Banjo legend is still out there

"I love bluegrass; that's really at the heart of everything I do," says Tony Trischka. (Gregory heisler)

For Tony Trischka, playing bluegrass is like going back home.

Not that he ever really left bluegrass behind, but the banjo player extraordinaire has built an inimitable career by adding so many stylistic additions to bluegrass's tidy edifice that he rambles through a vast, stylistically polymorphous mansion mostly of his own construction.

His latest album, "Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular," on Rounder, finds him taking up residence in the intricate, finger-picking sound pioneered by Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe in the 1940s.

It's a rare return to his creative roots, and for the first time in decades Trischka, 59, is touring with a down-home bluegrass combo, a tour that brings the Double Banjo band to Club Passim on Thursday with Mike Mumford on banjo, guitarist Michael Daves, Uncle Earl bassist Amanda Kowalski, and 18-year-old Nashville fiddle phenomenon Mike Barnett (who also performs with the New England string band Northern Lights).

"I love bluegrass; that's really at the heart of everything I do, even when I'm playing progressive, crazy, out-there music," Trischka says in a phone conversation from his home in Fairlawn, N.J. "In fact, since I got out of college in 1970 and really started playing professionally I've been in only one or two true bluegrass bands. Everything else has been something at least a little off center, so this is the first bluegrass thing I've done, with minor exceptions, in the last 38 years."

Coming of age in the 1960s, Trischka absorbed myriad influences along with Scruggs's definitive three-finger bluegrass banjo style. Enamored with the studio creations of the Beatles and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, he sought out similarly experimental-minded players in the progressive bluegrass bands Country Cooking and Breakfast Special, such as Pete Wernick and Andy Statman.

"We realized we could take bluegrass and add some Hawaiian flavor, or some klezmer, or some rock 'n' roll, or anything," Trischka says. "We were sort of fearless in terms of combinations, some of which worked and some of which probably didn't work as well as we thought at the time. We'd go into the studio and Statman would play mandolin like Bill Monroe, or in Middle Eastern style, and saxophone like Albert Ayler, or honk like an R&B player."

Trischka's solo albums also took the banjo into uncharted territory, sessions that inspired young musicians just discovering bluegrass to formulate their own hybrids. It's difficult to overstate his influence on successive generations of impressionable players. Beyond his sheer banjo prowess, strongly marked by the blazing jazz fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea's Return to Forever, Trischka spread the experimental bluegrass gospel through his instructional books, videos, and cassettes, as well as generous in-person mentoring. Fiddler Darol Anger, mandolinist Chris Thile, and guitarist Tony Furtado are just a few of the acoustic Americana mavericks who cite Trischka as a seminal influence, though of course banjo players claim pride of place.

"If it wasn't for him I wouldn't be me," says banjo star Béla Fleck in a phone interview between rehearsals. "I was his protege. I studied with him and tried to learn everything he could do, which wasn't really possible. But I loved his playing, and his albums had such a big influence on me that it changed the course of my life."

Fleck plays on three tracks of "Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular," a consistently festive album that features Trischka facing off with his primary banjo influences, Scruggs and Bill Emerson, as well as players like Fleck who grew up listening to Trischka's albums, including Alison Brown, Kenny Ingram, and Noam Pikelny. Even Steve Martin, who shared a bill with Breakfast Special in a Greenwich Village bistro before making it as a stand-up comic, gets into the act, joining Trischka for a banjo duel on his original tune "The Crow," and the Shenandoah Boys' "Plunkin' Rag."

With his virtuoso technique, bottomless well of licks, and rhythmic facility, Trischka remains an essential way station for bluegrass-loving musical searchers looking to establish their own homestead.

"To whatever extent I've had an influence, I feel like I opened up some territory for other banjo players with my first couple of albums," Trischka says. "People often say it gave them a completely warped sense of what bluegrass is, which isn't such a bad thing."

Tony Trischka’s Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular performs at Club Passim (47 Palmer St., Cambridge) Thursday night at 8. Tickets are $20 at 617-492-7679, clubpassim.org.

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