Regular readers of this blog know I attended the Midwest Banjo Camp back in June. I noticed they posted a few videos last week from this year’s camp concerts. There were two faculty concerts, once on the Friday and the other on the Saturday evening.

Here’s Chuck Levy with Erynn Marshall…

Chuck led the slow jams, which were handy for the “jam challenged” players (like me). I’ve been learning pretty much in isolation and haven’t had much jam experience. I participated in a couple of Chuck’s slow jams, and found them to be a really good confidence booster. I finally felt comfortable enough to start playing in intermediate jams. While I found some of the tunes difficult to jump in and play along to, I surprised myself in managing to find something to play in most of the tunes – and in some  other tunes I was able to play with some confidence.

Here’s Adam Hurt with Mike Compton on mandolin. Adam Hurt is a very strong teacher as well as being a great player. I took his class on fills where we started with a basic melody and inserted various fills to build an arrangement.

Then there were the Bluegrass guys. There were some very fine Scruggs-style players at camp.

I took one class at camp from Joe Newberry – all about the Galax lick. He’s a very likeable fellow. I was impressed Joe took the trouble to learn everyone’s name. He taught by ear and was really good at making sure everyone in the class got down what he was teaching.

Here’s Joe with Bruce Molsky, Mike Compton and more playing Rockingham Cindy.

I hope they post more videos soon – these brought me right back to camp.