Fri, Mar 8 - 9pm - $22adv/$25door/$40 both 3/8 & 3/9

 Mandolinist Jeff Austin is unstoppable. He is celebrated for his fleet fingers and penchant for improvisation on stage, but those qualities also speak volumes about how he chooses to live. Austin has cultivated his natural musical abilities and allowed himself to be driven by his boldest instincts. In this way, he has been able to build positive, exciting momentum around his life’s greatest passion.In 1998, while working at a bar called the Verve in Nederland, Colorado, Austin met Adam Aijala and Ben Kaufmann, with whom he and Dave Johnston would form the Yonder Mountain String Band.“My time with Yonder has taught me what is possible,” Austin says. “It has shown me that if you work hard at it and you believe in it and there’s a part of you that’s meant to do it, it will happen. It’s clichéd, but it’s true.”It is with this history at his back that Jeff Austin will step out into the spotlight as a solo act. “My ideal sound is between Phish, My Morning Jacket, and Zac Brown Band.” Austin plans to continue songwriting for his solo project but might be weaving in a bit of mainstream, in the style of his John Scott Sherrill/Shawn Camp co-write “Fiddlin’ Around,” featured on Dierks Bentley’s 2010 bluegrass album Up on the Ridge. “I love writing a three-minute song with a hook that would grab a five-hundred-pound marlin as much as I like writing something that goes, ‘okay, after the bridge, it’s going to open up and just go wide.’”Indeed, “wide” is what Jeff Austin is all about. He wants new and different, complex and interesting. He wants everything the music world has to offer, and he’s willing to work hard to get it.

The Rumpke Mountain Boys combine signature vocals, a unique command of string instruments (acousticguitar, mandolin, upright bass and banjo) and dynamic special effects into a singular musical experience.An emotion filled musical stream of consciousness with no setlist, minimal structure, and intuitiveimprovisational flow. In this way, they summon the energy of the crowd as their guide in linking just theright music to precise moments in time.Grateful Dead Hour host David Gans proclaimed, “One of the things I love about the Rumpke MountainBoys is that there’s a fundamental honesty in their presentation. This is something they share with my otherheroes, Donna the Buffalo and the Grateful Dead. They don’t make set lists ahead of time, they don’trehearse their songs to a fare-thee-well-- they perform in real time. All four of them write, which is veryimportant, and they draw songs from a tremendous variety of sources... being a musician is a life-longlearning experience, if you’re doing it right, and they are.”