Banjoree Pictures!

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From April 15th to 17th of 2005, the first European Banjoree took place in the hills above Hagen, near Dortmund, Germany. There were dozens of banjo players from Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and the United States. It was orgnized by Veit Doehler of Acoustic City, Andreas Benkhofer, and Reinhard Gress. Go to the Banjoree webpage for details on the program of the event in German and English. All in all, it was a great time, as I hope these pictures will help demonstrate.

All the pictures were taken by me unless otherwise noted. You can feel free to download any of the pictures I took and use them however you want. If you have pictures of the Banjoree that you would like to me to include here, just e-mail them to me.

Please also contact me if there are gaps or errors in my commentary. I took notes, but may have made errors.

If these pictures weren't enough for you, the official webpage of the banjoree now has a lot of picures up as well.

Enjoy the pictures and see y'all next time!

Mark R.Hatlie
Tübingen, Germany

Mark's Pictures of the Hagen Banjoree...

This rather blurry shot was taken at Jürgen Biller's workshop on bluegrass picking. The guy in front of the middle window is Markus Rodway. The layed back guy on the right is Ulrich Wortmann. I don't have names for the others.

Joachim Kirchhoff was also at the Biller workshop.

This was also at Jürgen Biller's bluegrass picking workshop. Is that Corinna Gaese picking with Wolfgang Lugmair? I'm not sure about her name. Notice Wolfgang is picking a Capek banjo, a rare site despite being a fine, Czech-made instrument.

More from the Biller workshop. Here, we see Rolf Arndt, Peter Huber and Markus Rodway.

That's Jürgen with the long hair. Edu Grin and Joost Van Es (of Four Wheel Drive) sit between him and Peter Huber.

The guitar player is Matthias Malcher of Groundspeed, Jan Michielson on bass.

Well, by the time the first workshop was over, the first Saturday jamming was already well underway. Here, Gerhard Pehland (left), (who can be seen here in a similar picture elsewhere) is entertaining onlookers with Nuka (back to camera), who has his own webpage here. Philipp Antar wants his banjo back.

When the WDR TV station came by to do a story on us, they had all of us banjo players stand together and play Cripple Creek. I couldn't get more than a few dozen of us at once.

Rolf Arndt, Peter Huber and Robert Rott take a break between jams. On Friday night, Rolf let me play that Stelling he's got. Nice!

I stopped by the clawhammer workshop by Jochen Breuer for a few minutes. He was making a strong case for pickless playing.

Here, Veit Doehler, one of the weekend's organizers, treats my Deering to a new song. Veit is pronounced "fight"!

This was probably the highpoint of the weekend for me. Frank Wortmann (left in the green shirt playing mando) Ulrich Wortmann (sitting, playing the banjo dobro style), and I sat down to pick some tunes. We were joined by and more and more people. Shown here are Peter Huber (guitar), Rolf Arndt (autoharp), Joachim Kirchhoff (banjo, background), Philipp Antar (banjo, back to camera) and Peter Ellerbrock (dobro). (By the way, while it is not uncommon to find intelligent, dilligent and gifted people among banjo players, who would have thought that we were jamming with an echter Kulturmensch?)

The jam continued to grow... (photo by Joachim Kirchhoff)

and grow...The picture still only shows about 1/4th of the people playing. That's Andreas Leckebusch on the mando, me exuberantly picking the banjo and, in the Hawaii shirt on the far right, Bernd Vollbach. (photo by Joachim Kirchhoff)

Things got a little quieter, but playing continued on unabated until dinner. Here, Bruno Van Hoek (standing), Philipp Antar (background) and Nuka pick a trio. Bruno plays with a band called Skyland. Phil's got a webpage going as well.

Here, I am doing some advanced frailing on one of the more finely handcrafted open back instruments they had on display in Hagen.
(photo by Joachim Kirchhoff)

Here, left to right, are Nuka, Bruno Van Hoek, Philipp Antar, Robert Fazzio (who has his own bluegrass supply webstore here) and Gerhard Pehland demonstrating proper playing stance. Robert just doesn't understand faded jeans, does he?

Nuka and Philipp Antar play Foggy Mountain Breakdown together on one banjo!

Here I am playing with Lars Leckebusch, who seemed to switch back and forth between guitar and mando at will. Who is the banjo hand on the right? There were three or four players at that jam over the course of an hour or two. (photo by Robert Fazzio)

Obi Barthmann (left) and Bernd Vollbach seem to be putting Joachim Kirchhoff to sleep. Or is it the beer?

On Saturday night, there was a major jam in the foyer centered on the band Four Wheel Drive. Here, we see Joost Van Es on fiddle, Nuka and Obi Barthmann on banjo, Bernd Vollbach (back to camera in the immediate forground) on guitar and Jan Michielson on bass.

Lars Leckebusch was part of it...

And Peter Ellerbrock, here again on dobro, was the guy who actually started the whole jam. By the time this picture was taken, however, he was only a cog in the great machine, stuck in the corner with a glass of wine and Bernd Vollbach.

Same jam. Joachim Kirchhoff on guitar, Edu Grin on mando, Joost Van Es on fiddle, part of Obi Barthmann on banjo (far right). The banjo on the left is Matthias Malcher.

There was a wedding party going on in the same building. Robert Fazzio led a troop of players over and tried to crash it. Well, it seems they actually liked it!

That same night, Clarke Buehling treated those who happened to be there to some turn-of-the-century (last century!), pickless-picking. Nice sound! Check him out here or at the webpage of The Skirtlifters. He also did a workshop together with Ulf Jagfors of Sweden on the history of the banjo. Ulf, who is serious scholar of banjo lore brought those African banjos and replicas of ancient instruments you see in the background.

While the main jam was still raging, a few of us absconded to another room for a counterjam. That's Christian Goettling on bass, Joachim Kirchhoff in the red shirt, and Wander Van Duin in the red pants (playing clawhammer). I don't know the name of the gentleman in the foreground.

On Sunday morning, I tried to throw together a "slow jam" or "beginners' jam". Christina Gaese is shown here picking with Ulrich Wortmann. Both Frank and Ulrich Wortmann repeatedly demonstrated a desire to teach and knack for teaching. They both showed patience and seemed to enjoy playing with beginners.

Here is Wim Van de Weg telling his set-up workshop all about banjo bridges.

Karsten Schnoor was also a tutor in the set-up workshop. He and Wim both shared that rare experience for frailers of having bluegrass pickers actually pay attention to them.

Here are Stelling-schnuckis Maike Hoeft and Veit Doehler, caught by surprise.

This is the last picture I took at Hagen, on Sunday morning. It shows Clarke Buehling (left) and Johannes Bonefaas dueling it out on ancient fretless banjos while Jochen Breuer looks on and listens in.

That's all I have. If anybody else has any pictures of the event, and would like me to include them here or link to them from here, please get in touch.

In closing, I offer a song I thought up on the train on the way up to Hagen. I was hoping it could serve as a kind of official song, but I didn't work hard enough at the event itself to publicize it. I only sang it a few times at small jams. The melody is Wildwood Flower:

I told her I loved her and called her my flower
But I dumped her 'cause my train it leaves in an hour
To Hagen I'm going to old Germany
To the first European five-string Banjoree!

Keep on pickin'!