Swallow Hill Music is excited to announce its 3rd Annual BanjoFest, a day-long celebration for banjo lovers featuring concerts, workshops, and community on Saturday, November 14 from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The banjo is an instrument with deep African roots that holds a unique place within the modern musical landscape. Its sound is comfortable in contemporary settings like bluegrass, country, rock, experimental music, and more. At the same time, banjo music evokes a complicated past that is entwined with the transatlantic slave trade and cultural misappropriation, a history that often leads its modern fans to a deeper understanding of its role in popular music.
The banjo’s resilience, both as a cultural touchstone and as a sonic shapeshifter is on full display with this year’s lineup, which features evening performances and daytime workshops by Kaia Kater, Allison de Groot & Nic Gareiss, and Natalie Spears.
Montreal-born, Grenadian-Canadian Kaia Kater’s jazz-fueled voice and deft songcraft have garnered widespread acclaim. Through her artful banjo playing and lush songwriting, Kaia draws on influences rooted in Quebec, the Caribbean, and Appalachia, all of which reflect the diversity of her background.
TICKETS: Get your tickets and complete details about the 3rd Annual Swallow Hill BanjoFest here
Allison de Groot & Nic Gareiss sound and move together, engaging tunes and gestures from Appalachia, Ireland, and beyond through banjo, voice, and percussive dance. After their first decade of performance collaborations the acclaimed duo, featuring de Groot on banjo and Gareiss dancing, released The Thrill, a visual album inspired by the music of Appalachian musician Hobart Smith. The Thrill was named “Best Roots Music of 2022” for that year by NPR.
Hailing from Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, Natalie Spears’ most recent album, Hymn of Wild Things, chronicles her experience of wonder, loss, and metamorphosis. Of her banjo playing, Bonedale Amplified writes, “Watching Spears on banjo, you can see her lean in, cocking an ear, to suss, to feel, and play. Her banjo is sunlight, gilding the harmony of their voices; her bass, driving the groove deep into the heart of their sound.”
Daytime workshops covering a variety of banjo-centric topics for beginners and advanced players alike will also be taught by Swallow Hill instructors Caleb James Hall and Laura Goldhamer. One of Colorado’s finest banjo pickers, Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose, and music historian and musician Rex Rideout, will also teach workshops. Swallow Hill Instructor Mike Jagel will return as the jam host in Quinlan Cafe.
The full schedule of daytime workshops and activities can be found on the Swallow Hill BanjoFest website at SwallowHillMusic.org/BanjoFest.
Swallow Hill BanjoFest launched as the Denver-based nonprofit sought to offer banjo players a middle ground between elite banjo camps and private lessons. In 2024 that concept played out spectacularly as attendees got to rub elbows with banjo luminaries Tony Trischka and Dom Flemons in an informal yet educational setting.
“When Tony Trischka told me he’d never taught a workshop for a hundred banjo players at the same time, I knew we’d done something special,” Swallow Hill Marketing team member Barry Osborne, who also helped develop BanjoFest, recalled.
BanjoFest’s audience grew in its second year, featuring artists like Pete Wernick, The Lowest Pair, and Kyle Tuttle, who even tended bar in the Cafe for a while. Banjo enthusiasts, meanwhile, traveled from as far away as Minnesota, Arizona, and Oregon to get in on the fun.
“One of the people I spoke with at last year’s BanjoFest told me he had to catch an early flight home to Oregon the next morning, and that was really gratifying,” Osborne said. “Banjo players can be solitary folks at times, and for Swallow Hill to create a place for them to gather and learn while making new friendships speaks to its unique nature. It’s really cool.”
Swallow Hill BanjoFest is presented by The Denver Folklore Center, KGNU Community Radio, and Southwest Airlines.
As a nonprofit, ticket purchases to Swallow Hill BanjoFest support the organization’s mission of bringing more music to the Denver metro community through concerts, music classes, and preschool music programs.
TICKETS: Get your tickets and complete details about the 3rd Annual Swallow Hill BanjoFest here
Kaia Kater
Kaia Kater’s JUNO-winning and Polaris nominated album, Strange Medicine, is an album that celebrates the power of women and oppressed people throughout history as they rise up and turn the poison of centuries of oppression into a strange kind of medicine. Her songs are dialogues with historical figures and meditations on her own modern life as well. In the years since her 2018 album, Grenades, on Smithsonian Folkways, Kater has taken time to reinvent herself and hone her skills, first attending film school to learn composition, then diving deeper into her songwriting to come up with her most personal album yet.
Feeling the pressure as a talented young songwriter, banjo player, and bandleader with three successful albums and an NPR Tiny Desk Concert under her belt, Kater struggled initially with the expectations of her adopted genre, Americana. “I was factoring everybody else’s perception into my songwriting,” she says. “Would I write more honestly if I knew that no one would ever hear this?” With that in mind, Kater retreated to her apartment in Montréal. Sitting at home with her banjo, the songs unfolded in personal intimacy, revealing windows into the perspective of women and revolutionaries through history.
Allison de Groot & Nic Gareiss
Through their collaboration, the duo of Allison de Groot & Nic Gareiss expand the conceptions and conventions of both banjo and percussive dance. In 2022 they released The Thrill, a visual album inspired by the music of Appalachian musician Hobart Smith. The duo spent concentrated time immersing themselves in archival recordings of Smith (1897-1965) to create the album. “We listened in hopes of having a conversation with his music,” Gareiss says, “not attempting to replicate – which would be impossible! – but hoping for a discourse, a tiff, a dialogue with his music.” The title itself comes from a quote from Hobart: “music fills you with a thrill you just can’t express.”
de Groot was shaped by the music scene in her hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, and holds a Bachelor of Music in Performance from Berklee College of Music in Boston. She has been awarded both the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Eisenson Family Prize for Excellence in American Roots Music.
Holding a MA in Ethnochoreology from the University of Limerick, Gareiss received the 2021 Michigan Heritage Award, the region’s highest honor bestowed on traditional artists, and was named “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine.
Natalie Spears
Natalie Spears brings listeners in touch with the warmth of community, the quiet awe of wild places, and the intimate corners of humanity. Her recent album, The Hymn of Wild Things, is a collection of songs about the intimate corners of humanity, hers and ours alike. She grew up in a home brimming with music. When she moved to Colorado in her early twenties, Spears discovered clawhammer banjo from a co-worker while building straw-bale houses. Old-time Appalachian music is a communal activity, a perfect match for the tight-knit, community spirit of mountain town living. She added banjo to her quiver of instruments and started writing songs.