When Noam Pikelny came to the University of Illinois as a student, he planned to study computer engineering. Although he’d been playing the banjo since he was a child and he deeply loved music, computer engineering seemed the more secure career path. He thought music would be a serious lifelong hobby.
But being at the U. of I. made a profound impact on his musical career. He met musicians, he kept playing music and he eventually transferred from engineering to the School of Music.
“I wanted my life to be about music,” Pikelny said. “I couldn’t resist the lure of the banjo and a life completely focused on music.”
It was a good decision. Pikelny is a renowned banjo player whose second solo album, “Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail,” released in 2012, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album. Pikelny received the 2010 Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. And in 2014, the International Bluegrass Music Association named him banjo player of the year, and it named his 2013 album, “Noam Pikelny Plays Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe,” the album of the year.
Pikelny will play Krannert Center for the Performing Arts as part of Punch Brothers, a progressive string quintet. Punch Brothers will play during ELLNORA: The Guitar Festival. They perform at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 12 in the Tryon Festival Theatre. The show is a ticketed event.
“I’m extremely excited to come back to Champaign because this was where my career was launched,” Pikelny said. “I’m thrilled to play with this band at Krannert.”
Pikelny is a founding member of Punch Brothers, whose music has been described as progressive bluegrass and “country-classical chamber music,” with influences ranging from jazz and classical to blues and rock. The band’s most recent album, “The Phosphorescent Blues,” released in January, reflects on the themes of technology’s place in our lives and the longing for connection and shared experiences.
Pikely considers himself “essentially a fourth-generation banjo player.”
“I had the luxury of picking up the banjo after guys like Earl Scruggs, J.D. Crowe, Bill Keith, Tony Trischka and Béla Fleck had already developed techniques on the instrument at such a high level of mastery,” he said.
“I was 8 years old when I first heard Béla Fleck. He was playing modern and progressive music on the banjo with a beautiful and mellow sound. It was the coolest thing in the world to this city kid falling in love with the instrument,” Pikelny said.
Fleck and his wife, Abigail Washburn, will also be featured during ELLNORA, at 6:15 p.m. Sept. 11 in the Foellinger Great Hall. It is also a ticketed show.
Pikelny realized he needed to start at the beginning with the music of Scruggs, just as Fleck and Trischka did, if he wanted to pursue a progressive style of banjo playing.
He tries to blend different styles of banjo playing – the traditional bluegrass style of Scruggs, the melodic style of Keith and the single-string, more guitarlike style of Fleck.
“I started gravitating to trying to blur those lines between the distinct picking styles, incorporating those three styles into a fluid approach where you could jump from one technique to the next within a few notes,” he said. “In the last 10 years with Punch Brothers, I’ve been given the opportunity to play very challenging nonidiomatic music on the banjo, music you wouldn’t expect to hear coming out of the banjo. But it’s always been very important to me to retain some of the essential ‘banjo-ness’ even when playing the nonidiomatic music.”
For example, he said one of the things he finds beautiful about bluegrass banjo is the sound of open strings ringing over each other.
“I’ve tried to find ways to keep that rolling and cascading sound even when playing music in keys not conducive to the open drone strings,” Pikelny said.
He’d been playing progressive music for several years with Punch Brothers before releasing his album “Noam Pikelny Plays Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe,” a banjo adaptation of the fiddle arrangements of traditional bluegrass music on Kenny Baker’s 1976 recording. Pikelny noted the irony that “playing radical string band music with Punch Brothers, which has very little to do with bluegrass or folk music, opened up the technique to reinterpret the bluegrass standards on the Kenny Baker record.
“It’s hard for me to imagine what my musical voice would be without these guys. We push each other constantly,” Pikelny said of Punch Brothers. “These guys really enabled me to figure out what I can offer on the instrument.”