Yonder Mountain String Band

by Aly Constine

Whether you've just caught the bluegrass itch or you've been a junkie since Monroe, the band for you is rapidly ascending the ranks of the genre. Gaining a reputation as a group that cares about its audience and thrives on playing until dawn, the Yonder Mountain String Band is ready to show you that you don't need drums for rhythm-filled dance crazy jams. They've also discovered that whatever you envision can be made to come true.

The band is made up of four promising young pickers who have chosen to take the bluegrass scene a step back towards its roots. YMSB starts with an all-string traditional bluegrass line-up of banjo, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and upright bass. They also stick to a more traditional sound in contrast to most newgrass bands out of Colorado. Drawn to the fast paced intensity of this roots based music and its inherent challenge of precision, these players have not been able to shake the addiction.

Bassist Ben Kaufman keeps the pulse driving while Adam Aijala imbues YMSB's sound with a bounty of intricate licks on rhythm guitar. At the same time, banjo player Dave Johnston tightly weaves his polished counter melodies with the innovative leads of the band's fearless and witty mandolin player, Jeff Austin. Austin stands out as he nails jawdropping licks at lightening speeds with the maturity, spirit, and conviction of someone twice his age. He's only been playing for 4 years, leaving lots of time to grow and become a legend in the bluegrass community.

The band has been around for just two years now, but they have literally exploded in this short time. And, the word is spreading. According to Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon, the boys are great because they play constantly. Austin says that the key is non-stop practice and playing shows as often as you can (YMSB has played over 150 gigs during their brief existence).

According to devout bluegrass freaks, YMSB offers some of the best bluegrass to come along in a while. Their young energy lends well to the fast paced picking of the genre and their vocals led by Jeff Austin easily find those sweet, high lonesome harmonies. Their music also draws those hooked on the intensity of YMSB's tight musical exchanges, their mindbending jams, and high energy, dance-inspiring grooves. These boys have an uncanny ability to tweak traditional bluegrass into an even more danceable style of music.

No two shows are alike, an appealing quality for the jamband freak. With a repertoire of over 200 songs, the band can go three nights without a repeat. Setlists include a good number of originals and a great selection of cover tunes. YMSB isn't afraid to let outside influences pervade their more traditional sound, putting Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs tunes in the mix along with grassy renditions of Peter Tosh's "Legalize It," Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train," and the Grateful Dead's "Morning Dew." You might even get an acoustic Pink Floyd encore (they did this at the Great American Music Hall in May of 2000). This energetic bunch is also known for their late night jams, keeping their shows running from dusk to dawn. Guest musicians also keep their performances exciting. Over the past two years YMSB has had the opportunity to play with Leftover Salmon, members of the String Cheese Incident, the Floodplain Gang, Pete Wernick, Sally Van Meter, Tony Furtado, Darol Anger, and Mike Marshall. The best places to find these collaborations are in their home state of Colorado or at the music lover's favorite place, the festival. This summer they have already played High Sierra, Rocky Grass, Nedfest, and have the Berkshire Mountain Music Festival on the horizon.

With the support of many of the local music legends of Colorado, YMSB has found Nederland a great place to get their start. Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon has been a good friend of the band since their inception and has helped with many of the hurdles. Grammy-winning dobro player Sally Van Meter produced the band's first album Elevation which came out this January.

If you like bluegrass, the Yonder Mountain boys will blow you away. They've got the skill, the energy, and the soaring jams that makes every show a must see. Not to mention their joyful, kind attitude and offbeat humor which adds just the right color. And like all great musicians, they promise to only get better with time. Come see the future of Colorado bluegrass with the Yonder Mountain String Band.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Austin about bluegrass music, the Colorado music scene, and their quick success.

What draws you to play bluegrass music?

It's the drive of it. It's the pulse of it. It's just addictive. It gets under your skin and doesn't go away. There's intensity to it, a raw beauty. It's like the human heart beat at a dancing pace. Boom boom boom boom boom. It's also the way the audience perceives music. Bluegrass audiences are definitely listening to your vocals, they're listening to your playing, they're listening to your rhythm. They're interested in that being of good quality. With the same audience you play a lick on the banjo that is super hot and they are going to go apeshit. So you have the best of both worlds. You have a very reactionary audience that also demands a lot out of you.

