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 National Banjo Competition in Winfield, KS in 1990, and won the mandolin award there the following year.
He moved to Nashville in 1999 and is now widely considered one of the hottest and most creative mandolin players on the acoustic scene. His two solo albums for Compass Records, The View from Here and Latitude, both featured bluegrass stalwarts Todd Phillips, David Grier, Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Darol Anger, and received high critical acclaim. Flinner actively tours with Phillips and Grier (in Phillips, Grier and Flinner) and the Modern Mandolin Quartet, as well as with his own Matt Flinner Acoustic Trio and Matt Flinner Quartet, which released its Walking on the Moon CD on Compass in 2002.
Flinner's newest release of original instrumentals will be released by Compass in the summer of 2007, and his new recording with Frank Vignola's Gypsy Grass will be available for download later this winter.
“Flinner provides the next logical evolutionary step to David Grisman's unique dawg style, and does it with a nod to the past and a vision of the future." ~Bluegrass Now
