BRONX BEGINNINGS

A native of the Bronx, Wernick got turned on to acoustic music via the urban folk boom of the '50s and '60s.

"My friends ... around 1960, when I was 13 or 14, were already learning guitar and banjo, and they were sort of following in the Pete Seeger tradition," he says, citing the popularity of such groups as the Kingston Trio as well. Without the availability of instruction manuals or tablatures in that period, Wernick picked up his skills the hard way.

"Everybody ... learned to play by listening and doing a lot of experimenting, and that's how I learned how to play... Slowly but surely I caught on to what was necessary - but before I even started to play, I had heard Earl Scruggs on a record and he seemed like the ultimate, (most) incredible musician I'd ever heard in my life, and I just loved what he did," says the musician.

He continued to play for pleasure through his college years at Columbia University and at Cornell, where his studies resulted in his earning a doctorate in sociology (thus his eventual "Dr. Banjo" title). He hosted a bluegrass radio show at Columbia, which deepened his knowledge of the music, spurred his contact with other enthusiasts and musicians, and whetted his appetite to be a participant in the scene himself.

"For a guy with a doctorate from an Ivy League university to quit his job and say, 'No I'd rather actually be playing bluegrass,' which is what I did, that's a statement in my life," he says.

He recalls faithfully attending four-hour jam sessions he attended on Sunday afternoons in Manhattan's Washington Square Park, where he met David "Dawg" Grisman, Jody Stecher, and one to two dozen others in the New York metropolitan area - "one in a million," as he puts it - who shared his love for the music.

Eventually, he and others began attending bluegrass gatherings and competitions in the South, carpooling down to Virginia and North Carolina and, surprisingly to them, coming away with prizes. He also gained insight from contact with the place and the people that spawned the music. Although bluegrass is now truly an international phenomenon (the IBMA now boasts members in 30 countries around the world), he sees it as a gift from Southern Appalachian culture.

"That's when I really got acquainted more with the culture that bluegrass comes from. 'Cause you learn one set of thing on a record, but some stuff you don't learn until you go into a caf/ down there or you're in the parking lot of a festival just hanging out with Southern people and getting to know life from their perspective," he says.

HOT RIZE REDUX

Fast-forward to today, as Wernick talks about his recent resurrection of Hot Rize with O'Brien and Forster, and the addition of young guitar virtuoso and Nashville session player Bryan Sutton, who takes over the duties, but respectfully never seeks to take the place, of Charles Sawtelle, who passed away in 1999 after a long battle with leukemia.

"It's about as big of a treat as I could ask for," he says, relishing the opportunity to perform the tunes he and his compatriots crafted over the course of a quarter-century. He estimates that Hot Rize performed over 1,500 shows during their career together until Sawtelle's death put an end to their original configuration.

"When we lost Charles, it really popped a big bubble in all of our heads," says Wernick. "Not just losing a very dear friend, but maybe losing the sound of a band that was a very big part of our lives." After a period of mourning ("when your spouse dies, you don't remarry two months later," he says), the surviving members decided to have a go of it again, especially after a long-delayed, Sawtelle-dedicated live album taped in 1996, "So Long of a Journey," saw release last year.

The band accepted six gigs without knowing who their guitar player would be, then aimed high and decided to ask Sutton, who happily agreed. "He's a delight to be around and play with," says Wernick, and the successful recombination of talents meant that seven Hot Rize concerts were scheduled for this year as well.

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