Austin 360
Guitarist Mitch Watkins first met drummer Scott Laningham in the early 1980s when they played a gig together at a Mexican restaurant on Sixth Street. Laningham was just 21 years old.
“The way we connected musically led me to suspect that there was more going on personally and spiritually, as well,” Watkins recalled this week. “I certainly put out the word about this new kid to anybody I knew.”
They played music together often over the next 40 years. Watkins, an anchor of the local jazz community who has toured with the likes of Leonard Cohen and Lyle Lovett, enjoyed seeing the young prodigy blossom into one of Austin’s finest musicians.
In 2017, Sarah Jarosz became the second recipient of the FreshGrass Composition Commission, a grant to compose a long-form piece of music for an ensemble that includes elements of traditional string band instrumentation. Guitar whisperer Bill Frisell preceded the Wimberley native, while Rhiannon Giddens and the Kronos Quartet followed. As she began to write, her mother battled breast cancer in the wake of Hurricane Harvey having ravaged the Texas coast and decimating Port Aransas, a summer mecca for the family.
When Jarosz premiered
Blue Heron Suite at FreshGrass that fall, avant-roots traditionalists heralded the work. The then-23-year-old entered the Central Texas scene as a prodigy – singer, mandolinist, clawhammer banjo picker – and by now counts four Grammy Awards and nine nominations.