Bright Land

The San Francisco-based quintet the Crooked Jades rival the Carolina Chocolate Drops as the foremost proponents of pre-radio old-time rural American string band music, rooted in minstrel tradition and Appalachian mountain heritage. Their latest album is the soundtrack to a modern dance work choreographed by the American dancer and artistic director Kate Weare. This means a number of the tracks have been recorded before on previous Jades albums but it’s not really relevant to the listening experience. Instrumentally, the strings – banjo, fiddle, double bass, guitar and ukulele, augmented occasionally by harmonium and subtle percussion – provide a thrillingly authentic sound-bed for the haunting baritone vocals of Jeff Kazor and the keening, lonesome accents of Lisa Berman. The spirit of Harry Smith’s great anthology of American folk music – particularly the likes of Dock Boggs, Charlie Poole and the Carter Family – infuses everything. But the 20 songs, the majority of which are traditional, are invested with an energy and vigour that makes the sensibility sound entirely contemporary.

Comparisons with the Carolina Chocolate Drops are inevitable, as the two bands mine the same deep well of trad material. But whereas the Chocolate Drops can at times sound academic and stylised in their approach, that is not a charge that can be levelled at the Jades, who invest the music with an earthier, more visceral emotion. They somehow sound startlingly strange and yet oddly familiar at the same time, wild and untamed and yet skilfully arranged.