The Yonder Mountain String Band are four young Colorado transplants who grew up with all manner of rock and roll but fell in love with bluegrass so deeply and naturally that you might as well call it destiny. The sound wasn’t part of their family heritage or commonly heard in the Midwestern and Northeast towns in which they were raised. Bluegrass was something they had to discover – through records old and new, fellow musicians, and hitting the road. And once they’d made the sound somehow their own, an equally young and passionate audience quickly discovered them.

There are many colorful ways to describe Yonder Mountain, but “ready for anything” may be the most apt. During their Cabin Fever tour of the Southeast the winter of 2005, the power went out in the middle of a gig at the New Daisy Theatre in Memphis, which would have literally been a buzz-killing situation for any other act. But this acoustic quartet is accustomed to performing an encore without amplification every night, gathered close together at the front of the stage like a vintage bluegrass combo. So no electricity meant no problem; they just stepped away from their gear and kept on playing. The following night at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, the juice stayed on, but there was a different kind of electricity in the air. According to bassist Ben Kaufmann, “There has never been a heavier moment in acoustic music, more punk, than what happened while we were playing then.” Yonder Mountain is capable of taking off in any musical direction when they’re locked into one of their improvisational grooves, and this time, Kaufmann says, they were channeling some astonishing hard-rocking energy simply on acoustic guitar, banjo, upright bass and mandolin.

Bassist Kaufmann and guitarist Adam Ajiala grew up in different parts of Massachusetts; banjo picker Dave Johnston and mandolin player Jeff Austin both hail from Illinois, and met up on the sprawling campus of the state university in Champaign-Urbana. Kaufmann was encouraged to play piano and then bass by his father, a big-band jazz musician, but after he was accepted to the prestigious film school at New York University in Manhattan, music, for a few years at least, became an afterthought. Similarly, the teenage Ajiala was an avid electric guitarist, at first favoring punk and metal, before going acoustic once he’d discovered albums like the Grateful Dead’s Reckoning. But he too had other ideas when he set off for college: he got a degree in Forestry from U Mass. Austin, on the other hand, studied voice and musical theater at the University of Cincinnati; his academic career would take a life-changing detour at the U of I after pal Johnston asked him to join a group called the Bluegrassholes, basically because Austin owned a mandolin, even though he didn’t really know how to play it. (“When I picked it up,” Austin confessed to Dirty Linen, “I pretty much didn’t put it down.”)

Johnston was the one member of Yonder Mountain who had found his true calling while he was still at college – but not during class, of course. Inspired by the “new grass” of the Seldom Scene that he’d stumbled across on record, Johnston was compelled to explore the work of their progenitors, traditional artists like Flatt & Scruggs and Bill Monroe, and then he casually picked up the banjo himself. Within a year, he was gigging around with a band called Giblet Gravy, and then with the Bluegrassholes. (Their tongue-in-cheek tee-shirt slogan: “A drinking band with a bluegrass problem.”) Johnston decided to head west in search of a place where he could further hone his skills with other like-minded musicians. He wandered around the Pacific Northwest for a few months before heading to the Boulder, Colorado area, where Austin had already resettled. There, the pair joined a freewheeling acoustic music community that had famously produced contemporary bluegrass superstars Hot Rize. It coexisted and intermingled with an anything-goes, jam-band culture led by neo-hippie outfits like Leftover Salmon and the String Cheese Incident.

Music also drew their other soon-to-be band-mates to this acoustic music mecca. Kaufmann, to the consternation of his admiring NYU professors, decided to abandon film for music and enrolled at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His dad had inadvertently sowed the seeds of his son’s wanderlust by once giving him a Bela Fleck album as a gift. Ajiala might have continued to pursue forestry, but an injury sidelined that career, so when he too moved west it was for the sounds, not the trees. Serendipity, Johnston says, brought them all together during a jam session in 1998 at a club in the nearby small town of Nederland. All four had come to know each other from the local play-for-drinks-and-food circuit at places like the Acoustic Coffeehouse, but, as Johnston explains, “something coalesced one night. It was an eye-opening experience because we heard a unique sound when we were playing together.” By December of ‘98, even before they could figure out a name for themselves, they were offered a gig at the Fox Theatre in Boulder opening for Runaway Truck Ramp. That night they became the Yonder Mountain String Band.

While they followed the do-it-yourself path and performed on the same circuit as the successful jam bands coming out of Boulder, Yonder Mountain represented something markedly different, a group that honored bluegrass traditions while not being afraid to push its boundaries, particularly in its live shows – and one that never had a drummer. Yonder Mountain emphasizes song craft over jams, although they are very much “an improvisational unit, “ as Johnston describes them. “We are an ambassadorial bluegrass band,” he continues. “We want to bring a real bluegrass feel – tight, clean-sounding, lyric-driven music – to our shows. We generate a very communal vibe from the stage that the audience really loves to be part of, but music is the primary reason they’re coming to see us.” They’ve even started their own summer bluegrass festival, the Northwest String Summit, which attracts veterans and upstarts alike.

Since 1999, Yonder Mountain has released six CDs on its own Frog Pad Records, alternating studio sessions with an ongoing series of live recordings they call Mountain Tracks. The studio discs feature self-penned songs in a traditional vein, with fast-paced, concise picking and guest appearances by well-known bluegrass artists who have encouraged and mentored the band. Grammy-winning dobro player and Sugar Hill recording artist Sally Van Meter produced their 1999 debut, Elevation. Former Hot Rize fiddle player and current solo star Tim O’Brien was behind the board for Town By Town, Yonder Mountain’s 2001 road song-themed sophomore disc. Van Meter returned in 2003 to helm a sort of concept album, Old Hands, that showcased the songwriting of local character Benny “Burle” Galloway, a self-described “butcher, plumber, music lover, fly fishin’ junkie.” Joining the band on these evocative tunes about cowboys, miners and all sorts of hard-livin’ western folk were O’Brien, fiddle player Darol Anger (who’d worked with Bela Fleck, Vasser Clements and super-group Psychograss) and dobro player Jerry Douglas (who’d played with Alison Krauss, Ricky Skaggs and Emmylou Harris, among others.).

Toward the end of 2004, Yonder Mountain released Volume 3 of its live Mountain Tracks series, a double-disc from their Kinfolk 2003 event, that captures the group’s improvisational ease and good-natured stage presence. Their jamming, says Johnston, is “partly about flying by the seat our pants, but now that we’re maturing as performers, our improvisation is more beholden to playing with good tone, good feel, good timing.” Now in 2006 YMSB returns with Mountain Tracks: Vol. 4 which takes somewhat of a different approach than previous Mountain Tracks—instead of taking song selections from one live show, this time around YMSB has selected previously unreleased songs from live performances spanning 2005. While all previous releases have been live audio only, Mountain Tracks: Vol. 4 adds a bonus DVD to the package, “The Europe Bootlegs”, a collection of footage from the band’s first trip to Europe in the summer of 2003.

In between their nearly nonstop tour dates, Yonder Mountain has been traveling to Los Angeles to cut tracks for their next studio album with perhaps their most intriguing – and unlikely – choice of a producer, Tom Rothrock, best known for Beck’s Mellow Gold and Elliot Smith’s XO. They can’t say exactly what the new material is going to sound like, but the band guarantees that everyone will be in for a surprise. Look for the new studio album to be released on Vanguard Records, May 9, 2006. Up to now, their work has been described as, among other things, “Colorado’s nakedest bluegrass,” “alternative bluegrass” or plain old “Rocky Mountain Music.” Let’s just call it the sound of the Yonder Mountain String Band and leave it at that. Pretty soon everyone will know exactly what that means.