Guitarist John Carlini is named by Frets Magazine as a founding member of the revolutionary West Coast new acoustic music movement of the 1970's. John was the lead guitarist in the ground-breaking new acoustic music group, the Great American Music Band. Ten years earlier, after discovering the Wheeling, West Virginia, Jamboree on the radio, John, the son of a New York Philharmonic violinist, made the New York City folk music scene while still a teenager. Sitting in for Jim Rooney with Bill Keith's band, he met David Grisman. In the next two decades this fortuitous union would change the world's perception of what acoustic string music could be.

A graduate of both Boston's Berklee School of Music as an arranging and composition major, and the Navy School of Music, where he played big-band rhythm guitar in the Show Band, Carlini became the musical director of the newly formed David Grisman Quintet. The band's distinctive sound emanated in part from his sophisticated, jazz-influenced arrangements.

Carlini's arrangements are featured on David Grisman's Dawg Jazz (1982), and his orchestrations include work with the Turtle Island String Quartet and the Kronos Quartet. Carlini orchestrated David Grisman's score for the Federico DeLaurentis film King of the Gypsies. John is the guitarist on Grisman's Gammy-nominated Dawg '90 and he performed with Grisman and Stephane Grepelli at Carnegie Hall. In 1992, Carlini was a New York Drama Desk award nominee for his orchestrations in the hit off-Broadway musical Song of Singapore, also released on CD.