I honestly didn’t expect to like the same team’s 2011 ‘Goat Rodeo Sessions’ (a modern bluegrass album blended with elements of folk, country, blues, jazz and classical music) as much as I did. The vast majority of crossover recordings sound contrived or half-baked (or both), and do scant justice to any of the genres involved, but Yo-Yo Ma and his collaborators got it right. This follow-up offers more of the same, and I’m not complaining one bit.

It helps that, here again, Ma wisely allows the others to drive the project – especially as two members of the core quartet have their feet firmly planted in vastly different musical worlds.
Bassist/composer Edgar Meyer, originally from Tennessee, is a veteran bluegrass player currently on the faculty at the Curtis School of Music. Mandolinist/composer Chris Thile grew up playing American traditional music while feeding himself a steady diet of Bach, and since 2006 has been deftly blending genres with his band Punch Brothers. There’s nothing at all synthetic-sounding in Punch Brothers’ sublimely polished work; it’s confidently its own thing. And the same can be said for the two ‘Goat Rodeo’ albums.

There’s quite a lot of stylistic variety on both recordings, yet they each feel all of a piece. If you’re able to sample the new album, I’d start with Every Note a Pearl, in which three wordless vocal parts gather over Meyer’s relaxedly strutting bass, flecks of chromaticism suddenly morphing into slow-motion portamentos that send the harmonies sliding off in unexpected directions – a musical Doppler effect. Stuart Duncan gets in some fine licks in the metrically off-kilter Voila! and brings a songful Appalachian twang to the sweetly nostalgic Waltz Whitman. The pair of indie-folk songs featuring Aoife O’Donovan are perhaps the most conventional of the 10 tracks, while the classical element comes to the fore on Not for Lack of Trying, where a melancholy progression of mostly dissonant triads goes in search of a melody. Not your typical crossover fare, and certainly not conceived to entice bluegrass fans to explore the classical repertory. I rather hope it’s the other way around, in fact, and that this album and its predecessor motivate Gramophone readers to lend their ears to American roots music’s rich legacy.