Wayfaring Strangers
This Train
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A band of nine virtuosos with separate careers in folk, jazz and rock, this acoustic supergroup makes for an odd clique, but on their second album they show remarkable chemistry in creating new, jazzy arrangements for timeless bluegrass and black gospel songs. Overall, the effect here is of a boundary-blurring experiment gone incredibly right. Helping to consistently raise these could-be curios to the level of fine art is a trio of female vocalists: the powerful Tracy Bonham, the earthy Ruth Ungar, and Aoife O'Donovan, who connects the dots by suffusing Flatt and Scruggs' forlorn "Don't This Road Look Rough and Rocky" with cold, lonesome Celtic mist. The argumentative thesis of the Wayfaring
Read More Strangers and its leader, fiddle master Matt Glaser -- who happens to be the chairman of the Berklee College of Music's string department -- seems a bit esoteric on paper, but if This Train is the musical equivalent of a dissertation, the band gets high marks for making a sophisticated Americana that's as soulful as it is cerebral. TODD SPENCER
(September 16, 2003)
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