What has been the reaction from the devout bluegrass crowd?

I think the biggest thing that the real devout, pretty sit-down, straightforward sort of bluegrass audience really likes is that we're young and we're doing the music justice. I've had 70-year-old people walk up to me and say, "Er, you guys were great. I didn't really understand that one song that went on forever, but man when you guys did that 'Whitehouse Blues.' I haven't heard it that good since Bill Monroe did it at the Bean Blossom in '64." You're like wow. That's pretty cool. We also have some that'll be like "You shouldn't be plugging those things in."

Playing without drums is more traditional. Why did YMSB stray from the current trend of combining bluegrass with drums?

From the beginning we never wanted drums. What we want is a 1000-seat venue packed with people dancing their asses off, unaware that there aren't any drums. We want to move people with just the bluegrass setting, with just this line-up.

Plugging in your instruments and experimenting with the extended jam are some of the elements that take you away from traditional bluegrass.

And the fact that we don't deny any of our influences. The fact that we're like hell yeah, when I was little I saw the Grateful Dead and listened to Phish. We're not afraid to go to all the places that the music we have listened to has shown us. Let yourself go and see what happens when you play a tune for 45 minutes as it segueways into other songs. We've all been influenced by bluegrass, very heavily, whether we've been into it for 10 years or for 2. We wanted to let people know that we are so deeply influenced by it that we are going to present it as traditionally as we can. But we are not going to forget that we grew up listening to punk and Pink Floyd and the Dead and Zappa and all these different styles of music.

Bill Monroe said something about bluegrass music. Learn the music, learn the traditional music, get your timing down, get your touch and your tone and everything right and then go with it, make it your own. Take it in a new direction. Let your influences get in there. We wanted to live in that tradition and carry on the music to the next generation. We've just not ignored anything that's inspired us.

How do you explain how far the band has come in just 2 years?

The basic answer is a lot of hard work. Busting our ass. We don't rehearse as much as we would like to, but when we are home we definitely get together. When we are on the road it is almost like rehearsal by fire. When we are on stage we experiment in front of people. What better way to let yourself experiment. A litmus with an audience that is going to let you know, good, bad, yeah, boo. Just a lot of hard work, a lot of patience, a lot of knowing that the work is far from over. Playing a lot of gigs and working at it.

The real honest answer is manifesting and energy. This has all really happened because failure is not an option. I spent a lot of time really focusing on it and manifesting it and trying to envision theatres full of people dancing to the music made by the musicians I would meet when I moved to Colorado. And when people would come up and say to me "Man, you're going to move out there and what if you fail man, you don't know anybody, there's a million musicians." But that's not an option. If you tell yourself, "Well, I'm going to do this cause I got to have something to fall back on. You know what if I fail," you're going to fail. Put it simple. You've given yourself a door you're going to go out in. You've got to dream it all the time and make it real. If it doesn't happen, dream it harder and it will. Plain and simple.

Do you think a lot of your success has to do with being in Colorado? Colorado is known for its incredible music scene.

That was a huge part of it. If you are a folk Americana bluegrass musician in America nowadays and you are not going to come to Boulder to try to make it you are kidding yourself. You've got everything that you need to make this all happen. You've got peers, you've got Leftover Salmon, String Cheese, and you've got Nick Forster and Pete Wernick, and Tony Furtado and Sally Van Meter. Crazy, established, very well respected musicians already here. And I've never seen a listening audience like in Boulder. Average people go out to music one, two times a week here. Some people I know go to see music three or four times a week. You've also got venues that allow bands to grow. It's not like you've got a bar and then the Fox Theatre. It's not like you have a 100-seat room and then a 700-seat room. You have a bar you can start playing in, get 50 people, and then next time you go back it's full and you have 100 people, then you can move to a next room that's twice that size. It really allows you to grow, allows you to play your cards and build. That's an important thing to be able to do cause man so many bands don't get out of that bar scene.

