Jam Session

Extraordinary improvising from O'Connor, Thile and the rest, but I'm a little surprised that nowhere is it mentioned that the five cuts with the quartet of MO, Thile, Sutton and House are the same performances issued 7 years ago on O'Connor's double disc "30 Year Retrospective." The four new tracks add up to 35 minutes, and they are as tasty as you'd expect.

The actual CD of this album doesn't appear to be available until July but the MP3 download is listed here so it must be ready! I received an advance of the Cd and have been playing it all day. With the exception of bass player Jon Burr, all the other musicians on this album are well known to the Folk/Jazz/Bluegrass community and are superstars in their own right. The common thread here is violinist/fiddler Mark O'Connor, on whose own label this album is released.

The nine tracks were recorded at four different "jam sessions" between 2000 and 2004. On five of them O'Connor is joined by Chris Thile (former Nickel Creek mandolin player extraordinaire), guitarist Bryan Sutton and bass player Byron House. For two other tracks jazz guitarist (with lightning speed fingers) Frank Vignola joins then and Burr replaces House on bass. The other two sessions feature just O'Connor and Vignola plus Burr. These are all "live jams:" and there's lots of fast playing here. There's time on...Read more

This is a wonderful follow-up to O'Connor's "Thirty Year Retrospective" set, which also featured Sutton and Thile. As a non-musician but avid fan it would have seemed impossible to me for these musicians to just keep getting better, but they do. On the earlier recording I had the sense that O'Connor might have been holding back, or perhaps been a bit in awe of young guns Thile and Sutton, but he's absolutely on fire here, threatening to just run away with the show on several solos even though his companions are playing better than ever. Thrilling, goose-bump-inducing stuff from genius-level players.