B i o g r a p h y
Tom Bekeny is a mandolinist, fiddler and experienced mandolin teacher who has performed and taught in the U.S. and abroad for over 45 years. 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 26 years and has held the fiddle spot with California’s premier traditional bluegrass band, High Country, since 1988. He has recorded with many of these groups, was featured in the Summer 2009 issue of Mandolin Magazine, was recently interviewed in Bluegrass Today, and has an instructional DVD on beginning mandolin (Music Star Productions). Tom also plays in the wildly popular trad bluegrass "jam" band, Bangers and Grass, along with west coast bluegrass luminaries Jim Nunally, Steve Pottier, Bill Evans, and Chad Manning.
In addition to being known for his work in bluegrass music, Tom also plays jazz mandolin with his trio The Missing Man Quartet (MM4). The MM4 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 in which he plays mandolin and fiddle backed by drums and bass.
photo by Clara Bekeny