Alison Brown

bluegrass · folk · jazz

Alison Brown is an American banjo player, guitarist, composer and record executive, born August 7, 1962 in Hartford, Connecticut, whose music draws on bluegrass, jazz, Celtic and Latin styles. She started guitar at eight and banjo at ten, met the fiddler Stuart Duncan at twelve and began touring with him, winning the Canadian National Banjo Championship as a teenager and recording the duo album Pre-Sequel with Duncan in 1981. She studied history and literature at Harvard and later earned an MBA from UCLA, then spent two years as an investment banker at Smith Barney in San Francisco before turning to music full time. Alison Krauss invited her to join Union Station in 1987, and Brown played in the band for three years; in 1991, after moving to Tennessee, she was named banjo player of the year by the International Bluegrass Music Association, the first woman to win one of that organization's instrumental awards. She spent 1992 as bandleader for Michelle Shocked, an experience that pushed her toward the hybrid of bluegrass, jazz and folk that has defined her own writing. In 1995 she and her husband, bassist Garry West, founded the independent label Compass Records, which has since absorbed the Green Linnet, Mulligan and Red House catalogs; Brown also produces for other artists, among them Dale Ann Bradley, Claire Lynch, Bobby Osborne and The Special Consensus. Her albums include Simple Pleasures in 1990, Twilight Motel, Look Left and Quartet for Vanguard, then Out of the Blue, Fair Weather in 2000, Replay, Stolen Moments, Evergreen, The Company You Keep, The Song of the Banjo in 2015 and On Banjo in 2023 for Compass. She won the Grammy for best country instrumental performance in 2001 with Bela Fleck for Leaving Cottondale, and received the IBMA's Distinguished Achievement Award in 2015. In 2025 she released the single Five Days Out, Two Days Back with Steve Martin. Live she leads a small band through instrumental and vocal material in theaters and clubs such as the Stoughton Opera House and The Hamilton in Washington.

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