solobanjo.com – Benji Flaming

The Grimm Tailor

Dedicated to the many clever, courageous, and cunning tailors of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. This is track 6 on my new CD.

The Golden Key

This is one of the new tunes written for my freshly-released solo banjo CD.

Carol of the Bells

I perform this piece at most of Monroe Crossing’s holiday shows. This is a more recent iteration of a solo banjo arrangement I originally developed and recorded on my first album, “For Brian”, back in 1995.

Titania’s Music Box

An exercise in restraint. With the exception of the introduction and ending, this tune is composed from a palette of 9 harmonics.

For those of you who don’t play stringed instruments, perhaps I should explain that a “harmonic” (in this context) is a note which is played while lightly touching the string in one of several mathematically significant locations. The finger on the string prevents certain vibrations from occurring, while leaving other vibrations unobstructed. The result is that we hear a different pitch. If you want to know more, Google and Wikipedia are your friends.

The title of this tune is, of course, a reference to the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. And yes, this is on my new solo banjo CD.

Northern Sunrise

This is my oldest solo banjo composition. I started writing it sometime in the ‘93 to ‘95 range. This video contains a number of embellishments not present in the original version, of course, but the core arrangement and melody have always remained the same.

As you’d expect, this is on the new CD.

High Above the Hills

Freedom of improvisation is one of my favorite things about playing solo material. Sometimes, it’s fun to choose just the first couple of notes you are going to play, decide how fast you are going to play them, and then see where the melody wants to go from there.

It was during these improvisational pieces that the melody in this video kept appearing. It became one of my favorite things to play, both alone and with other musicians. Last year, during the Bell Buckle Music Cruise (in the Caribean, no less) a couple dear friends of mine wrote some beautiful lyrics for this, which also furnished the tune with the title “High Above the Hills”.

You guessed it – this one is on the new CD too!