The View From Here (Compass) (star) (star) (star) 1/2
Mandolinist Matt Flinner is currently in singer Judith Edelman’s group, but his earlier band, Sugarbeat, was more in line with the sound on “The View From Here,” his first solo album. Inhabiting a musical genre that is still, after two decades, in search of a name — “new acoustic,” “progressive bluegrass,” “newgrass” all have been tried — Flinner takes the softer-centered, no-banjo approach that will be familiar to David Grisman’s dawgies but maintains more of the traditional tones and conventional structures than his jazzier mandolin brethren. His basic ensemble is a trio with bassist Todd Phillips and guitarist David Grier, augmented on each track by fiddle, dobro or bouzouki. With a mild Celtic flavor detectable on most of these 10 original instrumentals, maybe we should call this “Worldgrass.”
