10 Jun Telluride Bluegrass: Lark, Roman & Meyer,” 6/21!
The Telluride Bluegrass Festival announces 2026 lineup with top-to-bottom emphasis on world-class pickers. Tedeschi Trucks Band, Gregory Alan Isakov, Larkin Poe, Shakey Graves, Flatland Cavalry – and Tessa Lark on violin, Joshua Roman on cello and Edgar Meyer on double bass as a trio playing Bach and bluegrass on Sunday, June 21.
A select few tickets and camping pass options are still available at shop.bluegrass.com For those making their first trek to Telluride—or if it’s been a while— the Planet Bluegrass team has laid out a helpful guide for first-timers right here.
Have kids and don’t know where to start in bringing them to their first (and favorite) music festival? This handy Telluride Bluegrass with Kids guide is here to make it fun for the whole family.
For everything else, please visit bluegrass.com.
Go here for more about the history of Telluride Bluegrass. (Back to 2009.)
And please scroll down to learn more about Lark, Roman and Meyer, including a podcast with Edgar Meyer.
Tessa Clark was born and raised in Richmond, Kentucky. She took up mandolin at four, violin around six and, by nine, was playing fiddle in her banjo-picking father’s gospel-bluegrass band, “Narrow Road.”
Tessa, Credit Lauren Desberg.
Tessa is a genuine double-life artist, a top-tier classical violinist – Juilliard artist diploma, 2014 Indianapolis silver medal, 2012 Naumburg winner, 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, 2020 Grammy nomination – who is also a championship-caliber Kentucky fiddler. Tessa coined the term “Stradgrass” — playing bluegrass on her Stradivarius — and made an album of that name with Meyer, Sierra Hull, Michael Cleveland, and Jon Batiste. She’s now Artistic Director of the Moab Music Festival.
Joshua Roman is an Oklahoma City native, who began playing cello at age three. And, at 22, he became the youngest principal cellist in Seattle Symphony history (2006), but left two years later to build a solo and composing career.
Joshua is a composer, curator – 15 years running a Seattle chamber series – and collaborator across musical genres. His most personal recent work is the 2024 album Immunity, born from his ongoing health journey with Long COVID.
Edgar Meyer was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1960. He started playing bass at five with his father. Today Edgar is widely regarded as the preeminent virtuoso of his instrument: “…the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively un-chronicled history of his instrument” raved The New Yorker.
Edgar’s claims to fame?
Tough to keep track, but his laurels include a 2002 MacArthur “genius” Award, being the first and only bassist to win the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1994) and Avery Fisher Prize (2000), and seven Grammys.
Edgar Meyer is both a touring virtuoso and a serious composer. He is best known popularly for genre-blurring collaborations: “Appalachia Waltz” and “Appalachian Journey” with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor; “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” with Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, and Stuart Duncan (2012 Grammy, Best Folk Album); and “As We Speak” with Béla Fleck.
And wherever he is, Edgar is never too far from his lifelong musical companion, 1769 Gabrielli bass originally from Florence, Italy, an instrument that came to the U.S. in 1950 and was purchased – with a little help from his beloved father – in 1983.
Edgar’s path to the Telluride and the Bluegrass Main Stage began with a chance meeting with Béla and Sam when Edgar was a student at the Aspen Music Festival.
According to a long-time Festivarian and writer:
“The two had met once, briefly, but had never played together. Béla was performing with New Grass Revival in Aspen at the time, and heard about an amazing musician who had just placed third (Tim O’Brien took first) in the Pitkin County fiddle competition—on upright bass. “People were knocked out,” Béla recalled.
“Edgar and Béla ended up jamming on Charlie Parker tunes in front of Aspen’s Häagen Dazs shop.
”We knew then that he wasn’t your average hillbilly bass player out of Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” remembered Sam.
By the mid-1980s Edgar along with Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas, and Mark O’Connor were making Telluride Bluegrass history as Strength in Numbers, an all-star group which produced an album of 10 original compositions titled The Telluride Sessions. The band delighted Festivarians from 1989 – 1993.
In the years that followed, Edgar played Main Stage sets with Jerry and Russ Barenberg; James Taylor; as a member of the Telluride House Band; and in duos and trios with Béla, Chris and Mike Marshall, including a moving and memorable all-Bach Sunday morning set in 2003. In 2010, Edgar performed with Béla and Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, whom Edgar says has influenced his music profoundly
And now Edgar returns this year, #52, with his new trio: Lark, Roman & Meyer for which, it turns out, Tessa is the connective tissue.
As a girl, Tessa would drive two hours every Saturday from Richmond, Kentucky to Cincinnati’s conservatory with Meyer’s “1B” from “Appalachian Journey” on repeat.
Turns out Edgar Meyer was her musical hero.
Tessa and Meyer first played together in 2021; he had already met Roman. After those meetings Edgar essentially said, “Let’s go — we’d make a good trio.”
Lark, Roman & Meyer’s repertoire spans a Bach gamba sonata (rearranged across the three instruments) and Edgar’s own trios, including a “New Trio” he wrote in 2024 with input from Lark and Roman, one of the musical goodies from the trio Telluride audiences will be treated to on Sunday at the Festival close.
For more, listen to TIO’s conversation with Edgar Meyer.
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