It’s interesting to land upon a group that birthed the careers of two pretty well known players, but remains relatively unknown. Not that Country Cooking is either the greatest thing you’ve ever heard or the worst. It’s a really solid band able to mix rough hewn tempos and a sense of Appalachian otherworldliness while referencing the most progressive of progressive of bluegrass music.

Comprising Tony Trishka and Russ Barenberg, two eventual stalwarts of the Americana genre, Country Cooking arose from the meeting of college students during the late sixties. Of course, the music the band choose to investigate had very little to do with academia, it’d be difficult to differentiate between this ensemble and one from Kentucky.

Not that being of a place or time has anything to do with one’s ability to tred upon a music, but it’s still interesting to think about college being the arena in which Country Cooking was first realized.

The band wasn’t around for too long unfortunately – issuing only three albums, one of which was a date led to some extent by Frank Wakefield. What Country Cooking was most adept at, though, was working through some steamy instrumental fair capacious of flying be at such a pace as to leave listeners amazed – not just at the tempos, but the precise playing that each tune was rendered in.

A folded in discography, complicated by age and the lack of interest on the part of the general American populace resulted in a few different version’s of the band’s first instrumental outing being in print. Alternately, there’s 26 Bluegrass Instrumentals and 14 Bluegrass Instrumentals. And honestly, seeing as the first portion of both albums are interchangeable, the only difference is that there’re twelve additional reasons to be amazed on the repackaged edition.

Either way, what the band turns in during its first outing are mostly revved up bluegrass tunes, perhaps most in-step with the New Grass Revival, minus cheese ball covers, as anything else. There’s not an overt hippie influence, as one might guess at based upon the time and place these songs come from, but the balladesque tunes do share a common ground with Jerry Garcia’s bucolic work.

With both Trishka and Barenbrg going on to relatively high profile careers in country related musics, it’s a bit surprising that Cooking Country hasn’t received a higher profile over time, but that just makes discovering these songs all the better.