New Meets Old Meets New

Kat Wallace and David Sasso reached back for something old to try something new Sunday.

The local musicians — who play together in the New Haven-based bluegrass stringband Five in the Chamber — decided to try performing as a duo, with Wallace on fiddle, Sasso on a variety of mandolins.

They reached back for old fiddle tunes, mixed in some originals (one of them based on a century-old poem), and debuted as an opening act at Frank Critelli’s weekly ​“Sunday Buzz” matinee at Cafe Nine sponsored by Cygnus radio show.

Sasso said the inspiration for forming the duo came from the North Carolina-based Americana duo Mandolin Orange, also comprised of a female fiddler (and guitarist) and banjo player (and guitarist) who sometimes perform with a larger ensemble. Mandolin Orange is at the forefront of an evolving bluegrass-rooted music that combines traditional bluegrass and country harmonies and acoustic instrumentation with modern folkie songwriting and sensibilities.

At Cafe Nine Sunday, Wallace and Sasso opened with an old-time Alabama fiddle tune called ​“Farewell to Trion” that Sasso learned from the late great Stacy Phillips a week before he died. Sasso accompanied Wallace on mandola, and strummed a rhythm that sounded like a cross between mandolin and guitar.They shifted to folk ballads and bluegrass (“One Morning in May”) and upbeat originals with ease, with Sasso transitioning to mandocello and straight-ahead mandolin; they sounded particularly strong when they sang together.

Check out their first batch of numbers Sunday in this video. (And check out these four Mandolin Orange videos, to see why your reviewer is equally obsessed with the group.) Here’s hoping that the duo’s Sunday gig is the beginning of a regular venture.

As often happens at the Sunday afternoon showcases, Critelli paired a local band with a touring master, in this case guitarist/banjoist Tony Furtado, who has been performing and recording for over three decades.

He, too, falls into the loose-fitting genre of Americana, with an emphasis on gritty, fast picking and slide playing in open tuning. On Sunday Furtado mixed originals, heavy on the instrumentals, with interpretations of standards ranging from ​“Amazing Grace” to the Beatles’ ​“I Will.” Open tuning, which sets the strings at a pre-set chord, frees the banjoist or guitar to roam wild up and down the fretboard, often (as in Furtado’s case) summoning lyrical slides that sound like sunlit sparkling mountain waterfalls high up the neck on the top strings. Listening to songs like the second number in this video, I realized that what sets Furtado apart is his equal attention to the lower strings, relying on them not just for a bass setting for high-string leads, but digging there for low-register melodies as well that evoke darker, muddier, hidden depths of soul. The choice of banjo cello (one of three instruments Furtado had on stage) helped.

Furtado waited until his second-to-last number to play the song that brought me (and perhaps others?) to the show, his beautiful instrumental ​“Bolinas” from his 1997 Rounder album Roll My Blues Away. It was worth the wait to hear it live: He jammed with the original version, picking up the beat, introducing spirited, restless leads that took the original mellow, contemplative gentle-rain mood to the races.

For his final number, Furtado stepped from the stage into the crowd and invited Wallace and Sasso to join him in a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s ​“I Ain’t Got No Home.” The old-timer meshed with the new-timers as they breathed new life into an early 20th-century classic that sounded like it could have been written for the Trump era. Old met new met old met new again … with fortuitous results.