Yonder Mountain String Band

Johnston, a banjo player from Aurora, Illinois, had learned at the University of Illinois and played there in the Bluegrassholes, which Austin joined on a mandolin he owned but could not yet play. Both moved to Colorado, Johnston first to Boulder, Austin to Nederland. Kaufmann, who had grown up on big-band jazz and Phish, had played bass in the Colorado bluegrass band Mountain Standard Time and led his own Tree Full of Pigs; Austin introduced himself after one of that band’s shows at the Acoustic Coffeehouse in Nederland. Aijala, a Massachusetts-born guitarist with a forestry degree, had come to the Front Range after seasons of forestry work and met the others in 1998. In December that year the four played their first show, opening at the Fox Theatre in Boulder.

They toured widely, drawing crowds much larger than bluegrass bands were used to, and like the Grateful Dead they let fans tape their shows, so that a trading network of live recordings grew up around the band. The first studio album, Elevation (1999), was followed on their own Frog Pad label by Town by Town (2001) and Old Hands (2003), and by a run of live sets, Mountain Tracks, beginning with a 2001 volume recorded at the Fox Theatre. A self-titled studio album came out in 2006, followed by The Show (2009), and the band ran its own Harvest Festival at Mulberry Mountain in Arkansas from 2010.

In April 2014 Austin left to lead his own group, the Jeff Austin Band, and the fiddler Allie Kral and the mandolinist Jacob Jolliff, who had toured with the band in the meantime, became members in 2015. With them Yonder made Black Sheep (2015) and Love. Ain’t Love (2017). Austin died in Seattle on 24 June 2019, aged 45. In 2020 the multi-instrumentalist Nick Piccininni joined on mandolin, fiddle, banjo and guitar, and the fiddler Coleman Smith later took the fiddle chair. Get Yourself Outside (2022), with the instrumental “Into the Fire,” brought the Grammy nomination. Nowhere Next (Frog Pad / Thirty Tigers, 2024), with Jerry Douglas as a guest on Dobro, was made by Aijala, Johnston, Kaufmann, Piccininni and Smith, and Good As True (2026) is the band’s twelfth studio album.

In 2021 the Colorado Music Hall of Fame chose Yonder Mountain String Band for induction alongside Hot Rize, Leftover Salmon and the String Cheese Incident; the ceremony was delayed by the pandemic.