Greensky Bluegrass, from Kalamazoo, Mich., won the prestigious band competition at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2006.

Especially out here in the West, non-traditional, jam-oriented bluegrass is a hot ticket. Bands like Yonder Mountain String Band and Hot Buttered Rum do well enough in Bend to visit at least yearly.

In a recently published interview with jam-culture watchdog JamBase.com, Anders Beck of Greensky Bluegrass nicely summed up how a music as tradition-based as bluegrass grew such a boundary-blind offshoot.

“I think almost all the guys in the band got into bluegrass the way I did, through the Grateful Dead and ‘The Pizza Tapes,’” Beck said. “All of a sudden there’s Garcia and Grisman and from ‘The Pizza Tapes’ you get to Grisman Quintet and you hear this guitar player and you’re like, ‘Who the hell is that?’ Then you start listening to Tony Rice recordings, and then from there Bela Fleck and you just keep going back and back to Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs. That’s how a lot of people got into bluegrass.”

(Don’t recognize some of those names? Get thee to the Google!)

Unlike many of their contemporaries at hippie-friendly festivals such as Rothbury and Yarmony Grass, Greensky — from the bluegrass not-so-hotbed of Kalamazoo, Mich. — seems to have soaked up more Monroe/Flatt/Scruggs than Garcia/Grisman/Fleck; the quintet is friendly to fans of both sides, but they do seem more at home pickin’ a three-minute, traditional-sounding tune than ceaselessly soloing for the twirl-dancers among us.

Greensky has a new album out, called “Five Interstates,” and the two songs from it that you can hear at www.myspace .com/greenskybluegrassmusic are darn near picture-perfect slices of string music, as taut as Monroe’s trailblazing bands but with a warmth all their own. Call it bluegrass for the 21st century.

Greensky Bluegrass ; 7 p.m. Wednesday; free; McMenamins Old St. Francis School, 700 N.W. Bond St., Bend; 541-382-5174 or www.mcmenamins.com.