Jake and Taylor Armerding

Photo by Steve Ide

Jake Armerding was six years old when he pulled a beat-up tape recorder out of the attic of his Massachusetts home, balanced a cheap microphone on top of his clock radio, and began taping the pop hits of the mid-1980s onto cassette. These sessions often ran well into the night, and when he would finally turn off the radio and fall into bed, the soundtrack would switch to his dad, Taylor, practicing bluegrass mandolin up in the living room. Ten years later, when Jake began crafting his own style of music, it was no surprise that pop and bluegrass were the main influences.

The Armerding name is well known in North Shore music circles and beyond. One doesn’t easily forget a name like Armerding and one doesn’t easily forget the magical music that comes from one as talented as Jake Armerding. Growing up on the North Shore and playing with his dad’s band, Northern Lights, for six years prepared Jake well for the life of a musician.

By the time he graduated college in Wheaton, IL, Armerding had his first album in hand. “Caged Bird” reveals his early experiments with a pop-bluegrass blend; it was also informed by 10 years of classical violin lessons and his stint as fiddler in his father’s acclaimed “newgrass” band Northern Lights. Boston’s WUMB Folk Radio began spinning it regularly, eventually naming Armerding their Best New Artist of 2001. WUMB is still firmly behind Jake and his career since he was chosen to appear at this year’s Boston Folk Festival on the U Mass Boston campus. The exposure to an audience that Jake gained as a teenager brought him requests for session work, and he contributed to recordings by Jonathan Edwards, Jason Harrod, Amy Gallatin, Bob Martin and others. In search for new challenges, Armerding picked up the mandolin at age 16 and the guitar a year later. He also began to focus on developing his vocal skills and writing songs.

In March 1998 he received a call from mandolinist Matt Flinner, presently touring with Judith Edelman, a singer-songwriter from Nashville. Flinner asked Armerding to join the band for a tour around the West Coast. Armerding accepted, and toured intermittently with the Judith Edelman Band over the next two years.

On a whim back in 2001, Jake packed his stuff into his Honda Civic and took off for Nashville. For the next eight months he wrote and recorded songs for his next album, hung out with other twentysomethings in the local acoustic music scene, and jammed with his childhood bluegrass heroes. He headed back to Boston with most of the record done. Ironically, it was then that Nashville-based independent Compass Records bought the unfinished tracks and decided to turn them into a national release.

The result, “Jake Armerding,” put its author on the map. The CD was picked up by radio stations all over the country, and Armerding logged appearances at the Newport Folk Festival, the main stage at Falcon Ridge (NY), Great Waters Folk Festival (NH) and the Moab (UT) Music Festival, along with clubs from Anchorage to London. As the buzz built, so did critical praise. The Boston Globe proclaimed him “the most gifted and promising songwriter to emerge from the Boston folk scene in years.”

Now finishing his second Compass CD, Armerding is on tour with a full band this year. The new album, “Walking on the World,” is as difficult to categorize as much of today’s best music — equal parts New England singer-songwriter, acoustic rock, and traditional bluegrass (no genre is exactly safe). But the effect is natural. Fans of the syndicated radio series, Mountain Stage, may know already that Jake’s song “Little Boy Blue” has been selected as an Honorable Mention at the 2006 Mountain Stage NewSong Festival Contest in Shepherdstown, WV. Listening to Armerding perform, hearing these diverse elements overlap, you find yourself wondering why these genres, strangers until now, haven’t been friends all along.

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Star-watchers should keep an eye on young Jake Armerding, a fiddle, mandolin, and guitar prodigy with a quiet charisma and the chops to match. He is a provocative mix of hip urban songwriter and crack traditional musician (his father is Taylor Armerding of Northern Lights fame), giving his songs a timeless sweep and riveting intimacy. The Boston Globe

. . . when Armerding finds a rhythmic groove, his instrumental skills are remarkable. His fiddle solo on ‘Too Many People’ is so inventive and assured that you can understand why Northern Lights replaced him with occasional appearances by Vassar Clements. Geoffrey Himes, The Washington Post