Cynthia Sayer brings her hot banjo show to Sarasota

Within a few minutes of talking to Cynthia Sayer, you quickly learn that not all banjos are created equal. There’s a four-string banjo and a five-string. While the instrument is commonly associated with bluegrass, Sayer has made a career out of playing jazz banjo.

As she regales you with the history and lore of the banjo (the instrument traces its roots to Africa and was first played by enslaved inhabitants of the U.S. and the West Indies), Sayer worries out loud: “Am I sounding too much like a banjo nerd? I don’t want to turn people off.”

Not a chance. Sayer’s enthusiasm for the banjo is infectious and her persona is charming.

As entertainers know, it’s not enough to be talented — Sayer has won the prestigious Steve Martin Banjo Prize, among other accolades — you have be a person whom audiences want to spend time with. Sayer fits the bill on both accounts.

Based in New York, Sayer has become a regular annual performer at Sarasota’s Glenridge Performing Arts Center, the elegant, 260-seat theater on the campus of the Palmer Ranch senior living facility of the same name.

When Sayer was growing up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, she was studying dance and theater when a school talent show piqued her interest in the drums. She lobbied her parents for a drum set, to no avail.

One day she came home from school to find a banjo on her bed. “I knew it was a bribe,” Sayer says.

Still, she had seen banjos on the TV show “Hee Haw” and decided the instrument was worth exploration. When she was 13, she began studying with a jazz banjoist named Patty Fisher, an arrangement that lasted for about three years.

“I had no idea that a female jazz banjoist was incredibly rare. I was deeply involved in community theater and was also taking piano lessons,” Sayer recalls.

It wasn’t long before Sayer recognized that she could earn money by playing the banjo. “My other options were babysitting. I got my first job by calling up a nursing home and asking if I come come in play,” Sayer said.

Taking her banjo out to the ballgame

Evidently, cold-calling came naturally to Sayer, who has an effervescent personality and, as they used to say, “gives good phone.” The teen’s smile-and-dial success continued, as she landed a gig to play banjo for the New York Mets at the tender age of 16 or 17 —she can’t remember exactly.

“At the time, I had never been to a stadium,” Sayer says, noting that later on she would become the official banjo player for the New York Yankees.

When Sayer enrolled in Ithaca College, she thought she would eventually go to law school and take the bar exam. But that was before she heard a record by jazz musician Elmer Snowden, which she says changed her career path for good.

“When I was a kid, I assumed I would be going to law school. It was hard to admit that I wanted to be a musician. It seemed fun and self-indulgent. But when I heard this hot banjo playing with such intense swing, I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” she recalls.

Given Sayer’s drive and dedication, it’s a safe bet that anything she applied herself to was destined to succeed. Today, she is recognized as one of the world’s greatest banjo players. She is a longtime founding member of Woody Allen’s New Orleans Jazz Band and has played with such artists as Dick Hyman, Les Paul and Wynton Marsalis.

A member of the American Banjo Hall of Fame, Sayer has brought her swinging style of jazz banjo to TV and radio and the White House. She has played with the New York Philharmonic and The New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

These blue-chip credits are a long way from Sayer’s early days playing banjo in taverns such as the Stagecoach Inn in her hometown of Scotch Plains or Your Father’s Mustache in New York City, where she led singalongs. But years later she still enjoys audience interaction.

Like her peer and friend, banjoist Béla Fleck, Sayer is committed to crossing musical genres and breaking down boundaries. “The four-string banjo is often associated with vaudeville and I pay homage to that. Though I’m mostly a jazz musician, I like tango and I do pop tunes, but I swing them,” she says.

One of the tunes that Sayer has been performing lately is “When Will I Be Loved,” a hit by Linda Ronstadt from her 1974 album, “Heart Like a Wheel.”

During an hourlong conversation, Sayer frequently uses “hot” and “swinging” to describe her instrument and music. Indeed, her Glenridge show is billed as “Hot Banjo Time.”

Like many who call Sarasota home, whether full or part-time, Sayer got to know the community when her parents, the late Bertram and Barbara Sayer, moved here.

”I was long aware of Sarasota as a center of arts, but it got higher on my radar when parents moved there,” she says.

Sayer’s first concert in Sarasota was at The Players, but she ended up doing annual concerts at Glenridge, after her parents moved to the senior center. She reckons she has performed at least 15 times at Glenridge over the years.

Sayer has a New York band that she usually tours with, but when she is in Florida, she uses local musicians. During her Glenridge concert, Sayer will be joined by Greg Nielsen on trombone, Alejandro Arenas on bass and David Pruyn on drums.

Sayer’s manager, B.G. Dilworth, credits his client with having made “jazz banjo cool again with her fresh takes on hot jazz.”

No doubt her audiences are glad that Sayer gave up her law school ambitions for the life of a troubadour, which has taken her to such far-flung corners of the world as rural China.

“Our world is so polarized and music bypasses all that nonsense,” opines Sayer. Hear, hear!