Bluegrass is usually thought of as a folk idiom. Jazz, on the other hand, is typically considered a music of innovation. Bluegrass is traditional and backward-looking hill music made by people who started scraping away at that one bow out in some godforsaken holler in Ireland, kept it up all the way across the Atlantic, and didn’t stop even after they’d crawled up into some godforsaken holler in Kentucky. Jazz, on the other hand, started metastasizing fecundly as soon as it was spawned, sprouting an evolutionary tree that connects King Oliver to Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Miles Davis to John Coltrane to Ornette Coleman to the scrawling noise of John Zorn.
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The new album American Legacies, a collaboration between the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Del McCoury‘s bluegrass band, attempts to make a case for the second story. And in many ways it’s convincing—certainly the music is often seamless. “Shoeshine Blues” swings jovially, the bluegrass strings fitting neatly into the quacking horns on the chorus and the horns and banjo and fiddle all taking their turns on the solos. It’s a little bit Django Reinhardt and a little bit western swing—comforting in its familiarity.
All of which makes this sound like a successful outing. And I suppose it is, sort of. But while the ease of the set is in some ways its biggest charm, over the course of the album—or sometimes even over the course of a single song—it wears out its welcome. It’s true that bluegrass and jazz have many common roots. It’s true that they have a good deal of repertoire in common. Still, though, isn’t this just a little too relaxed? When Bob Wills, the king of western swing, mixed jazz and folk, it sounded right, but it also sounded more than a little weird and wired. Wills would let rip with a crazed “aaa-haah!” while some nut tried to make his rudimentary electric guitar sound like Jack Teagarden’s trombone or played dirty blues licks on a country hoedown. At times, with Wills, it sounded like everybody in the band had gotten a different memo. Were they country? Were they jazz? Were they blues? Were they traditionalists, were they forward looking, or were they just plain pop? Who cared? Wills yelped, and different musical traditions clanked into each other with sublimely offhand chutzpah.
So maybe this could have jelled somehow. Clearly the project was undertaken with an awareness of the problems besetting both bands. Juxtaposing bluegrass and jazz here is meant to be a way to shake off the embalming fluid. Put two dead traditions together and maybe, Igor, we will create life! And it doesn’t seem as crazy as Frankenstein’s plan, either. Why shouldn’t it work?
Sat 4/16, 8 PM, Pfeiffer Hall, North Central College, 310 E. Benton, Naperville, 630-637-5140, $45-$60, all-ages.
