love of the game.
BH
Yeah, I have found that people that gravitate to the banjo do not lose the passion. There’s a moment in Fish Bowl where you guys hit the triplets together—I mean, it’s already such a complicated piece to play together, or solo—but that moment, it’s just joyful, so much fun. As an inveterate tabber, I have to ask: did he tab it correctly? Or did you have some better fingering to suggest or something?
GR
I remember him basically tabbing it out all correctly.
BH
One thing about those runs. As you play so cleanly, with every note really popping out, I’ve been looking at your right-hand technique. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly what Ryan would do. Maybe a little bit more in line with how Noam Pikelny would do things.
GR
Yeah, you know, it’s hard to say. I don’t know if it’s really a Noam versus Ryan versus Greg thing as much as it was a trial and error thing. I’ll favor doing an alternating thumb roll, where it’s thumb, index, thumb, middle. I find it easier to move my thumb around and lead with my thumb. And also, if there’s a downbeat, or something that divides a melody line in half, I try to use my thumb to mark those moments. When you get into the whole three-finger single string thing, you’re already hitting, to some degree, uncharted territory. There is no right answer.
BH
Do you regularly wear a pick on the ring finger, like Greg?
GR
I do. I use it especially for rhythm. And there are a lot of Greg tricks that I’ll whip out, but I find that if there’s an obvious way to do it with three, it’s going to be easier for me. A lot of it, too, is chasing a tone thing. I’ve spent more time, arguably, than is worth it, trying to chase Noam’s breadth of tone, and the way that he can make the banjo sound really full while playing far from the bridge. That’s a very tricky thing to try to get. I chase that sound more than I try to chase the technique aspect.
BH
The most traditional song on Buoyancy, and also the one song you didn’t write, is Train That Carried my Girl from Town. The breaks you’re doing on there are just so clever and fun, but never just flashy for its own sake. In the second break of that tune, you start with some more or less standard banjo licks and then move into more wild territory. Are you thinking of licks and scales that you want to work in as you do it, or is that all long-studied fundamentals that more or less feed a non-thinking spontaneity?
GR
There’s something to be said about thinking about those things to so that you can try not to think about them when you get to get to the playing point. One of the skills that you learn in doing all that kind of theory work is, ‘Oh, like, I can create this kind of a color by adding in this on top of it.’ And at some point that becomes more instinct based than anything else. It’s a fine line, certainly. And part of that is having little baked in tricks. If you can play something in one way, find a way to play it in a bunch of other different ways, and eventually you’ll be able to use it improvisationally. But that’s a long path towards success, certainly. A lot of the way that I have approached music in general is to try to be a melody driven improviser. That comes from learning a lot of Miles Davis, trying to sit down with someone that’s pure melody and no licks.
BH
So let’s talk about some of these other projects. High Horse has an album coming out soon, right?
GR
There’s a live album coming out this summer, with Kat Wallace. We have a thing that we do every once in a while, where we bring her on to play with us. So we have a few live recordings from that that we’re really excited to release. We also have an EP coming out, just a three-song set of tunes, that I’m also really excited to get out there. We’re putting the finishing touches on the recordings and hoping to have them out in the next month, and then getting the live album out later this summer, before we have a little High Horse and Kat Wallace tour.
BH
Can you tell us anything about the three songs?
GR
One is called Cold Harbor. It was a tune that our fiddle player wrote, and I’ll be doubling banjo on that as well. We also are going to do a Townes Van Zandt song, that’s this kind of slow cowboy number called Two Girls, and an original song of mine called Wait for Me. So those, those three are going to be coming out together.
BH
With banjo on all three?
GR
Banjo on just one of them, unfortunately. But the next High Horse record that comes out is going to have tons of banjo on it. We’re just a little ways out from from sitting down for an extra length thing.
BH
And what about Jacob’s Ladder?
GR
We just put out a new record a couple months ago, called HaMakom, and that one has some banjo. And then I have a somewhat secret side project of bluegrass with some of the best bluegrass players that live in Connecticut. We’re hoping to put out an EP, and I’m playing banjo solely on that record, on every track. But I don’t have many details on what our timeline is, or our strategy, or even our band name. So I can’t say too much yet.
BH
I’m looking forward to that, to be sure. Are you playing at festivals with all of the above?
GR
High Horse is going to be playing at Green Mountain Bluegrass and Roots in Vermont, as well as Wind Gap in Pennsylvania. That’s gonna be a hoot. And then I’ll also be playing with the Jacob Jolliff Band this summer at Grey Fox. I’ll just be playing guitar with him.
BH
What is going on with him? Does he hate banjo? He’s never got a banjo.
GR
The economics of having a five-piece bluegrass band are getting harder and harder to pull off these days. But we once opened for the Sam Bush band. And, you know, Wes Corbett and Jacob Jolliff are really good friends—they played in Joy Kills Sorrow together. So Wes sat in with us, and we did a couple of bluegrass tunes. And, you know, it’s really interesting how differently the rest of the musicians play when there’s a banjo player in the band. It really affects how everyone feels the time. But no, I don’t think it’s any kind of animosity towards the banjo. I think he would be into the idea of me doing banjo on one or two tunes, but, you know, you can’t really sacrifice your guitar player in a bluegrass band, because that’s a lot of the support system of the tune.
BH
There are guitar players all over. Can’t you play banjo and just draw up a guitar player from the audience?
GR
That would be cool. But yeah, I don’t think that’s exactly quite how Jake likes to roll.
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