Jimbo Mathus
Hometown: Oxford, MS
Manager: Reed Watson / Thousand Dances
Label: Big Legal Mess
Booking: Lee Huber / Odyssey Touring
Jimbo Mathus is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known for his work with the swing revival band Squirrel Nut Zippers. Built around an unlikely but infectious melding of American music styles, Squirrel Nut Zippers drew from be-bop jazz, bluegrass, Dixieland, swing and rock ‘n’ roll and became a surprise hit in the mid-1990s. The band’s 1996 album, Hot, sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone, and the 1997 follow-up, Perennial Favorites, posted another half a million in sales.
Since those days in the early 2000s, Mathus has released more than a dozen solo albums and reactivated Squirrel Nut Zippers, which has become a popular draw across the U.S. His latest release, These 13 [2021], is a collaboration with former Zippers bandmate-turned-solo artist Andrew Bird.
Following a central tenet of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” that encourages a balance of rational and romantic impulses, Mathus spurned a scholarship to the U.S. Naval Academy to pursue his own path. That journey has taken him many unexpected places, but none more important than his self-discovery of the artist Jimbo Mathus.
“I guess my whole thing has been like some sort of serendipitous, a fool following his folly,” he says. “It's not like I calculated anything, you know?”
“Up until meeting Jimbo Mathus, all my musical heroes were dead. Jimbo was anything but and just oozed musicality of a kind I thought was extinct. He is an enigma, a walking contradiction: wild yet refined, worldly yet colloquial. He represents his own brand of the American musical tree.”
- ANDREW BIRD
