Brett Hughes has been a stalwart champion of and long-time collaborator in the dynamic Burlington, Vermont music scene. He has been a member of seminal local and regional bands Decentz, viperHouse, Chrome Cowboys, and Monoprix. An engineer/producer for Surprise Me Mr. Davis, NOLA’s Duke Aeroplane and the Wrong Numbers, Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz, and Esther Rose. Brett has played festivals, such as, Bonnaroo, Mountain Jam, moe.down (with Mike Gordon of Phish) and toured much of the US and Europe with Nashville-based Shannon McNally. He is also an Emmy Award-winning composer for Windy Acres. You may recognize him locally from the beloved Honky Tonk Tuesday at Burlington’s Radio Bean, which he hosted for over ten years. He’s currently scoring a film soundtrack and healing up from surgery after tearing off his bicep tendon while telemark skiing in the woods at Mad River Glen.

Multi-instrumentalist 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 Contest at Winfield Kansas in 1990, and took the mandolin award there the following year. Since then, he has become recognized as one of the premiere mandolinists as well as one of the finest new acoustic/roots music composers today. He has toured and recorded with a wide variety of bluegrass, new acoustic, classical and jazz artists, including Tim O’Brien, Frank Vignola, Steve Martin, Darrell Scott, the Modern Mandolin Quartet, Dave Douglas, Leftover Salmon, Alison Brown, The Ying Quartet, Tony Trischka, Darol Anger, and the Nashville Chamber Orchestra. He has also recorded two Compass Records CDs and toured as part of Phillips, Grier and Flinner with bassist Todd Phillips and guitarist David Grier. His two solo CDs (also on Compass), “The View from Here” and “Latitude,” are now widely considered classics in the new acoustic/modern bluegrass style. His current group, the Matt Flinner Trio (with guitarist Ross Martin and bassist Eric Thorin), has forged new pathways in acoustic string band music with their two ground-breaking CDs, “Music du Jour” and “Winter Harvest” (coming soon!).