Jim Volk Website

You couldn't care less that Jim Volk was born in 1962, you don't give a hoot where (okay, Chicago), and you could die happy not knowing that he's been playing the guitar probably longer than you've been alive (if you�re under 40). So he founded Steel River Productions, organizing and promoting concerts for other "modern acoustic" musicians and composers. Ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. He's been accompanying poets, dancers, actors, and performance artists since time immemorial. Yawn. So what if he's produced 2 solo releases,"Melodies and Monologues" and "Woods and Metals"? Anybody can put out a CD. Stretching stylistic boundaries (as well as pushing them over the edge) is par for the course for many soloists of this guitar era. Isn't it? "I'm fortunate to be able to benefit from the Fahey-Kottke era as well as the Hedges-deGrassi era. As a lad, I heavily dug The Beatles and Earl Scruggs with equal passion; it was simply just great music to me," he intones, with predictable modesty. Like many of his present-day peers, JV cut his teeth on Rock, Jazz, Bluegrass, and R&B (if you're speaking strictly American music). BFD.

More boring bio: The boy relocates from Cleveland to Austin, thinking this is an improvement, where he masochistically spends 7 years playing approximately 1,059 gigs, including the South By Southwest Convention, countless honky-tonks, restaurants and dance halls. But even after being crowned Austin�s 1994 KLBJ Guitar Wars Champion, slaying dozens of electrified metal-heads and Stevie-wanna-bees with an acoustic guitar, Volk is still without a major release, despite many years of demoing, performing with, and recording on other artists� albums. So Jim does what any red-blooded unsung genius would do; he moves back to Ohio. To his amazement and delight, he finds there a rich, fertile, and ever-evolving acoustic music scene, for which he quickly becomes a major catalyst. Hot players and music-lovers alike look forward to each fresh session of his Modern Acoustic Guitar Fest series in Columbus and Dayton. What this is all leading up to is that he's finally given in and recorded "Blue Wheels...and Other Guitar Favorites," a multi-paletted documentation of his guit travels from the last 15 years, representative of his ongoing stylistic distillation. Oh, yeah, I forgot: you don't care about all that. At least not until you�ve heard him play. And after that, everything else is irrelevant. After that, you understand why he has shared the stage with the likes of John Renbourn and Fairport Convention, why he's been making TV and radio appearances nationwide since he was a 12-year-old brat in San Francisco. Then you just want to drag everyone you know out to see him, because you can�t tell them, they just have to hear it for themselves. What can anyone say about a guy possessed by a daemon, who gives voice to its ecstasies and its sorrows by turning over his body and soul, letting it use him as it will, a man with a guitar sprouting from his heart that pulls blood and breath from the his veins for its own life. How can you put something like that into words that your friends will understand?

You can't. But don't worry, you won't have to. Not after they've heard him play.