Sam Bush is best-known for his prodigious skills on the mandolin and the fiddle, but it would be a mistake to label him simply a bluegrass musician. Throughout his years with the New Grass Revival, the Nash Ramblers and Strength in Numbers, he’s explored a wide swath of traditional American music, and his cross-genre blending has continued with the many iterations of his solo band over the years.
Throughout his set at the Pour House in Charleston, Bush’s exuberance was on open display. Sporting a permagrin and constantly communicating with his talented band, he led them through an undulating set of bluegrass, country, jazz, folk and even reggae (a bright rendition of Bob Marley’s “One Love” featuring a dual between Bush and banjo player Scott Vestal). The man’s a consummate technician, but he’s always having fun and trying new things, pushing the band in new directions as the set unfolds.
Opening on fiddle, Bush kicked off with a mid-tempo version of the classic Bill Monroe tune, “Uncle Pen,” before launching a hyper-speed “Ridin’ that Bluegrass Train.” Paying close attention to Bush on mandolin and fiddle, it’s easy to lose track of the stellar musicianship swirling around him. During one particularly impressive jazz-inflected jam, my buddy turned to me and said that bass player Todd Parks might be the best musician in the band. That’s debatable, but Parks is one of the only bass players in a bluegrass-heavy band to lay down some fat, jazzy beats that fit perfectly in the groove.
In addition to bluegrass and jazz, the band also explored more nuanced textures that contained elements of Celtic music, and some of the jamming took on the character of progressive Celtic fusion band Shooglenifty. These excursions across the pond also brought out some intriguing instruments. Bush picked up what looked like a dobro/mandolin hybrid and played it with a slide, and Vestal grabbed what my buddy dubbed a “synthitar”—a guitar-like instrument with a tapered fretboard, wired through a variety of filters to elicit some Hammond-esque sounds.
In a nod to their eclectic mix of influences, Bush and the boys produced a solid encore of Van Morrison and Dylan (both with Sam solo on mandolin), then a raucous full-band “Up on Cripple Creek” to close it out.
