Beginning Mandolin with Tom Bekeny

Tom Bekeny is a mandolinist, fiddler and seasoned mandolin teacher who has performed and taught in the U.S. and abroad for over 40 years - so when he breaks down how to play, you are learning from someone who has spent a lifetime both on stage and in the lesson room.

He was the mandolinist in such San Francisco Bay Area bands as Done Gone, Tenbrooks, and an early version of the Grant Street String Band with Laurie Lewis. He has appeared with Peter Rowan, the Rowan Brothers, David Grisman, George Cole, vocalist Lua Hadar, and Jerry Garcia. Tom has played mandolin with the highly acclaimed Kathy Kallick Band for almost 20 years and has held the fiddle spot with California's premiere traditional bluegrass band, High Country, since 1988. He has recorded with many of these groups and was featured in the Summer 2009 issue of Mandolin Magazine.

Tom also plays in the wildly popular trad bluegrass "jam" band, Bangers and Grass, alongside west coast bluegrass luminaries Jim Nunally, Steve Pottier, Bill Evans and Chad Manning.

Beyond bluegrass, Tom plays jazz mandolin with his trio The Missing Man Quartet (MM4), which plays straight-ahead jazz with original arrangements drawing material from the world of jazz and Great American Songbook standards. He released a solo CD project ("Jazzolin") in 2013, on which he plays mandolin and fiddle backed by drums and bass.