About Tony Trischka
Anthony Cattell Trischka is an American five-string banjo player. Sandra Brennan wrote of him in 2021: "One of the most influential modern banjoists, both in several forms of bluegrass music and occasionally in jazz and avant-garde, Tony Trischka has inspired a whole generation of progressive bluegrass musicians."
A native of Syracuse, New York, Trischka's interest in banjo was sparked by the Kingston Trio's version of "Charlie and the MTA" in 1963. Two years later, he joined the Down City Ramblers, where he remained through 1971. That year, he made his recording debut on 15 Bluegrass Instrumentals with the band Country Cooking; at the same time, he was also a member of America's premier sports-rock band Country Granola.
In 1973, he began a three-year stint with Breakfast Special. Between 1974 and 1975, he recorded two solo albums, Bluegrass Light and Heartlands. Ethnomusicologist Benjamin Krakauer devotes an article to the legacy of this group in the bluegrass community, described as of experimental bluegrass musicians from New York City: .mw-parser-output .templatequote.mw-parser-output .templatequotecite@media}
Breakfast Special's innovative music incorporates jazz, avant-garde, psychedelic, klezmer, and various non- Western musical elements into their irreverent and often absurdist performances
. This researcher explores the question of why their music has never been absorbed into the bluegrass mainstream, while the newgrass and progressive blue-grass of many of their innovative peers was widely embraced : Benjamin Krakauer argues:
that breakfast Special’s eclecticism and related aesthetic choices made their music inaccessible to many bluegrass audiences and that the unfa-miliar aspects of this music and its presentation exacerbated conservative southern white audiences’ anxieties over the performers’ regional, ethnic, religious, and cultural otherness
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