Molly Tuttle – "If you know three chords you can strum along!"

Molly Tuttle reckons that pretty much anyone can play bluegrass music. But as a renowned virtuoso, she likes to bend the rules. "It's fun," she says, "to stretch the limits..."

- By Jonathan Horsley

Bluegrass belongs to a long tradition but having the weight of history on its shoulders does not preclude it from existing as a radical art form. This musical style - light on its feet, effervescent, joyous, on occasion elegiac and melancholy - has been woven together from myriad influences, a uniquely American story of many cultures and different voices all bringing something to the party in a sound that welcomes it all.

That, too, is true of the players and their abilities. There's a virtuosic element to the bluegrass rank-and-file, among whom we'll find latter-day phenoms in the likes of Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle - players whose technical ecstasy brings lightning into a largely acoustic space. But if you know three chords and count to four, the chances are you can play along, too. And Tuttle says you would be made to feel right at home.

Her new album, Crooked Tree, is a thoroughly modern bluegrass record, which is to say it mines the history of the art form for its sonic vocabulary and then contextualizes it in the 21st century. It is explicitly bluegrass by design but only after the song ideas started piling up and Molly reached the point where it just felt right to do an all-bluegrass record now.

Speaking via Zoom before a show at Brownfield, Maine's Stone Mountain Arts Center, she explains how the genre's stylistic horizons yield plenty of free space for its contemporary practitioners to run into.