Kieran Kane & Rayna Gellert - The Ledges (2018)

This is the sound of fortunate confluence. A new school master of old time music, Rayna Gellert, partners with Americana godfather Kieran Kane. They gather in an upstate New York bunkhouse, with fiddles, banjos, guitars, Kieran's famed octave mandolin, five microphones, and vague directives, and they emerge with songs that edify and fascinate. The certainty of decades melds with discovery's first blush, in a whirl of tune, tone, touch, and timing. All of this happens along the banks of the Great Sacandaga Lake, in an area known as ''the Ledges,'' where rocks meet deep water. And it's all a marvel of rhythm, melody and harmony, at once unsuspected and ordained, containing a level of assured simplicity that can only be attained by those capable of roaring complexity. Anyway, this thing is at once gorgeous and funky, easy and pulsating, luminous and flannel. As we said, fortunate confluence. Rayna Gellert is a child of Elkhart, Indiana, a town known for building saxophones and producing Country Music Hall of Fame vocalist Connie Smith. Steeped in traditional music from birth and inspired by father Dan Gellert, she emerged as a folk music force, recording with Robyn Hitchcock, Tyler Ramsey, Sara Watkins, Abigail Washburn, Scott Miller, Loudon Wainwright III and many more, and making waves as a member of string band Uncle Earl. Kieran Kane grew up just north of the Bronx, fascinated by Bo Diddley and bluegrass. He moved to Nashville in the late 1970s and found favor as a songwriter. Then, he and Jamie O'Hara formed the O'Kanes, a ''one of these things is not like the other'' duo that somehow scored six Top 10 country singles with harmony-heavy, deeply rooted music that would today be disallowed from coming within 500 feet of a terrestrial country radio antenna. After the O'Kanes' brief but satisfying chart run, Kane became an unlikely independent record company boss man, running Dead Reckoning Records and releasing acclaimed solo albums and brilliant works by Kevin Welch, Tammy Rogers, Mike Henderson, The Fairfield Four, David Olney, and others. Dead Reckoning provided an alternative to the contemporary country music of the late 1990s and early new century, and it provided a blueprint for what would become the Americana music movement. Kane and Gellert met at the 2015 edition of Warren Hellman's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. ''I watched his set and thought, 'Who is that person, and why aren't we playing together,''' Gellert says. ''To hear someone so great yet so restrained, that's so rare. It blew my mind.'' She sent him a song called ''Perry,'' and the two soon worked together to produce her Workin's Too Hard album. ''Immediately, I could tell that we were feeling the groove in exactly the same place,'' Kane says. In the cautious early summer of 2017, the two set off for Kane's Sacandaga cabin, with less than a handful of songs and hopes of writing a handful more. Those hopes were realized along the Ledges, and Kane and Gellert recorded the realizations together in real time, with nothing between them but microphone stands stacked upon cinder blocks. The result is a reinvigoration of Dead Reckoning Records, and a resplendent, acoustic, avant-garde variant that could be called alt.Americana. It isn't like anything else you'll hear this year, yet it is reminiscent of so much that we treasure in American roots music. It is the embodiment of soulful musicality. It is the very definition of harmony. It is the sound of fortunate confluence, and it's pretty to hear. - Peter Cooper, Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum