Feature Article - Fall 1996

Tony Furtado

Breakdowns, Ballads, and Blues

By Julie Melrose

As a junior high student in the early '80s, Tony Furtado felt torn between two potential occupations: astro- physicist and banjoist. "Then I discovered a lot of astro-physics work was applied to nuclear war," he recalled in a recent conversation. "I said, 'Forget that. I'm gonna be a banjo player and make people happy.'" At the prodigious age of 28, he has already fulfilled that resolution.

Tony has twice won the National Bluegrass Banjo Championship at Winfield, KS (1987, 1991), and has to his credit three Rounder solo albums: Swamped (1990); Within Reach (1992) and Full Circle (1994). Equally skilled as an ensemble player, he backed Laurie Lewis in Grant Street from 1988 to 1991, then organized the Rounder Banjo Extravaganza Live! tour and album, in which he performed with Tony Trischka and Tom Adams. His collaboration with Alison Krauss on the Beatles tune "I Will" was included in both Tony's Within Reach and Alison's double-platinum Now That I've Found You albums.

Tony has also recorded or toured with feminist musicians Theresa Trull and Cris Williamson, bluegrass duo Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick, guitarist Scott Nygaard, dobroist Sally Van Meter, Stony Lonesome vocalist Kate McKenzie, Boulder's String Cheese Incident and New England band Salamander Crossing.

Sugarbeat--a group Tony pulled together shortly before the 1992 Telluride Bluegrass Festival--won the event's "new band" contest that year and released a self-titled album on the festival organization's Blue Planet label. Tony provided solo mini-sets between main stage acts at Telluride this year.

All of this seems an unlikely evolution for a youngster who grew up in Pleasanton, California, without much exposure to music.

"My family wasn't musical at all. When I was a little kid, my dad used to play Tony Orlando and Dawn's 'Tie A Yellow Ribbon' record a lot. Then there was a period with almost no music in the house, but I rediscovered it. My mom bought me one of those little Hammond organs, and I used to mess around on that and try to write little tunes. She asked if I wanted to take keyboard lessons, but I said no, because everyone did that. I didn't want to play what everyone else was playing."

This insistence on originality led Tony to design a banjo-like instrument before he really knew what a banjo was. "I was big into creating stuff--little balsa wood airplanes and other inventions. In sixth grade, I took a required 'intro to music' course. We had to do a report on a famous classical composer (I did Beethoven), and we also had to make an instrument and report on it. That was the most exciting part to me, because I could build something with my hands."

The day the assignment was given, said Tony, he started planning his musical creation while still at school. "I decided I would make a fiddle by gluing paper on top of a pie pan, painting it with latex paint, stretching it in the oven, hooking a stick onto the pan, putting rubber band frets around the stick (little did I know a fiddle didn't have frets), and stringing it up with nylon fishing line."

When Tony got home that evening and started looking for materials, a happy accident set him straight about the true identity of the instrument he was building. Roy Clark was on a TV talk show with a banjo. The youngster got a crash course in the history of the instrument while preparing his school report, and begged his parents to give him a banjo for his 12th birthday. "Well actually, I begged them for either a banjo or a chemistry set, but I got the banjo--a Japanese import that I still have. I was so happy! I couldn't believe how great a real instrument sounded. I immediately started trying to pick out 'Dueling Banjos' with one finger. Of course, I put the picks on backwards, because I had no idea what I was doing."

Tony credits his first local banjo teacher with turning him on to a variety of banjo applications—including the bluegrass picking of Earl Scruggs and the folk-rock playing of John McEuen (then with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) and Bernie Leadon (formerly of the Eagles).

The eager banjo student learned mostly from tab until age 15, when he began studying with Rick Shubb (of Shubb capo fame). "The first thing Rick said was, 'Lock up all your tabs in a drawer. You're not going to be using them for a while. Everything we do is going to be by ear. You're going to tape lessons so you can listen to them at home, and you're going to improvise a lot.' And I did. We'd sit and play one tune for 20 minutes, and I'd have to play a different break every time."

During that same period, Tony discovered and began practicing scales. He also cross-trained with classical guitar lessons for six months to strengthen his left hand.

Like many fledgling banjo players, Tony went through an initial obsessive period. "In summer, I would alternately play my banjo and eat for 12 or 13 hours a day. During the school year, I would do my homework during the day so there would be more time to play after I got home. I even took music theory books to school to read when I could get away with it."

In his later teens, having acquired a late-'70s Gibson RB-250, Tony became self-taught on the instrument itself, but turned to West Coast player Avram Siegel for lessons in jazz theory as applied to the banjo. "I wanted to know how to make all the dots connect, and how to create really quickly--how to tap into something and make it flow while at the same time making music from the soul." He joined a local band and got an intoxicating first taste of hearing his originals played in a group setting. "At that point, I was writing both very playable tunes and totally bizarre ones. But it felt great to be up on a stage watching other people enjoying my music."

After spending time at California State University to pursue some specific art and music knowledge, Tony concluded that his aspirations would be best served by becoming a full-time musician. By age 20, he was touring with Laurie Lewis and being mentored by multi- instrumentalist Mike Marshall, who encouraged him to put out a solo album.

Tony took that encouragement to heart. With his parents' financial support ("they essentially used my college money") and Marshall as producer, he recorded Swamped independently and began searching for a label.

"We shopped the project around all over the place, but no one wanted to put out a banjo album by a 20- year-old kid, even though I was playing in Laurie's band. Then we gave it to Ken Irwin at Rounder, and he said, 'Yeah, I'll put it out.' I think Ken realized I was driven and really wanted to make this career thing work."

Tony quickly got hooked on the recording process. "Actually, the first tune I ever recorded professionally was 'Reilly and Spencer' with Laurie's band. I immediately realized I loved the studio. It was scary, but also fun. You were putting down something that was forever."

Only a couple of months later, Tony returned to the studio to record his own tunes. It took him a while to get comfortable there and adopt realistic expectations. "Recording is like taking a microscope to your playing. Your mistakes become very obvious to you in the studio, and you can get very nervous and highly self-critical. I still really work at making each recording perfect, but I've learned that an album budget allows you to do only so much."

As Tony's first producer, Marshall helped his protégé loosen up in the stressful environment, functioning as "a combination producer and guidance counselor." Other stellar producers who have helped guide Tony's solo projects include dobroist Jerry Douglas, fiddler Stuart Duncan and Sugarbeat producer/engineer Cookie Marenco.

Tony currently has a "have instrument, will travel" lifestyle that generally finds him touring the U.S. and Europe between recording projects. "I'm just a musical gypsy. I basically like touring. When I'm on the road for months, I can get sick of it--but after I'm home in Boulder for a couple of weeks, I get itchy to hit the road again."

An enthusiastic private teacher and workshop leader, Tony shared with Pete Wernick this year's banjo faculty chair at Planet Bluegrass's RockyGrass Academy. To meet requests for tabs of his originals and arrangements, he distributes a book that includes 21 tunes from five different albums (see Classy Classifieds). Sugarbeat performs only occasionally these days to give its members time to pursue other interests, but Tony said the group has offered him a great opportunity to develop his skills.

"Sugarbeat's music was exactly what I was hearing in my head during the period when the group formed: songs and instrumentals that incorporated Irish music, bluegrass and all kinds of other things. Doing those tunes day after day gave me discipline, and the space to tighten up both my own playing and my work with other people. Once that happened, we had a great little playground for creative experimentation." Tony's creativity often expresses itself through unorthodox fingerings, which he said allow him to use exactly the style that suits his ear on each phrase of a tune. "Learning breaks from records while I was growing up, I would often come up with alternative fingerings. The same applied to scales. I might not do them the way others would, or the way a person would logically think them out, but those fingerings felt comfortable to me and I liked the way they sounded."

