Alison Brown
Balancing Banjo & Business
by Kerry Dexter

Alison Brown is a composer, instrumentalist, bandleader, and co-founder of a record company. "It's a very interesting place to be," she said. "I don't think that there are that many people who really can see things from both sides. I'm really grateful that I have the artist's background. I understand where artists' questions are coming from when they ask about certain things, because I remember not knowing about them, either. I've been on the artist's side and continue to be, but now I can see both sides of the fence. I also see the sales, the marketing, mechanicals and royalties and how all that stuff works together."

Though Brown was drawn to music early — she began learning fingerpicked guitar when she was eight and banjo two years later — she didn't envision a career as a player. "I never, from the time I was a little kid, had an image of myself as an adult as a musician. My parents are both lawyers, as is my sister, and a doctor, actually, is what I think they were hoping for for me," Brown said, "and I always expected that I'd go into a profession." That didn't prevent the young Brown from immersing herself in learning music. She started playing acoustic guitar when her parents showed her some things that they'd learned from folk guitar lessons they were taking, "...and when I got good enough they said it was okay for me to take my own lessons," Brown said. "My guitar teacher brought over an Earl Scruggs record one day, and I just loved the sound of the banjo. I wanted to learn how to make that sound." She began to master Scruggs' technique, and listened to his records as well as those of David Grisman and Tony Rice, and her father's recordings of jazz guitarist Joe Pass.

"I think there's always been a big melodic content in what I've listened to," she said. "I think bluegrass is a really melodic music — which sounds odd, but really in bluegrass that's how you tell one tune from another, because the time signatures are all pretty much the same."

Brown doesn't mind that duality, or the dual careers in which she works. She finds it a challenge to be on both the business and artistic sides of music. "I feel like it's a real blessing to have the ability to have that challenge. I feel very, very fortunate to have created a situation for myself where I can do both things as simultaneously as I'm able to. It's hard, because I tend to put in such long hours at the office and then come home at night and work on writing music for a new record after dinner, at ten o'clock or eleven o'clock at night — that's sometimes a little difficult. But I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity. When I was just a musician riding around on somebody else's bus, I felt like there was something missing from my life, and if I were just doing the business side of a company, whether it was this company or an investment bank, I'd really miss the music side. So I guess it's my challenge to figure out the right balance between the two."