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SXSW review: Abigail Washburn
When last we — or at least I — encountered Abigail Washburn a couple years ago at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, she had embarked on the quixotic task of combining bluegrass and roots music (She plays the clawhammer banjo.) with Chinese imagery and instrumentation (She lived and worked in China for a time.) via her groundbreaking group the Sparrow Quartet.
The result was audacious, unclassifiable and undeniably interesting. Those adjectives also apply, to a different degree, to the music she presented Thursday night at Antone’s as part of the Americana Music Association showcase.
Washburn devoted her set to material from her brand-new album, “City of Refuge.” It’s a folk-pop-roots melting pot — that unclassifiable thing again — that contains tales of arrivals, departures and quests. The onstage instrumentation ran to steel, upright bass, and fiddle and Washburn’s banjo, but it wasn’t conventional country or bluegrass by a long shot.
There was a sense of structure, and controlled energy held in check as Washburn and Co. segued from the ethereal (“Dreams of Nectar,” with its Chinese folk song inflections, and “Bring Me My Queen”) to the terrestrial (the gospel-ish “Divine Bell” and the country-flavored “The Last Train”).
Keyboardist and co-writer Kai Welch traded falsetto vocals with Washburn on the head-turning “Ballad of Treason,” and “City of Refuge” was a hypnotic showcase for Washburn’s banjo chops. The different grooves of the band all came to a rolling boil of a groove during “Chains,” a pop-flavored oughta-be-single that sticks to the ear like Velcro.
Washburn is continuing down a more unconventional (albeit somewhat more accessible) path. Her musical audacity and restless curiosity will no doubt yield more treats for listeners as time goes on.
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