PAT CLOUD
Pat Cloud was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and discovered the five-string banjo by chance at age fourteen when his mother purchased a used swap-meet banjo as a wall decoration. By age sixteen, he was playing professionally and toured with the USO Bob Hope Oriental Command tours of 1967 and 1970 and in the early 1970s, appearances on television include the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, and PBS. He has been a Los Angeles studio musician for 25 years. In 1972, he began jazz studies with former Nat King Cole guitarist, Horace Hatchett and then with William Thaisher (co-author of the Joe Pass guitar books) and started to adopt a fluid jazz vocabulary to five-string banjo utilizing melodic technique pioneered by such banjoists as Carrol Best, Bobby Thompson, and Bill Keith. In 1974, he joined briefly with mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau and country music great Keith Whitley forming the "New Tradition" band playing Bluegrass throughout the southeast. Between 1976 and 1980, he continued jazz studies with jazz vibraphone player Dave Pike and continued in the Los Angeles studio circuit along with associations with the Walt Disney Corporation and the UCLA jazz workshop. In 1983, he recorded the album "Higher Power" with Barry Solomon and Bob Applebaum on the Flying Fish label and was nominated that same year in the best "new instrument" category by Downbeat Magazine. He is included in the 1988 Oak publication, Masters of the Five-String Banjo, in which Tony Trishka says: "He is the first five-string player to achieve a wide-reaching command of the jazz vocabulary, and as such inhabit a rarefied world which he now shares with a select few.