Matt Flinner
Rocky Mountain Mando

by Michael Parrish

Multi-instrumentalist Matt Flinner has made a career out of playing acoustic music in new ways. Starting out as a banjo prodigy who was playing bluegrass festivals before he entered his teens, Flinner later took up the mandolin, won the banjo contest at Winfield, Kansas, in 1990, and took the mandolin award there the following year.

Flinner's decision to focus on eight-stringed instruments was primarily a function of opportunity. "I was getting more work on the mandolin. Sugarbeat was probably the main factor in getting me to switch, because they obviously already had a great banjo player in Tony Furtado, who was really the organizer of the band. He offered me the mandolin/bouzouki slot in the band, and that was just the best opportunity I could imagine at the time, so there was no way to pass it up."

Sugarbeat, an eclectic quartet that also featured bassist Sally Truitt and singer-songwriter-guitarist Ben Demerath, specialized in playing rock and folk material, including Demerath's lively originals, in a bluegrass context. The band first came together to play the band contest at the 1992 Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which they ended up winning. "We knew three tunes, and I guess that was enough."

The band recorded one memorable CD for Planet Bluegrass and toured nationally before going their separate ways. "Sally and Ben both got kind of tired of touring. Tony and I thought about carrying on, but it made more sense for everybody to pursue their own things at that time."

The breakup of Sugarbeat got Flinner thinking about putting together a solo album. "Rather than relying on a band for a job, I thought maybe I should have some of my own material and have some other people to play it with me."

The View From Here, an all-instrumental effort on Compass, came out in early 1998. Recorded in Nashville over five days in the spring of 1997, the disc features a core band of Flinner, guitarist David Grier, and bassist Todd Phillips, augmented with fiddlers Stuart Duncan, Tim O'Brien, and Darol Anger, along with Jerry Douglas on Dobro and Mike Marshall on bouzouki. The disc, which consists entirely of Flinner's originals, has a distinctive sound, airy and open, that Flinner credits, in part, to his love of Celtic instrumental music and the seminal work of trumpeter Miles Davis.

Living in the Rockies, Flinner probably gets less session work than he would in Nashville or California. But Flinner, who has lived in the Rockies all his life, has no regrets about his location. "It's great living here. I can't complain."