Submitted photoMandolin great Jeff Austin, formerly of Yonder Mountain String Band, will play new tunes with a new band, the Jeff Austin Band, at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Domino Room in Bend.

Asking questions people don’t want to be asked is kind of a hazard of journalism. It’s not a problem that comes up very often on the entertainment beat, but it happens.

Case in point: when we asked Jeff Austin about his departure from a certain popular newgrass quartet.

“It’s been a year,” Austin told GO! Magazine on Monday when we started things off awkwardly by asking about him going solo after 15 years in Yonder Mountain String Band. “There’s nothing else to say. It’s time to talk about the present.”

Point taken. But still, the past is hard to let go of, and Austin is best known from 1½-decade stretch as the mandolin player for Colorado-based progressive bluegrass group he co-founded in late 1998. Together, the foursome became hugely popular, started a festival, appeared on late-night TV and became a much-loved staple of the bluegrass and jam scenes.

So when Austin announced he was going solo a year ago, it rocked certain quadrants of the music world. One commenter on Jambase.com complained, “This is about as bad as it gets. This is equal to trey leaving to (pursue) TAB,” comparing Austin’s decision to Phish’s Trey Anastasio focusing on his Trey Anastasio Band.

(Of course, now Phish is back together and playing not one but two shows right here in Bend this summer. Hearts can be broken, kids, but they can be mended, too.)

We could go into a lot more detail about Austin’s seemingly abrupt departure or his attitude about it, but as he might point out, it kind of gets away from the fact that Austin is still making music with some talented folks.

Jeff Austin Band is no vanity project, either. “It might have my name on it, but it’s a very collaborative experience,” Austin said.

The band also features Ross Martin (guitar), Eric Thorin (bass) and Danny Barnes (banjo).

He met Martin in the late 1990s. “We never played in a band together, but hung out, and we’re friends. Danny and I’ve been collaborating with or playing music in one form or another for 10-plus years. Same thing with Eric Thorin,” he said. Martin and Thorin go back a long ways as well.

“When we got together, it wasn’t like, ‘We don’t know what to do,’ that breaking of the ice period (where) we didn’t know of each other, we didn’t know who each other was. We all knew … each other,” Austin said.

That put them in a very comfortable place starting out, he said, and after a year of playing together under their belt, they’ve gotten more comfortable.

“The collaboration is pretty heavy in this band, as far as where we go improvisationally in a live experience, in that songs that might have been around for a little bit have turned into different things,” he said.

Austin is highly regarded for his improvisational skills; fans of his Yonder work will be reassured to hear that the songs on his new solo album, “The Simple Truth” — some of which land in the bluegrass area, others country or rock — will be fleshed out differently when played live.

He describes the album as “a collection of songs that we tried to interpret as true to the songs as we could” in the studio.

“Now, when we go on stage, it’s a four-piece acoustic band (and) we translate those songs again in a different way. It’s pretty fun to take one piece of material and mess with it a bunch of different ways. It’s a lot of new stuff,” he said.

“Nothing’s ever black and white. It’s not, ‘Here’s the song, this is exactly how we’re going to play it, and that’s how it’s going to come out.’ That would be cheating everybody, to not let the band breathe its own life into it,” he said. “We’re really interested in creating our own identity. For us to try and sound like anybody else would be a shame. We can only sound like ourselves.”

“The Simple Truth” dropped just a couple of months ago, but Bend audiences will also hear even newer tunes the band hasn’t yet recorded — emphasis on “yet.”

They’ve in fact been so productive Austin hints there could be another JAB album by next year.

“We’re discussing recording in December again, because the next album is practically written,” he said. “We definitely have a nice big chunk of stuff that if you put it all together would, track-wise, make a record.”

Meanwhile, the band has a big year of shows and festivals in front of them, to progress further.

“The music keeps developing. There’s constant inspiration,” he added. “It’s really fun to write … because suddenly you have something kind of new to write for, to play off the strengths of the musicians that you’re playing with.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com