What's your theory regarding the volume of musical talent coming out of Boulder?

I think it's magical, really. I think it is more can be explained in logical sense. There are energetic vortex centers all over the world. Down in New Mexico you have these points, these energy points. And I really think that's what this area is. In the 60s and 70s you had Caribou Recording Ranch existed here. Zeppelin recorded there, Chicago recorded there, Jerry, REO Speedwagon. You've got so many musicians that inspired millions of people right here, just outside of town here up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. Then a band like Hot Rize. You've got Tim O'Brien and Charles Seitel and Pete Wernick and Nick Forester and you've got those guy who come in the early 70s and blow the lid off the bluegrass community. It's got to be energy, man. Cause it's so huge. I couldn't explain it in any other sense. How did it start, I don't know. Caribou was out here, one of the top recording places. That's why everybody came here. And even now, you've got Wind Over Earth down in Boulder, you've got guys like James Tuttle who engineered our album who's a world class engineer. People line up to work with him. You've got David Glasser who mastered our album. You pick up, I say basically one out of five bluegrass albums, just to be fair, flip it over and if it says mastered by, it will probably say David Glasser. The audience here is going to listen to you, you've got the technical people who are going to hone your skills, the musicians who are going to inspire the hell out of you, and the huge mountain ranges and massive amounts of woods help too.

You've only been playing the mandolin for about four years, is that right?

3 and one half.

How did you master the instrument in such a short time?

I played a little bit of guitar but I never could get my hands around it. I learned all the chords, every Grateful Dead song in the Grateful Dead Anthology, all the Dylan songs in the Bob Dylan anthology, but I couldn't get it. When I was in that rock band I started to do a little bit of soloing on guitar but my solos were kind of like neeneeneenee. It didn't line up. Mandolin, I don't know, it just kind of spoke to me.

I'd say the biggest thing is to practice and listen to music. It may be 3 ½ years, but the first two years I had a lot of time on my hands. This is when I first met Dave and when I first got the hunger. I went out and purchased a pile of bluegrass music. I would wake up at noon, sit and play by myself with music records until 4, walk across town and meet up with Dave and start playing just Dave and I at 6, and at 9, the rest of the Bluegrassholes would come over and we would play until 2 or 3 in the morning. And all of a sudden I'd played 10 hours of music that day. For about two years that was the regimen. It was a day in day out kind of thing. I was also surrounded by musicians that were so good and so inspiring to me. But, as far as mastering it goes, I feel like I'm going to be learning until the end of time. I'm learning so much every day just listening to people. I recognize the weaknesses in my playing and try to address them. I've got so many more millions of hours of work to do before I would even think of slowing down practicing.

What kind of mandolin do you use?

I play a 1996 Flatiron Performer that was made in Belgrade, Montana. It was one of the last mandolins made at the Belgrade, Montana Flatiron Plant before Gibson shut it down and moved everybody to Nashville.

Do you guys write out your setlists ahead of time or do they evolve during the show?

It depends. Some nights we'll put together the first four tunes of the set and we'll call it from there. Some nights we'll sit down and write out an entire setlist. We try to pay close attention not to repeat night after night especially if people are traveling with us. Right now we can get about three full evenings and not repeat anything. We know about 200 something songs and do an average of about 30 to 35 songs per show.

If you have four songs set out, what happens after that?

If we are going to jam, we'll say all right we are going to do "Snow on the Pines" and then we have a number of tunes that fall into that jam that we can pick from and mix in between, "Morning Dew," "Bolton Strech," "Follow Me Down to the Riverside." After that it's a calling thing. I'll signal it with my voice sometimes. We'll be at the end of "Snow on the Pines" and I'll start freeforming or improvising a song about a woman and she's going across this ocean and she's going to meet her boatman and we'll go into the "Boatman." And then at the end of that we'll go into this jam where I'll mention "I love you my darling, send you across this ocean, now I have to bury you in the ground, as I lay here in the grass before I bury you and I see the morning dew gathering on your eye lashes," and go into "Morning Dew." There is a great deal of vocal improvising that I get to do during shows. It is awesome to get that kind of space. We really don't limit each other with solos. If Adam is going off we are going to support him and let him go off for as long as he wants and take his solo as far as he can go. It's kind of the same thing with my vocal jams. I'll start to come up with something and they'll be nights when Ben will lean over to me and say, "Just make up a tune." And a lot of tunes have come out of that. We all support each other equally and let ourselves creatively flow.

