Ben Sollee

Ben Sollee is an American cellist, singer-songwriter, and composer known for his political activism.

His music incorporates banjo, guitar, and mandolin along with percussion and unusual cello techniques.

His songs exhibit a mix of folk, bluegrass, jazz, and R&B elements.

Sollee has also composed longer instrumental pieces for dance ensembles and for film.

Sollee graduated from the School for Creative and Performing Arts at Lafayette High School in 2002.

He was admitted to the University of Louisville's School of Music on a full-tuition scholarship to study cello with Paul York.

This began a four-year saga that hugely expanded Sollee's technical mastery of his instrument, while being marked by a constant struggle with his teacher over their different musical interests and objectives.

In this context, Sollee collided with the firmly established tradition of the cello as a fundamentally, if not exclusively, classical instrument.

He now found that his participation in two disparate worlds of music had become a struggle within himself as well as a source of frustration with his formal training.

In resisting the conventional orthodoxy, Sollee disputed the classical tradition as the way to play the cello, insisting that was just one way to play it.

While in college, Sollee performed and soloed in his school's classical ensembles but continued to participate in the Woodsongs programs and took part in the recording sessions of seasoned performers such as Otis Taylor and Abigail Washburn.

Sollee toured off and on with Washburn as a duo from 2005 to 2008.

He became a member of the Sparrow Quartet (which also included banjoist Béla Fleck and violinist Casey Driessen) when Washburn formed it in 2006, and that year the group issued an EP with five songs on the Nettwerk label.

That same month, Sollee came out with his first EP If You're Gonna Lead My Country The group toured widely throughout the U.S. during the period of 2006–2008.

By this time he had already self-produced three CD albums, the most recent of which, Turn on the Moon, was released in March 2006.

After graduating from the University of Louisville in May 2006 with a degree in cello performance, and while still touring with the Sparrow Quartet, Sollee began work on a new solo album, also self-produced, entitled Learning to Bend, which was released in an initial premium "collector's" version (1000 numbered copies) in November 2007.

The Sparrow Quartet made a trip to perform in China in 2007 and, under auspices of the U.S. State Department, became the first American music ensemble of any kind to be permitted to enter Tibet, where it performed several shows.

By December 28, 2007, on the strength of that record, NPR's Morning Edition had identified Sollee as one of the "Top Ten Unknown Artists of the Year."

The group then began working on what would be its signature studio album, Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet, which was released in May 2008.

On June 30, 2008, the quartet was featured in a broadcast on PBS station KPBS in San Diego.

While Sollee had been touring commercially since his late teens with artists such as Otis Taylor and Abigail Washburn, during his senior year he began performing his first solo gigs in Louisville area, playing his own music.

A commercial version of Learning to Bend, issued on the SonaBLAST! Records label, was released in June 2008.

On July 5, 2008, NPR's All Things Considered aired a feature on Sollee, describing his record as "an inspired collection of acoustic, folk, and jazz-flavored songs, filled with hope and the earnest belief that the world is good."

No Depression ranked Sollee's record among its top five for 2008.

Paste Magazine September 2008 issue listed Sollee among "The Best of What's Next; Twenty-Six Emerging Artists You Must Know."

Sollee was featured on the PBS series On Canvas, broadcast by Philadelphia station WHYY on October 8, 2008, which was recorded before a performance at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia.

On December 20, 2008, Public Radio International's "The World" program, co-produced by the BBC World Service and WBGH Boston, declared Learning to Bend one of the nine best "Global Hits" of 2008.

The top nine contained only three artists from the U.S.

The 2008 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival was marked by controversy surrounding a performance by Kanye West.

West's set was scheduled for 2:45 a.m. on June 8, the last night of the festival.

The previous act had left the stage late and the time taken to remove its staging and install West's elaborate set, including a pyro and light show, delayed the show's start until 4:25 a.m. Audience members grew impatient and rebellious and some left before the show finally began.

Spectators threw detritus onto the stage.

The production and choreography of the show was compromised, West was outraged, and many in the audience became hostile.

The resulting debacle resonated for days afterward, fanned by an angry Kanye West on his blog site.

Sollee also had performed in the 2008 Festival, as a member of the Sparrow Quartet, and so was a witness to the Kanye West episode.

Sollee revealed on Twitter that, in the fall of 2020, he contracted COVID-19.

The following year, he tweeted that, as a result, he now suffers from long covid.

Sollee was raised in Lexington, Kentucky, and attended public schools where he was introduced to the cello in the fourth grade.

Yates Elementary School orchestra teacher Ellen Dennison brought a collection of musical instruments to her class and demonstrated them for students.

Sollee was quickly charmed by what he called the "growly" sound of the cello and chose it as the instrument to learn to play and he eventually became the only cello player in his school orchestra.