Ben Weiss | Pixie and the Party Grass Boys
- Type: Weber Artists
- Website: www.pixieandthepartygrassboys.com
Ben was raised in Salt Lake City on the sounds of Grisman and Garcia. The first concert he can remember was when he was 4 years old and his parents took him to see the Grateful Dead perform what would be their last concert in Salt Lake City before Jerry died. Bluegrass was a constant backdrop in his childhood home, along with the soaring guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Duane Allman.
His parents bought him his first guitar, a Squire Stratocaster, at the age of 9 and by the time he reached high school he had decided music was going to be his path. He enrolled in the University of Utah after high school and began pursuing a music degree in Jazz Guitar Performance. Spending his days practicing and transcribing John Scofield, Joe Pass, Charlie Parker, Freddie Hubbard, Julian Lage, and Herbie Hancock, he was able to quit his day job and become a full time musician at the age of 20.
At the age of 22 he bought his first mandolin, a cheap Ibanez that he could take camping and on river trips. What began as a hobby, his relationship with this newfound “sandy Mandy” quickly developed into a serious passion. He had a lifetime of bluegrass in his bones that seemed to awaken as he began to gradually play more mandolin than guitar, acoustic music more than amplified music. He fell in love with the festivals, the picking circles that popped up spontaneously and extended late into the night, and with the old traditional songs as well as the new sounds emerging in the bluegrass scene.
In 2015 he met singer-songwriter Katia Racine and formed Pixie and The Partygrass Boys alongside childhood musical compatriots Andrew Nelson on guitar and Zach Downes on bass. Six months later with the addition of Amanda B. Grapes on fiddle, the band had found it’s sound and began to record and tour. Blending elements of rock, jazz, funk, punk, and pop with a (nearly) traditional bluegrass instrumentation, Pixie and The Partygrass Boys tour extensively across the nation and have been seen at many festivals including WinterWonderGrass, Delfest, ARISE, High Sierra Music Festival, Hangtown, Sawtooth Valley Gathering, Rhythms on the Rio, Campout for the Cause, and many more to come.
When not touring or recording with Pixie and The Partygrass Boys, Ben spends his time roaming the beautiful outdoors in his home state of Utah, and being the nerd that he is, has collaborated with the Municipal Ballet Co. to write original Ballets about the subject. “The River Speaks Plainly” is a collection of pieces written about the early river runners of the Grand Canyon, and in Spring 2020 they will be debuting a new piece about Zion National Park.