Are segues ever planned or do they just evolve?

We definitely plan out segues between tunes, although a lot of them are improvised. I guess it's about 50, 50. Sometimes we'll go "what about this tune into this tune. Well, we haven't done that before. How are we going to get from there to there?" Then we'll find out.

Do you find out in rehearsal or do you find out on stage?

A lot of the finding out is on stage. We don't sit down and rehearse our jams. The jams that you see on stage are fully improvised. You know except for the beginning licks of tunes and certain signals that the song is in the middle or it's over, or we are ready to go into a verse. That stuff will be planned out. As far as the 45 minute jams you might hear, except for the vocals and the lick that might be the hint that that's the song, that's it, the rest of it is every man get in the boat and let's see where she goes. That is my absolute favorite thing about playing in this band is the amount of freedom. And I think that everybody would say that. You don't get freedom like that in a lot of bands. A lot of bands have a leader who takes the band here and here and here and here. Everybody here can signal anything at anytime. It's real open.

You guys are known for your legendary late night jams. What gives you the energy to play such intense, energy requiring music until the wee hours of the morning?

It's a combination of a couple of things. One is the energy of the music. Another is that you've got to get in people's faces, you got to make it happen. Shit, if you are going to play a late night gig, play until six-thirty. Cause if you play until six-thirty people are going to come out and remember that a hell of a lot more than if you played until three. I mean just what you can instill in a group of people when you've been playing for five hours and they're with you. That's the inspiration, the dual inspiration going on. It's the energy of the music, the crowd. Also, we're still such a young band, so many people still to reach. You need to do it. We don't want to do it just for the first three years we're playing out and then go to the old, all right, good night everybody. We want to be able to do it five, ten years from now. Because it's who we are. You're really going to knock people's socks off if you play until five.

What are your plans for the coming year?

We're going to keep working our asses off. This winter we are going to go back in and do another album with a lot of the new tunes we've being playing live. It's going to have a whole different feel. We recorded the first album in a real traditional bluegrass style, where you record the rhythm tracks and then the vocals and then the solos and then you clean it up and polish it up. This album is going to have more of an edge, more of a live feel.

Over the next year we are hopefully going to move into bigger theatres, going from the 300, 400 kind of clubs into the theatres, the 600-1000. We want to be able to provide our audiences with a better show, better sound, and bigger space for people. People will see backdrops and a little more lighting and stage décor. We want to add to our music with backdrops that kind of show what Colorado is to us, show what we hope our music is giving them in kind of a psychedelic mind kind of expansive way. We're going to have our own sound guy and road manager traveling with us all the time. We also want to establish our family more significantly over the next year because people know that we love them and we know that people care about us very deeply. Get skeleton crews of people who are going to help us in any aspect, from postering to letting us sleep on their floor. That is the best way. The Dead proved that. Widespread proved that. Cheese is proving that right now. Nobody's dumb. The Dead were the grand pappies. They taught everybody and if you are smart you watch and you listen and you learn. That is what String Cheese is doing. You go to their shows and it is a real family atmosphere.

We might be introducing some new instruments into the band, not new members. We might mix it up a little bit, somebody play dobro, somebody play fiddle, somebody play bouzouki. We just want to keep it fresh and inspiring for everybody. We're going to keep touring, keep working, keep dreaming, and when the dreams come up we'll figure out how they can be made real. As long as you don't throw any failure to it, it is going to succeed.

For more info about the band and a touch of their sense of humor visit www.yondermountain.com.