About Mountain Music Project

Our Mission:

The Mountain Music Project’s mission is to encourage the preservation of musical traditions in rural and under-served communities throughout the world, with a special focus on mountainous regions.

Our activities include cultural exchanges and expeditions, multimedia
documentation, and supporting local cultural preservation organizations.

Our cultural preservation work is done as a project of Tundra Club, a 501c3 non-profit organization with offices in Montana and Utah. Our commercial CDs and DVDs are managed by Mountain Music Project, LLC, registered in Virginia.

We’re currently working to help musicians preserve their local traditions in Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, Burma, and wherever the songs carry us. Does your community have a musical tradition that might not get passed to the next generation? Let us know!

Staff Bio’s

Jacob Penchansky
Jacob Penchansky (AKA Jack Chance) is a radio producer, sound recordist, and “guerilla
ethnomusicologist.” His radio stories and audio recordings have been broadcast on National Public
Radio, BBC/PRI’s The World, Radio Netherlands, the Nature Conservancy Podcast, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting, and Outer Voices. Jacob has recorded traditional musicians in more than 30 countries. He’s
a contributing writer for the Rough Guide to World Music, has helped preserve audio recordings for
Easter Island’s Museo Anthropologico, built radio stations in Borneo, documented endangered native languages in Alaska, and trained musicologists along the Thailand-Burma border.

Tara Linhardt
In addition to being an award-winning mandolin player from Virginia, winning first place at such festivals as Mt Airy and Maury River Fiddler’s Conventions, she’s also spent significant time exploring the traditional Asian music and culture. She also studied and lived with Nepali families for a year studying classical Indian tabla drumming, yoga,
meditation, and traveled with and assisted a local environmental organization, along with her studies of
Nepali language, history and culture. She graduated cum laude with her Bachelor’s Degree in
International Relations from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Masters in Education from
Shenandoah University. She then followed her interests in music and culture back in the US, where she
went back to the culture of her home state of Virginia and became a bluegrass musician, playing,
performing, and teaching traditional styles of music; privately, at festivals, and at camps such as
“Traditions Week” at McDaniel College.

Danny Knicely
Danny Knicely is a music producer and fourth generation Appalachian multi-instrumentalist from a
Virginia family steeped in mountain music tradition. He has won many awards for his mandolin, guitar,
and fiddle expertise, including 1st place mandolin at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Danny has used his
roots in old-time and bluegrass to explore many types of music from Irish, Jazz, and Latin, to the various
styles he’s encountered while performing and studying music in India, Nepal, Tibet, and China. He has an
awesome ability and desire to learn music from local musicians where ever he goes. Danny can be found
recording and touring the U.S. and internationally with Magraw Gap, Corn Tornado, Purgatory Mountain,
Ouros, Furnace Mountain, and the renown multi-cultural performance troupe, Footworks Percussive
Dance Ensemble. He has also given presentations on the similarities between Appalachian and Himalayan
music at Columbia University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Augustana College,
Dickinson College, and for Asia Network.