A banjo trip to Nashville from a banjaxed Wall Street

A former investment banker with a Harvard MBA, Alison Brown is not your average jazz and bluegrass player, writes SIOBHÁN LONG

SO YOU’VE ALREADY pushed the bluegrass envelope, exploiting the rhythmic potential of jazz and luring a hunk of listeners to your chosen instrument, the much-maligned banjo. Grammy nominations abound, road and air miles are tucked beneath your belt as a member of the Alison Krauss band, and then with the Alison Brown Quartet. In between hours on the tour bus and weeks in the studio, you decide to launch your own record label, Compass Records, in partnership with your husband and bassist, Gary West.

Alison Brown’s MBA from Harvard and her background as a Wall Street investment banker might give some indication that this string picker didn’t spend her early years lounging on her front porch in La Jolla, California.

She's blithely tossed the bluegrass rulebook in the air (still relishing the straight-up style of Earl Scruggs, mind) and let it fall in the unlikeliest of places. Not too many Nashville-based banjo players are bold enough to write an ode titled The Wonderful Sea Voyage of Holy Saint Brendanor sassy enough to frolic in the word-play of Louisiana's culinary delights in Étouffée Brutus? Six albums on, Alison Brown is happy with the company she's been keeping.

So happy in fact, that she's doffed her cap to them on her new collection called, as it happens, The Company You Keep. It's another instalment in the Brown catalogue of cerebrally challenging, rhythmically charged bluegrass-infused- with-copious-tinctures-of-jazz albums. Still, the curious titles persist – Under The (Five) Wire– and the electricity that flowed on her previous studio outings between Brown and her infamous quartet still threatens to ignite the floorboards beneath them. Pianist John R Burr adds that special something too, lending a certain mix of haughtiness and nobility to the mix. It's been an eventful 15 years since Compass Records first opened its doors, and an even more since Brown first convened her Quartet.

“We started the band and the label at roughly the same time,” she recounts, on the phone from her Compass office in Nashville. Prior to that, her playing had been largely limited to straight- up bluegrass. “I started thinking about how different the music would have been had we not had the collaboration of these wonderful individuals like John R (Burr). He’s probably my most important musical influence, and he brings different melodic and harmonic ideas to those that I’d have from my bluegrass playing.”

Alison Brown and her quartet exist at an elusive point at which bluegrass and jazz intersect. It's not a place you'll find on any roots road-map. Does she find that diehard fans of either genre struggle to get their heads around her music? "It's not like we're on a mission to push the envelope, or to piss people off who like bluegrass banjo or who like jazz," she says, "but the truth of it is, I don't really know why anyone needs to categorise their music before they listen to it, and decide whether they like it or not. When we play for a bluegrass audience, we sound like a jazz band, and when we play at a jazz festival, people are going 'how great that we have bluegrass here!' The perspective of the listener has a huge impact on where they think we fit. For me, it's just the reality of how I write and hear the music, and what I want to say with the instrument. Musical worlds can be built around an instrument. It doesn't have to be put in a pigeon-hole." Brown's interest in things Irish reflects her curiosity rather than any family ties. The Company You Keepincludes Brown's take on Máirtín O'Connor's effervescent The Road West, which turns the tune upside down and morphs it into a less manic, more languid creature. Over Nine Wavestakes its name from Marie Heaney's book of the same name, in which she refers to the folk belief that anyone leaving Ireland hadn't truly exited until they had sailed over nine waves across the ocean.

“I loved that image, and it was a nod to the Celtic connections that we have, I guess,” Alison says. “I love John’s [Doyle, session guitarist] approach to playing too. He doesn’t worry so much about what kind of tune we’re working on. He just wants to play it, and that’s how I like to work too.” Now that Brown has established a dual career for herself as a musician and a record label executive, she must surely allow herself the tiniest smile when she looks at the economic downturn and Wall Street’s role in it.

“Well, I like to joke that I saw it coming,” she says, laughing, “but for me, being an investment banker was much more of an aberration than being a banjo player. I played since I was a kid, but my family encouraged me to think of the banjo as something that I could talk about at cocktail parties, rather than considering it in professional terms. My heart was never in investment banking, although I appreciated the intellectual side of it.

“If I hadn’t been an investment banker, it would have been a lot harder for me to give myself the permission to be a banjo player and to start a record label.”

Alison Brown's latest album, The Company You Keep, is now out on Compass Records