Mike Munford, interviewed
by Ira Gitlin
Since 2008, when Mike Munford began touring with
rising bluegrass star Frank Solivan and his band Dirty Kitchen,
listeners around the country are finding out what fans and pickers in
the Washington-Baltimore area have known for years: This is one amazing
banjo player.
The first thing that hits you when you hear Mike is
his confident attack and big flathead tone. Next you might notice how
thoroughly he integrates straight-ahead Scruggs playing and sprawling
melodic passages. Listen a little further, and you can’t help but be
struck by the catchy, unexpected rhythmic twists that pepper his
phrases.
Even at the stiffest tempos, this is all delivered
in a seemingly effortless improvisational flow that one listener has
likened to Zen meditation. Yet this dazzling soloist is also a real team
player who excels at creative and tasteful backup and has a flair for
slow songs. And though Mike emphatically denies it, he seems to know
every tune: old songs, new songs, banjo tunes, fiddle tunes, jazz
standards—everything.
So it’s no surprise that Mike is always in demand
as a sideman. His last stint with a touring band came in the early 2000s,
when he hit the road with the Mark Newton Band and recorded two albums
with them. But among the artists Mike has worked with as a freelancer
are Tony Rice, Tony Trischka (Mike was one of the few banjo players that
Trischka tapped for his “Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular”
tours), Lynn Morris, Larry Rice, Valerie Smith, and Frank Wakefield. He
has backed up Peter Rowan many times since the 1980s, and played on
Rowan’s Grammy-nominated “Bluegrass Boy” album in 1996.
Closer to home, Mike has worked with Darren
Beachley, Gary Ferguson, Hard Travelers, Moondi Klein, Joe Meadows,
Akira Otsuka, Dede Wyland, and (to exaggerate only slightly) everyone
else from Pennsylvania to Virginia.
Like Washington, D.C., Baltimore has had a thriving
bluegrass scene since the 1950s. Compared with its more cosmopolitan
neighbor, though, Baltimore kept stronger ties to the music’s country
origins, with musicians and audience drawn from the ranks of Appalachian
migrants who’d moved north to work in the city’s shipyards and steel
mills. Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (with Walter Hensley on
banjo) were big there in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Future Ralph
Stanley sideman Jack Cooke had a band, and Del McCoury used to drive
down from Pennsylvania to play banjo. Hazel Dickens played bass and sang
in the blue-collar bars downtown. DJ Ray Davis presented the Stanley
Brothers and Charlie Moore live on his radio broadcasts from Johnny’s
Used Cars over WBMD.
But Mike’s family inhabited a different Baltimore.
The son of a physician father and a museum curator mother, he grew up
hearing his parents’ classical and jazz recordings and his older
brother’s rock music. The change came in 1973 when another
neighborhood teenager played Mike a recording of Foggy Mountain
Breakdown. As he recalls, “It nailed me right to the floor. I said,
‘I’ve got to do that.’” While Mike was fumbling with the three-finger
basics that his friend had shown him, the Baltimore Sun newspaper
published an article about the region’s bluegrass scene. That led him to
the Gettysburg Bluegrass Festival, where he saw J.D. Crowe (with Tony
and Larry Rice), the Seldom Scene, Jimmy Martin, and the New Grass
Revival; to Bluegrass Unlimited magazine (“My first issue
dropping through the mail slot was like being on a desert island, and
the bottle with a message comes up on the shore”); and to Banjo
Newsletter (“How fast did I get to the phone to make that call? A
magazine on banjo?!?”).
After two years of lessons, jamming, and figuring
things out on his own, Mike had progressed enough to join a local band,
Windy Ridge. During these early years, he also met two Baltimore-area
musicians who would influence him profoundly: fiddler Jon Glik and
guitarist David Grier.
Mike worked as vice president and general manager
at Baltimore Bluegrass, a music store that was a gathering place for the
local bluegrass community, from 1976 until the place closed in 2000.
During his years there Mike got to know several generations of amateur
and professional pickers, and learned about instrument repair and
adjustment. The experience he gained there has made him a sought-after
set-up guru. Mike wrote the chapter on set-up for Ross Nickerson’s
Banjo Encyclopedia, his name comes up regularly when the subject is
mentioned on Banjo Hangout, and he even got the call to work on Steve
Martin’s banjos a few years ago.
When not on the road with Dirty Kitchen, Mike
repairs instruments at his home in Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania, teaches a
few students, performs with various artists throughout the mid-Atlantic
region, and participates in recording sessions. (His banjo has been
heard on several TV commercials, an episode of America’s Most Wanted,
and the Chris Rock movie Head of State.) Twice a month he
plays in Washington with Bob Perilla’s Big Hillbilly Bluegrass, a group
that has toured for the U.S. State Department in the Caribbean, Eastern
Europe, and Central Asia. On those tours Mike delighted audiences that
had never heard bluegrass before, and impressed local musicians with his
willingness to lend his virtuosity to their unfamiliar traditions.
Recently he has been appearing with the eclectic fiddle-based DePue
Brothers Band, and also with Dee Gunter, an old-school bluegrass singer
from Baltimore’s glory days.
If you’re around Mike for any length of time, you
can’t help but notice the same whole-hearted enthusiasm that drew him to
the banjo all those years ago. You might hear him analyzing the
subtleties of Tony Rice’s rhythm guitar playing, raving about jazz
pianist Oscar Peterson, or working out a crooked old-time fiddle tune.
In a more philosophical mood, he might muse about the changing
demographics of Baltimore’s bluegrass scene, speculate on what attracts
people to different styles of music, or draw an extended analogy between
a five-piece bluegrass band and a basketball team.
Maybe that kind of all-encompassing interest and
curiosity about music is the key. Mike downplays any suggestion that his
skills are the result of anything except desire and practice. “I can
honestly say I am living proof that anybody who wants to play can learn
to play. I swear to God,” he proclaims, recalling how he got started, “I
didn’t know where to tap my foot. I had no idea.” Anyone who has seen
Mike handle a banjo can be forgiven for responding with a skeptical
grin. —Ira Gitlin
continued in the print edition of the September 2011 Banjo Newsletter