Jesper Lindberg picked up the banjo in 1965 and has not put it down since. Still touring, producing, and working as studio musician, mostly picking the banjo, but also playing steel guitar, guitar, dobro and mandolin.

“The banjo tunes on this record span from the old frailing ones, to newly recorded rock songs. Most of the tunes are recorded in 2004 and 2005, but some are recorded back in the seventies with the groups Growing Grass, Hounds of Heaven and Grus i Dojjan.
The playing styles go from frailing to Scruggs-Stanley three-finger-picking to chromatic playing, with some 6-stringed banjo played in guitar finger picking thrown in.

The Music of the New Lost City Ramblers opened the door to the banjo world of old time music for me in the middle of the sixties. The pickers & folkies of the movement gathered at Gottfrid Johansson’s music store in Gamla Stan in Stockholm, we listened & jammed. And we collected the precious Folkways records in their unglamorous cardboard boxes, and the records from County and King… We went home, slowed down the player and tried to learn the tunes.
But the biggest musical moment in my life, when the beauty of the high lonesome sound of bluegrass struck me, was when I saw the Stanley Brothers at Konserthuset in Stockholm in the spring of 1966. Ralph Stanley’s fantastic banjo playing just swept me of my feet. And it is the most powerful instrumental performance I have seen in my life. (Even compared to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar & Keith Richard who I saw later…)

Welcome to a life with five strings in the key of G. (Mostly.) Enjoy!”

JESPER LINDBERG