Abigail Washburn

If American old-time music is about taking earlier, simpler ways of life and music-making as one's model, Abigail Washburn has proven herself to be a bracing revelation to that tradition. She - a singing, songwriting, Illinois-born, Nashville-based clawhammer banjo player - is every bit as interested in the present and the future as she is in the past, and every bit as attuned to the global as she is to the local. She pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, and the results feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything anybody's ever heard before. To put it another way, she changes what seems possible.

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It seemed just as certain that Washburn would study law in Beijing as it seemed far-fetched that she'd be offered a record deal when she wasn't looking for one. And yet, half a decade back she emerged without a law degree, but with a debut album, Song of the Traveling Daughter. Alongside old-timey originals that felt impossibly lush and light on their feet were songs she wrote in Chinese - she's fluent - and even an instrumental that wove together an old-time banjo tune and with a traditional Chinese folk song: "Backstep Cindy/Purple Bamboo." It was a new way of hearing both. In 2008, Washburn and three virtuosic comrades - cellist Ben Sollee, fiddler Casey Driessen and three-finger-style banjo player Bela Fleck - presented Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, a set of seemingly boundless compositions sprouted from seeds of American and Chinese folk. The album extended an imaginative musical bridge between East and West. The world had never seen a chamber ensemble, stringband or bluegrass group quite like the Sparrows.

At the request of the U.S. government, the Sparrow Quartet toured Tibet in 2006 - something no other American band had done - and performed in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics. Recently, she played the prominent U.S.A. pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai. And Washburn has regular collaborators in China: a group of women musicians from the China Conservatory - they haven't yet named the band - and Hanggai. She's been popular with the Brits as well, singing with the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, Richard Thompson and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, who produced the Uncle Earl album. Plus, she and Fleck still do shows as a duo; a meeting of the minds and banjos. And why wouldn't musicians of renown - a great variety of them at that - covet Washburn's creative contributions? She expands horizons and makes the distances between people, cultures and musical styles seem not so very far after all.

City of Refuge (2011) is something completely different, even for her: a sublime marriage of old-time and indie-pop. "This new project," she says, "incorporates what would've in the beginning of my career seemed like an unexpected move, but now feels like a really natural progression of working with people that reach into other genres and other spaces musically." With the exception of old-time fiddler Rayna Gellert - Washburn's former bandmate in the all-female stringband Uncle Earl - her cast of collaborators is entirely new. Among them are Turtle Island Quartet's Jeremy Kittell, who arranged the strings and played a small orchestra's worth of violin and viola parts; My Morning Jacket's Carl Broemel (pedal steel and electric guitars); The Decemberists' Chris Funk (bowed and plucked dulcimer and guitars); atmospheric jazz guitarist Bill Frisell; veteran Nashville studio percussionist Kenny Malone; Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor and Morgan Jahnig (backing vocals); Wu Fei, master of the guzheng (think of it as a Chinese zither); and the Mongolian stringband Hanggai, who managed to contribute ambient throat-singing from halfway around the world.