Not Our First Goat Rodeo

It's almost a decade since the adventurous classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma teamed up with bluegrass fiddle/banjo player Stuart Duncan, double bassist Edgar Meyer and mandolinist extraordinaire Chris Thile (Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers) to record the Grammy-winning The Goat Rodeo Sessions. Finally comes the long-awaited follow-up – and as a part-composed and part-improvised meeting of classical, bluegrass, folk and jazz traditions it's as breathtakingly virtuosic and as invigoratingly inventive as its predecessor.

The opener ‘Your Coffee is a Disaster’ finds Ma playing an Indian scale similar to The Beatles’ ‘Within You Without You’ before Thile and company transport the tune to an Appalachian back porch. ‘Waltz Whitman’ sounds like Max Bruch's sublime Violin Concerto No 1 meets ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ with a touch of Celtic folk tossed in for good measure. ‘Scarcely Cricket’ is a tour de force as Ma's cello and Duncan's fiddle conduct a delightful dance that moves through the gears from courtly grace to nimblefingered abandon. On three tracks the instrumental magic is joined by the lovely voice of singer-songwriter Aoife O'Donovan, who was also heard on the first album. Here's hoping there are many more goat rodeos to come.