Alison Brown

Alison Brown began her music career at a young age, playing banjo in several Southern California bands alongside fiddler Stuart Duncan as a teenager. After graduating from high school, bluegrass took a back seat while Brown attended Harvard University, earned an MBA, and worked as an investment banker. Following successful tours with both Alison Krauss and Michelle Shocked, a Grammy-nomination for her first solo effort Simple Pleasures, and the Banjo Player of the Year award from the International Bluegrass Music Association, Brown put her business skills to work, founding Compass Records in 1995 with her husband Garry West. Brown’s discography includes 5 releases on Vanguard Records as well as 4 on Compass Records. Brown tours internationally with the Alison Brown Quartet, has been a guest speaker at Harvard Business School, Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School, and the University of Colorado Boulder, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Led by Grammy-nominated banjoist Alison Brown, the Alison Brown Quartet offers up an astonishingly original instrumental sound that blends jazz, bluegrass, latin and folk music and takes the banjo far from its stereotyped hillbilly roots. Since 1994, the Quartet has been touring nationally and abroad and has garnered extensive critical acclaim.

Alison Brown Quotes:
“Warm, inventive, spirited and challenging by turn, it is one of the finest records I’ve heard in a long, long time. Alison Brown deserves your attention. In fact she deserves a lot more than that!” - HOT PRESS
“Brown brings the best of ensemble playing from jazz and marries it with the keenest bluegrass sensibilities . . . the ultimate treat for fans of either musical genre, but for the most part punters who like their music shaken, stirred and stretched until it aches gloriously.” - IRISH TIMES
“Stolen Moments shows how sweetly she has taught her banjo to sing, whether humming winkingly behind the melody or delivering it with a breathy humanness that is as technically awesome as it is melodically seductive.” – BOSTON GLOBE
“Brown’s finger-rolling banjo patterns weave a bright thread through a colorfully arranged collection of original and familiar tunes.” – WASHINGTON POST
“Just out is Stolen Moments (Brown’s) most naturally flowing, verging on seamless synthesis of hoedown, Celtic and jazz.” – PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS
“Alison Brown left a career in investment banking for a life as a banjo musician. Anyone who thinks this was a foolish move hasn’t heard her play.” – NEW YORKER
“Stolen Moments …strikes a comfortable pose between homey twang and sophisticated jazz leaning; it might rile purists of both types, but it makes a lovely sound for the rest of us.” –TIME OUT NY
“One of bluegrass’s great banjo players, Brown is most notable for integrating jazz’s musical complexity with the bucolic mannerisms of bluegrass.” – THE VILLAGE VOICE
“Stolen Moments is the latest from banjo wizard Alison Brown, and it sits squarely in the superb column….Alison Brown is coming to get you, music fans. She’s got Paul Simon, Sam Bush and Jimi Hendrix in her posse, and she isn’t planning ..ping before nightfall…These guest star-laden experiments in genre-blending are rarely a good idea. But Alison Brown is packing some serious banjo, and she knows how to use it. Cool your heels and let her overtake you.” – POPMATTERS.COM
“Brown’s sweet, fluid jazz fusions are as sophisticated as they are beguiling.” ---The Boston Globe
“…highly recommended to anyone who loves acoustic swing.” -- JazzReview.com
“…the influences of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Wes Montgomery, and Bill Evans can be heard on Out of the Blue…she is breaking new ground and winning over folks who think they don’t like banjo.” -- Jazz Times
"Smashingly Original!" -- Stereo Review
“Striking original melodies with bluegrass, jazz, classical, folk and world-music rhythms coursing throught them.” -- The Wall Street Journal
“Roll over Flatt & Scruggs and tell Pete Seeger the news: Alison Brown is bringing the banjo back to jazz…she boldly goes with banjo where it’s never gone before. And it’s an ear-opening pleasure.” -- The Hollywood Reporter
"A genre bending banjoist...Brown and her special guests head down tricky side roads packed with minor-key melodies and unexpected turns...Brown isn’t just offering a reverent look back at the banjo’s past; she’s also pointing out how wide open its future is. " -- Pulse
"Compass Records has turned into one of the more interesting small labels (around)." Associated Press
"One of the greatest banjo players of our time...There’s a beautiful calmness in her playing while burning your face off. She just stands there politely like a lady and rips it to shreds" Mike Marshall
"To play the capitalist music game and yet still deal with playing her instrument, it’s defying gravity." Mike Marshall
"(Fair Weather) has texture and ease throughout" Gavin
"’Fair Weather’ tweaks convention at several turns" USA Today
"The pre-eminent female banjoist in acoustic music" Country Standard Time
"A genre bending banjoist...Brown and her special guests head down tricky side roads packed with minor-key melodies and unexpected turns...Brown isn’t just offering a reverent look back at the banjo’s past; she’s also pointing out how wide open its future is. ***1/2" Pulse Magazine
"A warm and winning program consisting primarily of original instrumentals...a perfect blend of traditional Scruggs-style picking and jazzier melodic technique...(’Leaving Cottondale’ w/ Bela Fleck is) 30 seconds of absolutely jaw-dropping twin-banjo counterpoint!...A very enjoyable album from a singular talent."" Bluegrass Unlimited
"Bluegrass is lucky to claim a part of ALison’s musical genius!" Bluegrass Now
"’Fair Weather’ is sonically fantastic!...Alison Brown demonstrates that she is among the banjo elite...a world class banjo player." Vintage Guitar Magazine

msprm name="allowScriptAccess" val