Bill Evans left a lasting impression on the Charlottesville music scene. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1978, the innovative banjo player stuck around town and started a concert series at C&O Restaurant with Cloud Valley, his bluegrass outfit.
The group, which also featured award- winning bassist Missy Raines, would also host guest bands and recruit premier string acts, including Peter Rowan, Hot Rize, and Sam Bush and Bela Fleck’s Newgrass Revival, to share the bill.
The series of gigs had an intimate grassroots vibe—with capacity at around 140 people—but it helped put Charlottesville on the map as a friendly stop on the national acoustic music circuit, and set Evans on a path toward a four-decade-plus career as a performer, composer, author, and teacher. Now, he returns to Charlottesville on September 28 to play The Southern Café & Music Hall with a six-piece group touring as the California Bluegrass Reunion.
“We ran the sound, put posters up around town, and got to meet our heroes,” Evans says about his early career, during a phone interview from his current home in New Mexico. “And we had a great local audience. There was a really supportive environment for music in Charlottesville at that time.”
While booking the C&O shows, Evans often found himself hanging out with the instrumental masters he admired, gathering knowledge during his formative years as a musician from banjo aces like Tony Trischka and J.D. Crowe. “These folks would oftentimes spend a few days with us, and that’s where musical associations really blossomed,” he says. “The bluegrass community, across generations, is really welcoming, so it moved us all forward professionally.”
Cloud Valley toured nationally and earned slots at some of the top bluegrass festivals in the country. Evans says one of his favorite gigs with the group was opening for Doc Watson at Old Cabell Hall.
After the band members parted ways in 1985, Evans eventually moved west to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. Music education and academic study have since remained big parts of his work. He’s written multiple books on banjo instruction and given lessons to younger successful players including Greg Liszt of Crooked Still and Chris Pandolfi of the Infamous Stringdusters.
Evans’ long-running solo show, The Banjo in America, offers a historical tour of the instrument, tracing its roots in Africa to current styles of playing. A CD/DVD set of the performance, which covers 250 years of the banjo’s sonic evolution, came out earlier this year.
The release adds to his lengthy discography, which includes a handful of solo albums and credits as a member of Due West and Dry Branch Fire Squad.
During his time in California, Evans became embedded in the Bay Area’s progressive string scene, collaborating with some of the genre’s biggest boundary pushers, including mandolin whiz Mike Marshall and dynamic fiddler Darol Anger.
Both appear on Evans’ guest-heavy 2012 album In Good Company, perhaps the most well-rounded look at his fleet-fingered prowess. On the record, winding instrumental compositions mix acrobatic fret work with nuanced, jazz-minded explorations. It features the multi-dimensional acoustic style that Evans will showcase in his return to Charlottesville with the California Bluegrass Reunion.
The lineup came together as an offshoot of the California Banjo Extravaganza—another one of Evans’ creative touring projects—and features an all-star lineup of Golden State pickers who boast stacked resumés. In addition to Anger, who’s spent time in the David Grisman Quintet and Republic of Strings, the show will feature renowned mandolin player John Reischman, a founding member of the Tony Rice Unit. Bass duties will be handled by Sharon Gilchrist, a versatile player who toured for many years in Rowan’s band, and additional fiddle power will come from Chad Manning, another Grisman alum.
“It’s a superpowered bluegrass jetliner, especially with the double fiddles,” Evans says of the group, which is currently on an extremely rare East Coast tour. “It has a really big sound. We’ve all been around the block and most of us are bandleaders. The focus is on original material.”
The show at the Southern is being presented by local radio station WTJU, where Evans hosted a bluegrass show for more than a decade. It’s another callback to his early roots.
“When I return to Charlottesville it doesn’t feel like things have changed all that much,” Evans said. “For me, the landmarks are still there.”