Alison Brown
(born August 7, 1962) is an American banjo player and guitarist known for a soft nylon-string banjo sound.
|
ALISON BROWN TICKETS
|
Biography
Born in
Hartford, Connecticut, Brown learned to play
guitar at eight and banjo at ten. When she was twelve, she met fiddler
Stuart Duncan. In the summer of 1978, Brown traveled across the country with Duncan and his father, playing festivals and contests. She won first place at the Canadian National Banjo Championship, which helped her land a one-night gig at the
Grand Ole Opry.
In 1980, Brown went to
Harvard University, where she studied history and literature. After graduating from Harvard, she earned an
MBA from
UCLA. Brown worked for two years with
Smith Barney in
San Francisco, and then took a break to pursue her music interests.
In 1987,
Alison Krauss asked Brown to join her band,
Union Station. Brown spent three years with Krauss. In 1990, she moved to
Tennessee, and was named
International Bluegrass Music Association Banjo Player of the Year in 1991.
In 1992, Brown became the band leader for
Michelle Shocked. This experience led Brown to merge
bluegrass with
jazz and
folk idioms, in a manner similar to those of
Béla Fleck and
David Grisman.
In the early
1990s, Brown and her husband, bass player Garry West, started their own record label, Small World Music. This company eventually led to the launch of
Compass Records in 1995.
In collaboration with
Béla Fleck, she won the 2000
Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. She participated in
Alison Krauss’s Grammy-winning album I’ve Got That Old Feeling, and received a Grammy nomination for her own recording, Simple Pleasures. And in 2001 she won a Grammy, in the Best Country Instrumental category, for her album Fair Weather.
Stolen Moments, 2005, in Brown’s estimation, is her most musically successful record to date. "For the first time, I feel like I’ve created a true hybrid sound that suggests its influences – bluegrass, jazz, celtic music – but when taken as a whole isn’t any one of these things." – Brown's words about the album on the group's official webpage.
Albums
- Simple Pleasures
(1990)
- Twilight Motel
(1992)
- Look Left
(1994)
- Quartet
(1996)
- Out of the Blue
(1998)
- Fair Weather
(2000)
- Replay
(2002)
- Stolen Moments
(2005)
- Evergreen
(2008)
- The Company You Keep
(2009)