Country Music Talk: You are going to be playing at the Kent Stage at the end of May or beginning of June. Have you performed there in the past?

Sam Bush: June 4^th. I have played there a couple of times over the years with my own band as well as with saxophonist Bill Evans.

CMT: Your performance with Evans was with Soulgrass, right? How did that project come about since he is a pretty huge name in jazz?

SB: It all came about due to Bill’s interest in string band music. Bluegrass stuff like banjo, mandolin and violin – or fiddle. Whatever you wanna call it. He was interested in the fusion of instruments like that. For instance, on the Soulgrass album, he got Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Bela Fleck on banjo, Victor Wooten on bass, Jerry Douglas played the dobro. So Bill got interested in that kind of fusion. I would not call myself a jazz musician, by any means, but Bill was looking for that kind of fusion. He called upon us to bring in different kinds of voicings that he had not played with. Of course, we had been playing bluegrass and newgrass for all of our lives. It was a real interesting fusion and loads of fun.

CMT: You already differentiated between bluegrass and newgrass. Both are relatively traditional sounding American musics, so what is actually the difference?

SB: Bluegrass comes from a string band music. Bill Monroe put together the first bluegrass band in 1946, I guess. That group had Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise on the fiddle. Back when Bill put that music together, it was much different than the old time string band music of the day. It was more jazzy and improvisational in its own way. So, over the years, people would take the bluegrass instruments and not just copy Bill Monroe anymore, but try to make your own music out of it. So really, newgrass is just a newer version.

You know, the subject matter of songs started to change, we were not just singing about rural things anymore. I think that when bluegrass started out, it was more of a rural music where newgrass is contemporary music using traditional instrumentation.

CMT: In the same way that rural blues moved to Chicago, bluegrass has almost undergone the same sort of shift. Does that make sense?

SB: In a way it is the same kind of shift with the modernization of those instruments. But let it be said that bluegrass is still alive and well. Traditional bluegrass has still got a huge market and festival circuit. It is sometimes hard to differentiate between the two, but it is music like that that our band, the New Grass Revival, helped to spearhead a few years back.

What we did was take bluegrass musicians in the sixties and made new music – just like the Osborne Brothers and Jim and Jessie, the Country Gentleman and the Dillards. So, we took those influences and incorporated elements of rock and roll in our bluegrass, so to speak.