The World Inside Joe Troop Comes Alive in Whirlwind

Interviewed, written by Thomas Beck for Jam and Toast
12.13.2025

On a chilly December afternoon, with the Triangle gearing up for another packed weekend of music, Joe Troop picks up the phone. He is warm, quick to laugh, and fully energized about the new project he has been shaping for years.

“I lay it all out there,” he says. “Whirlwind is the most me thing I have ever done.”

That is saying something. Troop’s musical life has taken him from Winston Salem to Chapel Hill to Buenos Aires and back again, through projects that range from Che Apalache to Larry and Joe to his own world banjo storytelling. But Whirlwind feels like his entire journey fused into one suite of music. It is the first project where every chapter of his life speaks at the same time.

“If there is a most me thing I have done, it is this,” he says. “Every part of my life is in this sound.”

Whirlwind did not emerge overnight. It grew slowly, shaped by the people Troop met, the places he lived, and the rhythms he absorbed along the way. The music needed a set of musicians who could move comfortably between traditions, and somehow they all appeared at exactly the right moment. The lineup features flutist Rebecca Kleinmann, a master of both Brazilian music and American jazz who moves easily between flute, alto flute, and piccolo. She plays alongside violist Bailey Newman, who brings a strong classical and chamber music foundation along with grounding in fiddle groove. Bassist Ramon Garcia adds the perspective of a Mexican American jazz player shaped by the UNC Greensboro program and a lifetime surrounded by Latin American rhythms. The quartet is completed by drummer Gaston Reggio, whose roots in Uruguay carry candombe, tango, and South American folk language straight into the heart of the band. Together they create the exact blend Troop had been hearing in his head for more than a decade.

“It is my dream band,” he says. “It took two years to get here. Every one of them brings a whole world of sound.”

Before Whirlwind was a band, it was an instrument Troop had imagined for years. He wanted an electric banjo that could speak with the grit of fusion guitar, the warmth of an arch top, and the delicate pluck of a banjo, all without losing its core voice.

So he had one built.

The instrument came from builder Tom Nechville, carved from quilted maple with a dyed blue finish and a small internal resonant chamber. It did not exist until Troop asked for it. Once it arrived, he started writing.

He composed every part of Whirlwind himself, including the flute and viola lines. Sitting with GarageBand, he borrowed Bailey’s viola, bowing ideas into rough demos. He played imagined flute lines on a violin. He stacked parts, revised them, printed charts, and eventually handed the whole suite to the band.

“I finally have the toolkit I have been waiting for,” he says. “All the electric sounds I have carried in my head finally had a place to go.”

Whirlwind does not come out and play a collection of tunes. The performance is one long suite, moving through sections that feel cinematic, theatrical, and tightly composed. There is no stopping between pieces. Once the band starts, it moves continuously from beginning to end.

“I composed it like a story,” Troop says. “It begins and it goes all the way through. It is not one song and then another. It is one idea in motion.”

Each night begins with Troop alone on banjo, tracing his path through original global folk pieces and stories. It sets the tone for what is coming.

“It shows people the groundwork,” he says. “Everything I have done, everywhere I have lived, all of that laid the path for Whirlwind.”

Then the band steps on and the story shifts into a different dimension.

Troop’s path to Whirlwind has been anything but straight. He grew up in Winston Salem, spent college years bouncing between Chapel Hill and a study abroad in Sevilla, moved to Japan, and eventually followed friends to Buenos Aires. He intended to visit for a short while and stayed for ten years.

In Argentina he taught, played, absorbed the pulse of South American grooves, and formed Che Apalache with three of his students. The band toured the world, earned acclaim, and brought Troop’s bilingual, border crossing sound to a wide audience.

Later, he returned to the Triangle and created Larry and Joe with Venezuelan musician Larry Bellorin. Then came solo work, bluegrass projects, and social justice collaborations. Now, Whirlwind ties every piece together.

“This music has been inside me for more than a decade,” he says. “It was time to bring it into the world.”

Troop’s musical life has always run parallel to activism. His work with Siembra NC goes back years, including The Dreamer, a song about a DACA recipient from Yadkin County that appeared on a Grammy nominated album produced by Bela Fleck. More recently, when ICE increased operations in North Carolina, Troop and his straight ahead bluegrass group The Truth Machine turned a planned show at the Pinhook into a benefit.

They raised more than three thousand dollars in one night.

“Even a bluegrass band can stand with our neighbors,” he says. “We can protect each other.”

Che Apalache has a reunion tour planned for 2027. Larry and Joe continues to grow. The Truth Machine continues its mission. Troop still performs solo banjo sets that dig into global traditions and storytelling.

And Whirlwind sits in the center of it all, the project that sounds like every chapter of his life speaking at the same time.

Before hanging up, Troop reflects on the Triangle, on independent music, and on the people who keep scenes moving. Talking with him feels like tracing the map of a whole life, one that stretches from a Winston Salem childhood to Chapel Hill nights, through years in Japan, a decade in Buenos Aires, strings camps and activism, the Bay Area, and finally back to North Carolina. All of those chapters surface inside Whirlwind in unexpected ways.

But everything gathers here.
This moment.
This band.
This sound that refuses to sit neatly in any box.

“I am just glad people still care about independent music,” he says. “We are old school that way, but the younger folks are behind it too. Tell them to come out and see Whirlwind.”

In the end, Whirlwind feels less like a new project and more like a convergence, a life lived across cultures and borders distilled into a single continuous suite. It is Joe Troop standing exactly where his past and future meet, inviting the Triangle to hear the whole story at once.

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