About this ebook
About the author
Pat Cloud was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and discovered the five-string banjo by chance at age
fourteen when his mother purchased a used swap-meet banjo as a wall decoration. By age sixteen, he
was playing professionally and toured with the USO Bob Hope Oriental Command tours of 1967 and 1970
and in the early 1970s, appearances on television include the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, and PBS.
He has been a Los Angeles studio musician for 25 years.
In 1972, he began jazz studies with former Nat King Cole guitarist, Horace Hatchett and then with
William Thaisher (co-author of the Joe Pass guitar books), and started to adapt a fluid jazz
vocabulary to five-string banjo utilizing melodic technique pioneered by such banjoists as Carrol
Best, Bobby Thompson and Bill Keith.
In 1974, he, joined briefly with mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau and country music great Keith Whitley
forming the "New Tradition" band playing Bluegrass throughout the southeast.
Between 1976 and 1980, he continued jazz studies with jazz vibraphone player Dave Pike and
continued in the Los Angeles studio circuit along with associations with the Walt Disney
Corporation and the UCLA jazz workshop.
In 1983, he recorded the album "Higher Power" with Barry Solomon and Bob Applebaum on the Flying
Fish label and was nominated that same year in the best "new instrument" category by Downbeat
Magazine.
He is included in the 1988 Oak publication, Masters of the Five-String Banjo, in which Tony Trishka
says:
"He is the first five-string player to achieve a wide-reaching command of the jazz vocabulary, and
as such inhabit a rarefied world which he now shares with a select few. To hear him play is
amazing, but to watch him elicit those streams of "boppish" notes from a predominantly bluegrass
instrument is other-worldly."
ln.1989, he was awarded "Banjo Player of the Year" by the California Country Music Association.
In 1992, he participated in the Tennessee Banjo Institute with other banjo notables including John
Hartford, Douglas Dillard, Carl Jackson, Grandpa Jones, Bill Keith, Taj Mahal, Mike Seeger, Ralph
Stanley, Tony Trishka, Doc Watson, and legendary New Orleans banjoist Danny Barker.
Pat Cloud makes his home in the Eastern Sierras in central California.
