Home / Events / Jazz Tuesdays/The Moonrise Club: John Reynolds Trio

Lineup: The John Reynolds TrioJohn Reynolds picked up the banjo at the age of 11 and played it throughout high school in various dixieland and jug band groups. His focus shifted to the guitar after he heard Eddie Lang on the 1926 Jean Goldkette recording of “Sunday.” His enthusiasm for the instrument reached new heights when he discovered the recordings of Django Reinhardt. He studied with George Smith (of the Paramount Studio Orchestra; Eddie Lang’s sub when Bing Crosby needed an accompanist). Reynolds has played with Johnny Crawford’s 1920’s style orchestra, Dean Mora’s Modern Rythmists, Rhythm Club Allstars, and with his brother Ralf in the Rhythm Rascals. He is the grandson of the early Hollywood star and character actress, ZaSu Pitts. "This band harks back to an almost-forgotten series of recordings by one of the great Hot organizations of the early Thirties, the Washboard Rhythm Kings. If you didn’t have money for a trap set (and who did, during the Depression?) you could outfit what was then a common item, a laundry washboard, with a cymbal, a cowbell, perhaps other percussive side-dishes, find some thimbles, and wail away. … I thought of what the National Forest Service calls “a controlled burn” — an intensely Hot fire that is, however, always precisely focused on its musical objectives. And the band is more than a collection of individualists: they rock, joyously, together. " - Jazz Lives