With no introduction or celebrity fanfare, Steve Martin steps onstage with the Steep Canyon Rangers bluegrass band, a banjo strapped to his chest.
He's not there to tell jokes, though he manages to squeeze in a few. He's there to play music -- songs from his Grammy-winning bluegrass album, “The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo."
Martin tells the crowd he met the band at a party in North Carolina, “but when we're in California, I tell people we met in rehab."
With that, he begins to play, with such conviction and skill that he's clearly not joking. A banjo player for 45 years, Martin says he wrote every song in the hourlong set, just as he did all 15 tracks on his album, which spent a year atop Billboard's bluegrass charts. He toured the country playing banjo last year and is embarking on a second nationwide tour on April 19. The Steep Canyon Rangers serve as his backup band.
The 64-year-old actor-writer-musician says he fell in love with the banjo the first time he heard it during the 1960s folk-music craze.
“It was just the sound of it," Martin said in an interview before taking the stage. “It was like my ears were trying to part away the other instruments and focus on what is that instrument, and I've always loved it."
He's not there to tell jokes, though he manages to squeeze in a few. He's there to play music -- songs from his Grammy-winning bluegrass album, “The Crow: New Songs for the Five-String Banjo."
Martin tells the crowd he met the band at a party in North Carolina, “but when we're in California, I tell people we met in rehab."
With that, he begins to play, with such conviction and skill that he's clearly not joking. A banjo player for 45 years, Martin says he wrote every song in the hourlong set, just as he did all 15 tracks on his album, which spent a year atop Billboard's bluegrass charts. He toured the country playing banjo last year and is embarking on a second nationwide tour on April 19. The Steep Canyon Rangers serve as his backup band.
The 64-year-old actor-writer-musician says he fell in love with the banjo the first time he heard it during the 1960s folk-music craze.
“It was just the sound of it," Martin said in an interview before taking the stage. “It was like my ears were trying to part away the other instruments and focus on what is that instrument, and I've always loved it."
For more information contact All About Jazz.
