Matt Flinner

Mike Compton & Matt Flinner at Fiddle & Pick, Pegram, TN, 1/28/12

I’ve been an admirer of Mike Compton’s playing for a long time, so it was a thrill to get to play a duo show with him at Fiddle & Pick in Nashville, Tennessee the other night.  If you’re familiar with Mike’s music, you know he’s one of the great bluegrass players today (or any day).  He’s a great interpreter of Bill Monroe’s style, but he also goes deeper into the roots: down into old-time Appalachian music and Mississippi blues to get to much of the grit of what bluegrass grew out of.  We figured out an hour or so’s worth of tunes we could play together—I’ll have to go back and listen to a recording of it (which I think someone made at the show), but I think some pretty primal stuff happened that was really unique and wonderful.  And it was a blast!

Thanks to all who came to the show as well as the mandolin workshops that Mike and I gave earlier in the day at Fiddle & Pick.  It was a full day of mandolin nerdiness that Mike and I both enjoyed very much, and we hope all of you who attended got a good bit of nerdiness out of it as well.  We’re hoping the Mega Mini Mandolin Camp with Mike and Matt will happen again—stay tuned!

The new Matt Flinner Trio CD, “Winter Harvest,” will be released on Compass Records on January 31, 2012.  We’re very excited about it!  If you’d like to hear sample tracks, visit the Compass Records website.

“Winter Harvest” is a continuation of our “Music du Jour” project, which we started in 2006.  On most of our live gigs, each member of the trio (Ross Martin, Eric Thorin and Matt Flinner) writes one new piece of music the day of the show, and all three new compositions are debuted on that night’s concert.  After the first few of these tours we recorded our “Music du Jour” CD for Compass Records.  Now, after about another 50 “du Jour” shows and about another 160 new tunes, we’ve recorded “Winter Harvest.”  As on the “Music du Jour” CD, we’ve selected 12 tunes (after a long and torturous process of narrowing the tunes down to that many) that we feel represent a wide spectrum of what is possible in a bluegrass trio.  And if you order a physical copy of the CD (you can pre-order at Compass or you can get it here starting Jan 31), you’ll get three bonus tracks that are not included in the digital download (we see this as part of the beauty of having too much material to choose from!).  Or you can come to one of our many upcoming live shows and buy a copy in person.

We’ll be continuing our Music du Jour project on into 2012 and are excited to see where it takes us, both musically and geographically.  We hope to see you out there in the big wide world!

Click here to see upcoming tour dates.

Welcome to the new Matt Flinner website! Here you’ll find info about the Matt Flinner Trio, upcoming trio shows as well as other Matt Flinner concerts, videos of live performances, info about mandolin lessons on the internet, and much much more. You can also find some of the finest “Deeply Rooted New Acoustic Music” in our CD store. Feel free to look around, and let us know if you have any questions (via our contact page). Stay tuned—we’ll have some exciting new music and new features over the coming months!