IN HER NATURE

On Crooked Tree, Molly Tuttle bends the rules of bluegrass tradition. "It's fun," she says, "to stretch the limits."

- 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, and occasionally elegiac and melancholy - is woven from many cultures and voices that bring something to the party, and do so with a sound that welcomes 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 prowess brings lightning into a largely acoustic space. But if you know three chords and can count to four, chances are you can play along too. And Tuttle says you would be made to feel right at home.

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

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.

"I like bluegrass for the reasons that you mentioned," she says. "It is such a combination of different cultures and different influences. I think it is kind of radical in that it is a music that anyone can have access to. These are songs of the people, told by people who are just telling their own life stories a lot of the time. People try to put rules around it, and I don't think that's necessary.