Craig Havighurst

For all the songs about mother, trains and cabins in the mountains, bluegrass has a tradition of instrumental music that goes back to its very origins. Bill Monroe’s first bands recorded mandolin and fiddle-driven tunes like “Tennessee Blues” and “Back Up And Push.” After Earl Scruggs joined in late 1945, his banjo instrumentals became a staple. Several generations of players embellished on those models, and a rush of new albums suggests that instrumental string band music is as dynamic as ever.

Violinist Jenny Scheinman was newly in New York, a twentysomething breaking into the jazz scene when she got her first big ask – to play a fourteen-show run at the Village Vanguard with guitar icon Bill Frisell. When she looked in the folio of charts he sent to prepare, she was surprised to see some old fiddle tunes and country songs, a mingling rare in jazz but in tune with her background. As she put it in a JazzTimes interview, “Hank Williams and Sonny Rollins, they’re right there with each other.”

In the regular cycles of our never-ending media traffic jam, most one-year-old albums have faded from attention, and the artists are often looking forward to the next thing. But every so often a record grows in relevance and we see with hindsight how the work of art met its moment. Listen, by Nashville’s Kyshona, which has its first anniversary this week, is such a project.