Abigail Washburn w/ Kai Welch and Wu Fei at the Grey Eagle

If American old-time music is about taking earlier, simpler ways of life and music-making as one’s model, Abigail Washburn has proven herself to be a bracing revelation to that tradition. Abigail, Kai Welch, and Wu Fei will be at the Grey Eagle on February 7th.

 

Abigail Washburn—a singing, songwriting, Illinois-born, Nashville-based clawhammer banjo player—is every bit as interested in the present and the future as she is in the past, and every bit as attuned to the global as she is to the local. She pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, and the results feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything anybody’s ever heard before. To put it another way, she changes what seems possible.

An Unexpected Beginning – It seemed just as certain that Washburn would study law in Beijing—she even had the plane ticket—as it seemed far-fetched that she’d be offered a record deal when she wasn’t looking for one. And yet, half a decade back she emerged without a law degree, but with a debut album, that album being Song of the Traveling Daughter. Alongside old-timey originals that felt impossibly lush and light on their feet were songs she wrote in Chinese—she’s fluent—and even an instrumental that wove together an old-time banjo tune and with a traditional Chinese folk song: “Backstep Cindy/Purple Bamboo.” It was a new way of hearing both.

City of Refuge – City of Refuge, releasing in early 2011 — is something completely different, even for her: a sublime marriage of old-time and indie-pop. “This new project,” she says, “incorporates what would’ve in the beginning of my career seemed like an unexpected move, but now feels like a really natural progression of working with people that reach into other genres and other spaces musically.”

With the exception of old-time fiddler Rayna Gellert—Washburn’s former bandmate in the all-female stringband Uncle Earl—her cast of collaborators is entirely new. Among them are Turtle Island Quartet’s Jeremy Kittell, who arranged the strings and played a small orchestra’s worth of violin and viola parts; My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel (pedal steel and electric guitars); The Decemberists’ Chris Funk (bowed and plucked dulcimer and guitars); atmospheric jazz guitarist Bill Frisell; veteran Nashville studio percussionist Kenny Malone; Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor and Morgan Jahnig (backing vocals); Wu Fei, master of the guzheng (think of it as a Chinese zither); and the Mongolian stringband Hanggai, who managed to contribute ambient throat-singing from halfway around the world.

In Welch, Washburn found a co-writer and singing partner whose sensibilities, though they compliment hers, aren’t the slightest bit old-timey—which is precisely why she wanted to work with him; Smart AM pop is his native territory. “There were song ideas that I took to him that I thought I would have a handle on myself,” she says. “But I just thought I’d try it out with him and see if he thought of anything right away, and in so many instances he really would have an initial instinct that was extremely beautiful and applicable to the songs. He would think of chord structures that were different than things I would usually think of.”

Believe it or not, you won’t find any songs in Chinese on City of Refuge. What you will find, tucked in among picked and sung modal melodies, are some songs with catchy hooks and grooves. “Burn Through” is one of them; Washburn even punctuates a line of the chorus with a playful pop nonsense phrase: “Hey, hey, hey.” The song’s sentiment is as uplifting as its sound: “It’s really supposed to be a song that makes a person feel powerful listening to it, that there’s a lot of possibilities.”

Washburn may have abandoned the original plan of moving to China, but she’s spent a lot of time there, playing music, and, once in a while, recording. The “Prelude” to the album features a field recording of Chinese schoolchildren displaced by the Sichuan earthquake. Their temporary school was, as Washburn takes care to point out, their “refuge from the disaster.”

She’d captured those and other sounds—of kids singing their ethnic folksongs; of parents rebuilding their homes—in 2009 with Chinese-American DJ/producer Dave Liang, of Shanghai Restoration Project, and they’d fashioned them into a poignant electronic benefit album for the region, titled Afterquake. As big of an effort as that was, it’s one among many examples of her having just the right music at significant moments, here, there and everywhere.

And why wouldn’t musicians of renown—a great variety of them at that—covet Washburn’s creative contributions? She expands horizons and makes the distances between people, cultures and musical styles seem not so very far after all.

 

Kai Welch
Born in the Strawberry Mountains of Central Oregon, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Kai Welch was a product of an overabundance of influences from the start. He was raised mystical-agnostic in the wilderness until his family made the bewildering move into town, joined a Jesus Movement church and started speaking in tongues. After that he was variously strong-armed into a Conservative Baptist pew on Sundays, taught Native American rituals in a nomadic tree-planting co-op, and urged to embrace his Jewish heritage and uphold his back-to-the-land hippie legacy. He decided to just skip the religious questions altogether and focus instead on what inspires him most: music and the wilderness. Kai studied the piano from infancy through university, and has since traveled the world, rock climbing, sailing the South Pacific, running rivers, and conducting private anthropological research along the way. These experiences are the breeding grounds for the ideas and perspectives that inspire his songs. Most of all he hopes that his music shares his sense of wonder at our world and the colorful humans that light it up. He currently lives in Nashville, TN and is touring the live show of his collaboration with Abigail Washburn on her new record, “City of Refuge”. He also collaborates with Carl Broemel (of My Morning Jacket), Bobby Bare Jr., and The Greencards, among others.

 

Wu Fei Born and raised in Beijing, Wu Fei is a composer, vocalist and guzheng (Chinese zither) performer. She spent her formative years at the China Conservatory of Music before coming to the US in 2000. She holds a M.A. in Composition from Mills College and is a grant recipient of “Meet the Composer”. While at Mills, she began to diversify her sound and experiment widely, working with musicians like John Zorn, Fred Frith, Carla Kilhstedt, Cecil Taylor, and Billy Martin. Wu Fei’s compositions for choir, string quartet, chamber ensemble, Balinese gamelan, orchestra, film, and modern dance exhibit her remarkable skill and profound musical understanding. Her commissions include a composition for Percussions Claviers de Lyon that premiered in the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing. She recently moved back to Beijing where she continues to compose from her apartment over Chang-An Da Jie while continuing to record and collaborate with great artists around the World.