Noam Pikelny: My Favorite Banjo Player?

My apologies to bluegrass nuts, but since I believe many of my readership are not quite as "into" Bluegrass as I am this post concerns; The evolution of the banjo.

There are, of course, very old styles such as clawhammer, but we're talking more about picking rather than strumming. In the the early 1940's, Earl Scruggs invented his style of playing banjo. His amazing style seemed to come fully realized out of nowhere, and became the way to play banjo. This is a video of Scruggs.

The huge setback to Scruggs' style is that if you actually listen, Scruggs' players can't actually play the melody they want. They have to hint around at it (listen to all the notes in the previous video). So, the next step came around the early/mid 60's thanks to Bill Keith. He invented a very complex difficult style that allowed banjo players to play any sequence of notes they want to. Go here and listen to the clip of Rickett's Hornpipe. Completely the opposite of Scruggs, it's only melody.

So where does it end up today?

people like Noam Pikelny play a fusion which allows them to play the melody and still sound cool and smooth.

Listen to his break starting at 40 seconds. It's a perfect mix. :D

A problem with banjo is that it's strength is in sending out a barrage of powerful notes. This led to it being in excluded in some of the groovier musical circles such as Tony Rice and David Grisman (Grisman left out the banjo because there was more room for the music to "breath" without it). So the challenge today is to have a style that is versatile enough so that it will work in situations like the David Grisman Quintet (here is an instance of it working amazingly)

Is Noam Pikelny the new hope?

Maybe so.

Stylistically, he may be my favorite banjo player

-Luke