Hip-Hop Banjo: Blue-hop? Turbo Pro in the house

Sure, the Turbo Pro Project is a band based in North Wilkesboro, next door to Wilkesboro, home of Americana music Mecca MerleFest. And yes, it's headed by a banjo-wielding front man, Adrian Trbovich.

But this is not another bluegrass group, conjuring old, hard times with fierce picking and close harmonies. No, your eyes aren't deceiving you -- that's a real turntable in that picture.

"That's what this band is all about -- finding people who aren't afraid to think outside the box," Trbovich (pronounced TUR-buh-vitch) said. "We've had other people sit in with us. We're not closed to any possibility, really. It could be a kazoo player if that was their chosen instrument and they get down with the idea."

Raised in a family of musicians who favored Americana, blues and rock in western Pennsylvania, Trbovich picked up the banjo in his early 20s (he already played piano). His dad listened to NPR, Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson, but growing up in the '80s, Trbovich was touched by such rap pioneers as Run DMC and Eric B & Rakim.

There was a time when all this started to make sense, to come together, a day that Trbovich can't quite pinpoint now, a time when he took out his banjo and started fooling around with a drum machine. There was something about the combination, however unlikely, that appealed to him.

Once he moved to North Carolina seven years ago, Trbovich, 33, started to put together a band that would carry out his untraditional vision.

He's had to convert some musicians, though, such as Milton Cockerham, aka DJ Deacon, a 33-year-old computer-engineering student at Wilkes Community College who will be part of Turbo Pro's Friday-night appearance at the Garage, where they will open up for Martha Bassett. They'll be joined by Kim France, an upright-bass player who lives in Bristol, Tenn., and Ryan Barber, who lives in Asheville and contributes vocals.

Bassett filled in on bass for Turbo Pro last summer. This kind of fusion isn't such a radical idea, she points out -- Steve Earle is doing it. "His last tour, he was traveling with a DJ," she said. "Adrian has a vision, and he kind of creates a family. Every time I played with them, it was so much fun to watch people's faces. They just always look surprised and a little confused. And people often dance. It was always met with approval."

Ah, Cockerham had his doubts. Or to put it bluntly, when Trbovich called him seeking his DJ skills, "at first I thought it was a joke," he said.

"I think, being from this area, he had a limited scope about what the banjo could do," Trbovich said. "I think a lot of people forget when you're holding a banjo in your hand, you're holding a drum. It's a very percussive instrument. Hip-hop is about a hundred beats a minute. If you play a bluegrass song to that tempo, it really swings."

But Cockerham wasn't the only one. When Trbovich called the first DJ he worked with, the Burlington-based DJ Pro (the Pro in Turbo Pro), he was worried he would hang up.

Trbovich and DJ Pro started collaborating about three years ago. In 2008, the group self-released a debut CD, Daydream. They're working on another album that they hope to put out next year.

Trbovich likes to challenge other notions of banjo, and it's why the group's repertoire includes original songs along with twangy classics as you may have never heard them -- "Cluck Old Hen," the classic Appalachian fiddle and banjo tune, or "Dueling Banjos" (revamped as "Turntables v. Banjo"), a song that's been beaten to death. Trbovich figured people would ask for it. So he thought if he was going to do it, he was going to do the way he wanted to. "It's sort of like the ‘Free Bird' of banjos. It's been done over and over and abused and used, and we just did it a different way."

Bluegrass heroes and weekend pickers alike tend to favor a fast, rambling style. "They just want to play as many notes as possible," Trbovich said. "You can get banjo hangover."

Instead, he slows it down, coaxing the banjo's jangle around beats put together by Cockerham, who composes them with keyboards and a drum machine. He plays them back with turntables hooked up to a laptop. Have groove and banjo ever been used in the same sentence together? Because that's a good way to describe one of Turbo Pro's original tunes, "Daydream." It mixes the squeal of Cockerham's scratching laid on top of Trobvich's smoothed out, slowed down plucking.

Los Angeles-based artist Kianga Ford tapped Turbo Pro to work with when she came to Winston-Salem this year. She wrote a series of fictional, historically based narratives about the city, part of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's Inside Out: Artists in the Community II series. Turbo Pro played most of the accompanying music, a backdrop to Ford's spoken stories (listen at www.secca.org). One of her characters, Arthur Travis, even plays the banjo -- Daisy, more companion than musical instrument. Trbovich's gentle picking plays behind Ford's dreamy, precise voice, painting Travis' past. Trbovich thought about the characters, too: "I really felt (that) character would be playing old style, claw-hammer style. I tried to mix some of that in."

Travis was actually created as Ford and Trbovich began to work together. "That character could have never evolved for me without the conversations Adrian and I were having," Ford said. "You take that kind of traditional bluegrass and contemporary hip-hop, the space in between is where you get Turbo Pro."