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Matthew Davis, “Ektorp”

Oct 8, 2019

Matthew Davis,

Bluegrass has an undeniable fascination with prodigies. Raise your hand if youā€™ve ever heard an excited story about a pre-pubescent Chris Thile at a run-of-the-mill bluegrass festival campsite jam session or a story about receiving a pre-fame autograph from a young, curly-headed fiddler named Alison Krauss.

All hands raised? Yes. Itā€™s a thing. Bluegrass loves its pickinā€™ kids, especially the ones with otherworldly, unfettered talent. But an even more remarkable phenomenon relating to these prodigious youths, especially since the advent of kids in/on bluegrass programs across the U.S., is the ever more frequent occurrence of young people, veritable prodigies, who are effortlessly and distinctly musical. They donā€™t just shred, they have taste, they have singular musical voices, they have all of the trappings of their elder counterparts.Ā 

An example of one such not-just-a-prodigy is banjo player Matthew Davis, whose 20 years of age superficially belie the fact that heā€™s not only a former National Banjo Champion, heā€™s also a graduate of the prestigious Acoustic Music Seminar at the Savannah Music Festival, and heā€™s released four albums. The most recent, Outlander, dropped early August of this year.Ā 

Even a handful of projects into a recording career, albums made at age 20 arenā€™t supposed to sound like this. ā€œEktorp,ā€ the final cut on the record — with Ethan Setiawan on mandolin, Grant Flick on fiddle, Jed Clark on guitar, and Jacob Warren on bass — demonstrates the astonishing maturity with which Davis composes, thinks about, and executes his art. Furthermore, for art music, and heady, technically rich new acoustic music at that, itā€™s impressively accessible, while remaining rooted in bluegrass. If the ā€œkidsā€ are sounding this good this early in their lifetimes the future of ā€œthe musicā€ isnā€™t just in good hands, itā€™s destined to be innovated and reinvigorated time and time again, with folks like Matthew Davis leading the charge.

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Matthew Davis,
Matthew Davis,