Punch Brothers (from left, Noam Pikelny, Chris Eldridge, Paul Kowert, Chris Thile and Brittany Haas).
With a nontraditional approach to a traditional genre, the Grammy-winning band Punch Brothers will bring its virtuosic playing, sophisticated arrangements and music-geek humor to The Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, May 14, to start a national tour. The band is at the center of a rising movement that is called newgrass, progressive bluegrass or modern string music.
“We kind of look like a bluegrass band, but we play our own music, which is kind of divergent,” says bassist Paul Kowert.
The band was founded in 2006 by mandolinist Chris Thile, who gained national attention when he succeeded Garrison Keillor as the host of the radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” and then reconfigured it as “Live From Here.” He took the group’s name from a Mark Twain short story, “Punch, Brothers, Punch!,” about a maddeningly infectious jingle sung by train conductors.
The band debuted in 2007 at a Carnegie Hall festival curated by contemporary classical composer John Adams. They played a 40-minute suite “The Blind Leaving the Blind” that had elements of folk, jazz and classical. The following year, the band launched its first tour and released its debut album, Punch, on the eclectic Nonesuch label.
Since then, the band’s albums have topped the bluegrass and folk charts, and their 2018 album All Ashore won the Best Folk Album Grammy.
The cover of “The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers.”
The Morristown date is the first of a long tour in which band members and crew will travel in a specially outfitted bus and eschew hotels or “living in a tube,” Kowert said. The band will be playing songs from its upcoming album The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers (to be released on July 24). Like much of what the band does, the “unsung” is a sly joke: The album is its first with no vocals.
Thile has said that once the band settled on the theme, “We all felt like kids in a candy store … so many possibilities and so much energy with which to pursue them.”
Kowert says the process of creating the album began with an Airbnb retreat so the members could compose songs without distraction. They then reconvened to polish their playing and take the songs into a recording studio.
On the album, the group rearranges three traditional tunes, which they first experimented with on their podcast, turning “foot stompers into head-scratchers,” Kowert joked.
Like his bandmates, Kowert is not a usual suspect for bluegrass. Born and raised in Wisconsin, he says he was brought up in a “classical family,” taking Suzuki violin lessons at 9. He switched to bass a few years later, which led to an appreciation of jazz and rock. He then took up the mandolin as as a teenager. “I started to go to bluegrass jams and hanging out with that crowd,” he says.
Kowert has played bass with mandolin player Mike Marshall and as part of the critically acclaimed acoustic group Hawktail. While studying with bassist Edgar Meyer, he met and briefly played with Thile. When original Punch Brothers bass player Greg Garrison left in 2008, Kowert — who was a fan of the band — auditioned, and was offered a job.
Punch Brothers’ podcast is titled “The Energy Curfew Music Hour.”
They launched their one-hour podcast series “The Energy Curfew Music Hour” in 2024. The idea behind the name is that in the near future, the country has to periodically conserve energy, so the broadcast is an acoustic last-hour before the mandatory blackout.
The band records the podcasts live at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Manhattan with two musical guests for each broadcast; Jon Batiste, Jason Isbell and Lake Street Dive have been among the participants. The podcast often features a humorous lesson in music — on subjects such as exploring unusual time signatures — and short ad parodies.
After learning that the band had just played the second of J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” in one podcast, that week’s guest, James Taylor, said to the audience, “These are not your ordinary folk musicians, I’m afraid, ladies and gentlemen. There’s some expensive education on this stage.”
After 20 years of Punch Brothers performances at concert halls and bluegrass festivals, audiences know what to expect — which is the unexpected.
“There’s a lot of bands out there who are really great at playing traditional bluegrass, and that’s awesome,” Kowert says, noting that Punch Brothers’ approach is “something else.” While the band loves its bluegrass roots as well as the hybrid strains it adds, Kowert says pigeonholing a performer’s style is besides the point.
“Any conversation about (categorization) usually leads me into something that’s furthest from the truth,” he says. “You just play music — and music that is true to you. That’s the best thing you can do.”
Punch Brothers will perform at The Mayo Center for the Performing Arts in Morristown, May 14 at 7:30 pm. Visit mayoarts.org.
For more on the band, visit punchbrothers.com.
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