This penchant for careful attention to fingerings underlies Tony's uniquely powerful Irish music sound, which reproduces the reedy punch of uilleann pipes on a stringed instrument. "Again, there may be easier ways to play the notes, but you can't get the punch and the drive unless you hit those notes a certain way.“ In fact, Tony's main Irish music inspiration comes from pipe tunes. "That's the sound I love and the sound I'm looking for. It's got the most power, to my ear." Because Irish music is "so much about ornament," said Tony, he spends a lot of time playing along with recordings to learn the musical nuances "straight from the horse's mouth."

He uses the same approach when learning new bluegrass tunes. "Even after I've memorized the notes, I'll still play along with the record over and over until I'm sure I've gotten the feel of it. It's like learning a language. You might know the words and how to say them, but until you get around people who speak that language, and you speak it with them and get all the little twists and turns and inflections, the accent isn't going to be right."

Tony's fascination with Irish music is somewhat of a mystery to him, since his own ethnic background is primarily Italian and Portuguese. However, he has discovered a musical forebear through a vintage family photograph given to him by his grandmother.

"It's a beautiful picture from the 1920s of my great-uncle, who came over on the boat from Italy. He's sitting playing a slide guitar not unlike my Martin, and my grandmother said he also played banjo and mandolin. The really freaky thing is that he was called Tony. I don't know what kind of music he played, but I've been thinking about him a lot now that I'm playing slide guitar."

For the past two years, Tony has been immersed in multi-instrument exploration that draws equally on delta blues and Celtic influences. His blues compositions tend to be performed on bottleneck slide guitar, while most of the Irish tunes are set on the banjo. Still seeking to "connect the dots," Tony sees this as an interim separation of what will eventually be integrated.

"The two styles already come together when I write, but I study them separately just to keep my wits about it. I do mess around a bit with slide work on the banjo--transfer the tunes, or learn how to reproduce phrases on my Dobro banjo. The instruments I take on stage now for solo shows are a 1989 Gibson Earl Scruggs model banjo, a wooden dobjo, a steel-bodied resophonic banjo prototype that was just designed for the National Guitar Company by Ron Saul, and a small Martin guitar which I use for bottleneck and fingerstyle playing."

On stage, depending on which instrument he feels inspired to pick up at a given moment, Tony may launch into a bluegrass number, a set of Irish tunes or an original blues ballad. "It's still a struggle to integrate all this, but I know it's going to come together in a couple of years. Then I may decide to transfer it all back to the banjo. I'm just going with the flow and whatever feels natural."

Developing his multi-instrumental abilities has opened up exciting recording possibilities for Tony. On a new Rounder solo album due out in 1997, as well as a project-in-the-works with Sugarbeat mandolinist Matt Flinner, he plans to use "all of the instruments I play in my solo show--probably a couple of them on each tune. It will give me a chance to put the tunes together in the studio the way I really hear them. It's going to be a lot of fun."

To communicate his vision to colleagues, Tony makes rough multi-track demos on regular stereo cassette recorders, playing back on one deck while adding new parts on another. "I make these weird tapes with hiss on them for my producers. Then we go into the studio and make a clear version, and it doesn't sound right to me," said Tony, laughing.

Tony said putting together a viable career as an itinerant live performer, composer and recording artist becomes easier and more enjoyable the longer he does it. "I've always found a way to make it work, and I really couldn't do anything else. This is all I've wanted to do since I got that first banjo." The fact that his career is in a period of relatively smooth sailing, however, doesn't mean Tony feels any less compelled to keep growing and inventing. On the contrary, he uses his level of creative engagement to assess whether his choice of banjo over astro-physics is still the right one for him. "I think of my musical curiosity as ongoing. If I ever get to the point where I'm through trying to learn new things, then I'm through--period."