Meet Jordan Brandenburg of Turkeyfoot in Front Range

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Brandenburg.

Jordan, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I personally started playing guitar as a 12-year-old kid in Tyler, TX. My dad played and so I think I picked it up through him and I continued playing at church youth group and with buddies. I eventually picked up playing the drums as well which I really enjoyed. Sometime in high school, I saw a bluegrass band play at some church get together and I think that’s where I first caught the bluegrass bug, primarily as a listener though. I did get my first mandolin at some point late in high school but only really dabbled in it but I also met a guy named Matt Menefee (Matt is now a studio musician in Nashville who has played with Mumford and Sons, Warren Haynes, and many many more) who would also take me with him and his grandad to open bluegrass picks in East Texas which further deepened my love of that music. In college at Oklahoma State University, I would play for a beer with a buddy of mine – more singer/songwriter type stuff. But music was never a really serious endeavor for me.

However, I was an avid listener of music and I have always appreciated a well-written song.
After graduating from college, I altogether quit playing music so I could focus on my career as a landman in oil and gas in Oklahoma City. I would still pick my guitar here and there by myself but nothing too serious. In 2014, I moved to Denver for a job opportunity. My parents were visiting Colorado Springs at some point late that summer and I found a really nice Collings mandolin at Tejon Street Music which I ended up buying with the intention of getting back into music. It wasn’t until the next summer in 2015 that I really got into it. I started taking lessons from a local legend on the mandolin, Jordan Ramsey, and he really made the mandolin come to life for me. He encouraged me to start going to the many local picks that are hosted across the front range by the many lovers of bluegrass music that call Colorado home. The first pick that I attended was at Park House on a Wednesday night sometime in the fall of 2015 and from then on I truly hooked. It was a good way for me to meet new people in a new town and I loved the fact that it brought people from all walks of life for one common interest – bluegrass.

As I continued to make new friends in the scene, I found myself playing with the same group of people again and again. One of those people was Michael Rudolph (our bass player). We ended up founding Turkeyfoot in the summer of 2016 with three other friends simply as a way to have to do what we loved to do. But that rendition of Turkeyfoot was short lived as some of our players left the state after about a year to continue their musical educations. So, at the end of summer in 2017, Michael and I didn’t really know what we were going to do with the band. We had picked with both Bridger Dunnagan (fiddle) and Alex Koukov (banjo) at Rockygrass that year and really liked them both as musicians and people. When they told us they were both moving to Denver from Bozeman, MT that falls we asked them if they wanted to be in Turkeyfoot and they said yes. We ended up taking over a community pick/jam that Meadow Mountain had been hosting at Cerebral Brewing on Tuesday nights which allowed us to start playing together weekly. Eventually, Dave Pailet (guitar) joined us by December 2017 and that’s the quintet we have today. By then, we had compiled together a small set of original tunes and in the spring of 2018, we cut our first self-titled EP which was released in June of 2018. We also competed in the band competition at Rockygrass in July of 2018 where we were honored to take second place. Since then we have continued to focus on honing our craft and have been playing both around the front range and beyond with some mini-tours.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
For me personally, I think I had a lot of anxiety associated with performance since I didn’t have a ton of experience playing in front of people in a form of music I was relatively new to playing in a public setting. That has definitely eased over time and I really credit the band with helping with that. I think as we have grown more comfortable playing with each other my mindset shifted from a little anxiety to pure excitement. Scheduling can also be difficult as we all have other things going on besides the band like jobs and relationships but we make it work. All in all, though, it hasn’t been all that difficult. I don’t mean to make it sound easy, but I think we have a really great group of guys and we all get along really well. Everyone pitches in on managing different band duties and I think we’re all committed to making music that we want to hear. The life lesson to me is that it may be more important to have a team that works well together than having a bunch of superstars with big egos. We are more than the sum of our parts.

Please tell us more about what you do, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
We play our version of original bluegrass music in Colorado and beyond. As far as what we are most proud of, I would echo again my comments that we get along really well together and that we just have pure good old fashioned fun when we play. I also think that we have started to settle into our own sound in a pretty short amount of time. Our guitar player, Dave, often comments that we have such a “stout groove” and I think we would all agree with that. We are pretty locked in when we play and I think that has contributed to the sound we are working towards. I’ve had a lot of people say that it feels like our music comes from a different era – that it sounds somewhat traditional even while dealing with modern subject matter. I don’t think we want to completely replicate what’s been done in the past but for it to elicit that sort of emotion means we are taking people somewhere and that makes me excited.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We are currently discussing plans to get into the studio to do our first full-length album and we will continue to play shows around Colorado and will continue to do some mini tours here and there.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.turkeyfootbluegrass.com
• Email: turkeyfoot.bluegrass@gmail.com
• Instagram: @turkeyfoot.bluegrass
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/turkeyfoot

Image Credit:
Outdoor photos by Flat Nine Design and indoor photos are by Elliot Siff Photography

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