Nice Folks

An album of avant-garde-jazz-inflected compositions and improvisations by banjoist Paul Elwood makes perfect sense, if you understand how little Elwood cares for making sense. In 2011, he released an album of chamber bluegrass music with innova (Stanley Kubrick’s Mountain Home) and then in 2013, innova put out Misfit Toys’ Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?, an album on which Elwood and friends Dan Moore, Matt Wilson and Robert Paredes reimagined ‘70s AM radio hits for banjo, vibes and clarinet. In short, Elwood cares not for traditional notions of genre, especially when it comes to the banjo.

This is how his new album with The Invisible Ensemble, Nice Folks, makes absolute sense. A collaboration with world-renowned percussionist Famoudou Don Moye from the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Nice Folks is a coy reference to their 1978 album, Nice Guys), the album mixes compositions influenced by Elwood’s backgrounds in jazz and bluegrass and Appalachian folk music with group improvisations to mind-bending effect.

Elwood first met Moye in 2011 at a concert in Marseille, France, and quickly set about assembling a group of French musicians to record with them. Nice Folks ties together a surprising number of threads from the experimental jazz movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s to the current French avant-garde to the folk and communal elements of bluegrass. On paper it might look strange, but its logic is irrefutable by the time it hits your ears