Kruger Brothers bring Americana sounds to the Palace

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

As the unofficial third Kruger Brother, bass player Joel Landsberg had a ringside seat to his bandmates’ first exposure to America when Uwe and Jens Kruger came here in 1997.

You’d think that two Swiss guys in America for the first time would provide plenty of humor for a native New Yorker. As The Kruger Brothers built an American following and made their way across the country, however, a curious thing happened — Landsberg found that the biggest adjustment to be made was within himself.

“The bigger culture shock, I think, was me coming to the South as a Northerner,” Kruger told The Daily Times this week. “I had to get rid of that New York, know-it-all attitude. I had to learn to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open and to say ‘yes ma’am’ a lot.”

The second biggest adjustment was a musical one. As a New York musician, Landsberg had immersed himself in the city’s various scenes — Latin, jazz, R&B, funk, soul — but it took him traveling to Switzerland, where he was living when he met the Krugers in 1989, to discover a love for Americana and roots music.

“I had moved there in 1989, and shortly after, we became good friends and were working as sidemen in about 17 or 18 different bands,” Landsberg said. “There was a large country music scene, but not a lot of sidemen.”

Uwe and Jens started working on a Broadway-style country-and-Western musical, and as a condition of their involvement, they asked the producer to hire Landsberg as part of the production. He did, and from that point forward, Landsberg and the Krugers decided to quit their other gigs and focus solely on The Kruger Brothers.

That was in 1995. Two years later, the Krugers stepped off the plane and onto American soil — but thanks to their English teacher back home and the travels of their father, they weren’t exactly strangers in a strange land. And having been away from home for eight years, Landsberg found that rediscovering his own country through the eyes of his adopted brothers was an adventure in and of itself.

“I had never really played Americana or roots or bluegrass until I learned it from them,” Landsberg said. “Coming back to America, especially being a Northerner coming to the South and seeing it with different eyes — sort of from this quasi-European perspective — it was a great learning opportunity.”

Along the way, the familial bonds tightened — Landsberg’s late mother adopted Jens and Uwe as another son, and they chose to call her mom. They found a partner and a fourth brother in Phillip Zanon, the head of their record company and their sound technician, as well as fellow traveler. They met other musicians, such as Palace Theater owner Steve Kaufman and former Maryville resident Tut Taylor, known as the “flatpickin’ dobro man,” who now happens to be their neighbor in Wilkesboro, N.C. And they’ve made dozens of fans — people across the country who have opened their hearts and minds to the sounds of home being made by two foreigners that, for all practical purposes, understand American music better than just about anyone.

“The thing is, the music we’re creating is accepted all over the country equally, so between the three of us, it’s a tremendous creative experience,” Landsberg said. “We’re playing almost exclusively all of our own material, and it’s great to feel the beauty and the power of this music.”