Jeff Austin
Jeff Austin was a mandolin player, singer and songwriter, a founding member of Yonder Mountain String Band, the Colorado band whose improvising, jam-band approach to bluegrass drew a large audience of rock and Grateful Dead fans from the late 1990s. He wrote many of the band’s songs, left it in 2014 to lead the Jeff Austin Band, and died in 2019 at the age of 45.
Born in Arlington Heights, Illinois, on 25 April 1974, he grew up in nearby Elk Grove and studied musical theater, voice and dance at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. In the mid-1990s, while working in radio in Champaign, Illinois, he came across bluegrass, the Bad Livers’ records in particular. In 1996 the banjo player Dave Johnston asked him to sing in his band the Bluegrassholes; Austin owned a mandolin but did not play it, and Johnston told him to bring it anyway. He learned by ear, naming Roland White, John Duffey, Sam Bush and David Grisman as influences.
After moving to Nederland, Colorado, he formed Yonder Mountain String Band in 1998 with Johnston on banjo, Ben Kaufmann on bass and Adam Aijala on guitar. Austin played mandolin and sang, and was the focal point of the band’s stage shows. His songs ran through its records from the first album, Elevation (Frog Pad, 1999), which included his “Half Moon Rising” and “Darkness and Light,” to Town by Town (2001), with “Sorrow Is a Highway,” “New Horizons” and “Peace of Mind,” The Show (2009), with “Out of the Blue,” “Steep Grade, Sharp Curves” and “Fine Excuses,” and EP 13 (2013), with “Rag Doll.” The band let fans tape its shows and issued its own live series, Mountain Tracks, from 2001.
Outside the band he recorded Songs from the Tin Shed (2004) with Chris Castino of the Big Wu, and played in Keller Williams’s Grateful Grass with Williams and the String Cheese Incident bassist Keith Moseley, giving bluegrass treatments to Grateful Dead songs on two live albums for the Rex Foundation, Rex (Live at the Fillmore) (2008) and Dos, recorded at the Fillmore in San Francisco in December 2013 with Michael Kang added. With Brendan Bayliss of Umphrey’s McGee he began playing duo shows in 2006, and the pair, as 30db, released One Man Show on SCI Fidelity on 11 May 2010, fourteen songs they wrote together. He also wrote the theme music for the 2013 documentary I Know That Voice.
Late in 2013 Austin stepped away from Yonder Mountain, and on 23 April 2014 the band announced it would carry on without him. He formed the Jeff Austin Band with Danny Barnes on banjo and guitar, Ross Martin on guitar and Eric Thorin on bass, and his solo album The Simple Truth (Yep Roc, 10 February 2015), begun with demos recorded with Nick Forster, added Cody Dickinson on drums and guests including Todd Snider, Brendan Bayliss and Sarah Siskind, his co-writer on “Over and Over.” The band’s lineup changed often after that. He was touring with it when he died in Seattle on 24 June 2019.
