Jake Schepps Song Lyrics

Jake Schepps has made a name for himself as a banjo renaissance man, an artist with not only an adroit touch on his instrument but an intrepid, imaginative vision for contemporary stringband music. Although a student of traditional and progressive bluegrass styles as a player, Schepps has stretched beyond those genres to take his place alongside the Punch Brothers, mandolin ace (and frequent collaborator) Matt Flinner and other notables in a field the Colorado-based banjoist likes to call simply "new acoustic music." Schepps – spurred to create new possibilities for the stringband of five-string banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin and double-bass – creates ingenious arrangements of decidedly non-bluegrass material. His venturesome new album, An Evening in the Village: The Music of Béla Bartók (to be released on Oct. 6, 2011), finds common ground between the piquant beauty of the great Hungarian composer's take on Eastern European folk melodies and the big-sky vibrancy of new American acoustic music.