Richard Collins

The versatile Richard Collins has more than once held off all competition at British bluegrass championships and plays in a variety of bands, one with a repertoire ranging from the court music of Vivaldi to folk songs from the border of England and Scotland to country & western. Collins has gotten so polished in the latter category that by the late '90s he was getting requests to cross the pond and pick at sessions in Nashville. Several Collins projects got rave reviews in the early years of the new millennium, including his own A Band Like Alice's debut release in the EMI new music series and a particularly diverse Simon Mayor album heralding the arrival of a new threat to international musical security, the Mandolinquents. Led by virtuoso mandolinist Mayor, this quartet allows Collins a chance to shine on mandolin as well as banjo, and also features the wonderful sounds of the mandobass, as played by Hilary James. Collins also works with the group ABLA, an excellent ensemble coming more out of traditional British folk and folk-rock styles that is sometimes mistaken for a typesetter's clumsy struggle with Scandinavian pop music. Gary Payne serves as the guitarist and vocalist frontman in this unit, which also highlights the mandolin playing of Alan Ward as well as Bob Winquist's fiddle fancies and harmony singing. Having been judged to be the United Kingdom's finest bluegrass banjoist some three years in a row, Collins' ambitions have now expanded to embrace a project with the capability of astonishing professional musicians throughout the world. He is trying to assemble the largest collection of jokes about banjos and banjo players in history. Perhaps this is not such a challenge after all, since the only existing collections, probably consisting of about a dozen...