Biography

What do you get when you take two seasoned conservatory professors (one for composition at Oberlin Conservatory and one for double bass studies at the University of South Carolina), add one of the best mandolin players in the world in any genre, and throw in a young banjo phenom, then put them all together to play new chamber music using bluegrass instrumentation? You get EZRA.

Founded by award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Jones, EZRA is comprised of Jacob Jolliff (mandolin), Max Allard (banjo), Craig Butterfield (double bass), and Jones (guitar and piano). Jones, who is also a luthier, built some of the instruments he plays, and he composed all nine of the works on their self-titled debut album.

Jesse Jones met each of the other three musicians in EZRA in a different decade of his life: Jones met a young Jacob Jolliff at a bluegrass camp in 1999; Jones met Craig Butterfield in 2013, while both were on faculty at University of South Carolina; and Jones met Max Allard in the fall of 2021 at Oberlin Conservatory, where Jones is currently a composition professor and Allard is studying composition and playing banjo. The quartet sat down to play together for the very first time in January 2023, and one week later, they had recorded their first album.

Recorded and engineered by Paul Eachus and mastered by Dave Sinko (Punch Brothers, Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer), this album captures lightning in a bottle for these first time collaborators.