Boulder Acoustic Society
www.boulderacousticsociety.net

It's one of the odder musical quartets you'll find in Colorado: guitar, bass, violin... xylophone? Sure enough, that's the sonic recipe for the Boulder Acoustic Society, a new, scholarly quartet made up of Aaron Keim, Brad Jones, Kailin Yong and Scott Higgins. The group recently was named a semi-finalist in Notes at 9,000: Emerging Artist Series in 2004.

Bassist Aaron Keim: "Brad, our guitarist, and Kailin, our violinist, had known each other through different social stuff for a while. Last summer, they were getting together and jamming a little bit, but they felt they needed something else to hold it together. They decided they needed a bass player. I'd moved to town last August, and I met Brad because we both worked at HB Woodsong's, so we hooked up that way, and Kailin knew Scott, our percussionist, through working with orchestras."

"I think that our big focus is just to find a good repertoire or write a good repertoire and find a way to perform and reach as many people as we can with our sound. A lot of our music is inspired by the traditional stuff, but we like to do it our way, too. We're trying to strike that balance between what's traditional and what's progressive."

It's an unusual combination of instruments.

Keim: "It is, and we were not convinced, at first, when Scott said he wanted to play the xylophone. But it turns out that it's more about the musician and what he does with it than the instrument itself. This nstrumentation, I never would have conceived it. I never would have gone out looking for a xylophone, but it's the right combination for us."