Brothers Jens and Uwe Kruger make their first appearance on Mountain Stage, alongside their longtime bassist, Joel Landsberg. Now living in North Carolina, Jens and Uwe were raised in Europe, where they grew up listening to the American bluegrass records that their father would bring back to their native Switzerland. ("We also come from the mountains," Jens Kruger joked with the audience.)
Jens acquired his first banjo at 10, and six years later was traveling across Europe, playing music with his brother. When the two came to America in their 20s, it wasn't long before Jens found himself spending an entire summer living on bluegrass master Bill Monroe's farm. By the late '90s, the brothers, with Landsberg on bass, were fixtures on the American acoustic music scene. The trio's performance includes the entire first movement of Appalachian Concerto, the follow-up to their 2007 album Music for the Spring, which won them a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This segment originally ran on December 8, 2011.
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