Yonder Mountain hits the road with eclectic "Show"

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Sometimes being hard to define has its advantages.

Yonder Mountain String Band has been touring for nearly 11 years, long enough to adapt to the range of venues appropriate to its unique music.

The Colorado-based quartet's route in support of its new Frog Pad Records album, "The Show," includes amphitheater dates -- among them a headliner at Red Rocks near Denver and a three-night triple bill at the Gorge in George, Washington, with Dave Matthews Band and G. Love -- mixed in with festivals, theaters and House of Blues clubs in Boston and Chicago. At Horning's Hideout outside Portland, Oregon, the band hosts its own festival, the Northwest String Summit.

While Yonder Mountain features traditional bluegrass instrumentation -- minus a fiddle -- the band draws upon a wide range of influences, from the Grateful Dead to the Del McCoury Band. Jeff Austin, Yonder Mountain's mandolin player, says he didn't grow up listening to bluegrass, so when he discovered it as a young adult by way of John McEuen (a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), he brought rock sensibilities to his mandolin playing.

"I adapted it to what my ear heard when I was young, to the rock kind of style," Austin says. "I have fun playing music that way."

NOT TRADITIONAL ENOUGH FOR SOME

Yonder Mountain's music straddles the fence between rock and bluegrass, but it's safe to say that the band's audience is more on the rock side, specifically the jam scene.

"As far as a community goes, I would say that the bluegrass community hasn't really embraced us," Austin says. "But I think that's a loose interpretation of the whole scenario, because the bluegrass musicians have never shunned us. There's people that we've met that are musicians in the bluegrass field that are really now dear friends of ours, more than just somebody to look up to."

The band's rather inauspicious introduction to the bluegrass community came several years ago when Yonder Mountain closed a night of performances at the International Bluegrass Music Association gathering in Louisville, Kentucky.

"We got this great introduction from Pete Wernick (of Hot Rize), and when we started to play people just left, they just exited out of the venue," says Austin, who laughs about the incident now. "But that's not reflected in any of the musicians I know."

If the bluegrass community hasn't exactly welcomed Yonder Mountain, "the people that have embraced us have allowed us to be ourselves," Austin says. "What we might have lost in that one community, we gained 50-fold in this other group of folks."

Austin describes "this other group of folks" as "really open listeners," many of whom were at Michigan's Rothbury Festival in July.

"People had been out in the weather, getting rained on and baked in the sun; we were not going to go out there and play a set of ballads and gentle waltzes," Austin says. "From the first note until 90 minutes later we played our asses off; get the people moving."

The band's live approach stems from when it first started out, trying to build a following by playing festivals for free.

"It was instilled in us by a lot of our musical friends, especially the guys from Leftover Salmon," Austin says. "They would always say, 'When you get that chance, play your ass off, knock 'em out.' One thing I'm glad we kept is that mentality. That's the way you get people to stay and remember you and become a fan. That's what pays the bills and allows you to travel one more tour and then another tour."

(Editing by SheriLinden at Reuters)