Each year, comedy legend and banjo player Steve Martin bestows an award to a master of the instrument.
This Sunday, the 2023 recipient will be performing in Sarasota.
WUSF's Cathy Carter recently spoke with musician Cynthia Sayer.
The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Cynthia, when people think of the banjo, they very likely think of bluegrass or country, but you play the banjo in a totally different genre. You are a jazz banjoist.
That's true. For many years, people didn't even know how to put those two words together. My instrument is a four-string banjo, and the kind of instrument that people listen to when they hear these other genres, that's a five-string banjo. One of my missions is to reintroduce the four-string jazz banjo to the public. It has a very big part of the history of jazz, and was a part of the development of this great American genre.
And what is the major difference between the five- string and the four-string banjo?
Well, with the five-string, many people, even if they don't know anything about instruments, they might relate to the sound of the finger picking. With [a] four- string banjo, we play it with a flat pick, and so we strum it. It's a very dynamic, driving, rhythmic sound.
And the instrument was really a big part of the beginnings of jazz in New Orleans.
When you think about it, before electronics were invented, the way they used to make records into these big old horns, they couldn't hear a guitar, so banjo was what was in fashion.
In fact, if you were a guitarist in New Orleans when jazz was starting to get really hot and became the primary pop music of America, you would probably be struggling for work if you did not switch to banjo.
And later, when the guitar came into fashion, which was really around 1935-ish, many of the banjo players then switched over to the guitar.
You are very much an ambassador for the banjo. What else can you tell us about the history of the instrument?
The banjo is an African instrument and came here with enslaved people, and the way that Americans learned about it, meaning most of white America at that time, was really through minstrel shows. And minstrel shows portrayed the instrument as I think we all know today, in deeply stereotyped, racist ways.
Then there was a period where it started to catch on to the white world. I remember being shocked to learn that at one point in the late 1800s, it was also a woman's instrument, because I learned about banjo as something men played, and I was always the only woman for decades.
Most of us know jazz was a very male field, except for the vocalists. But I just wanted to say how this history of the instrument became overlooked and not included in the jazz world, which is the reason why most people are not even familiar with it in that capacity.
And Cynthia, you are a winner of the 2023 Steve Martin Banjo Award. What has that done for your career?
It's a big honor. Steve Martin's been around for a while, and he's had these banjo awards for the while, but I believe I'm only the second four-string banjoist to have received it.
Even the Steve Martin Banjo Award is understanding about banjo diversity by allowing us four -string players into the much larger field of five- string banjo. I love it. Banjo is a driving, wonderful, exciting, dynamic instrument in this context, and luckily, thanks to things like the Steve Martin Banjo Prize and all of the other work and the touring that I do, I like to think it's no longer as unusual as it used to be.
The Cynthia Sayer Hot Jazz Quartet performs at the Glenridge Performing Arts Center in Sarasota on Sunday, Jan 25.
