American Bluegrass Masters tour rolls into town Sept. 20

The Carpenter Theatre at Richmond CenterStage gets its bluegrass baptism when the American Bluegrass Masters tour stops in town Sunday.

Bluegrass legends J.D. Crowe and Bobby Osborne will take the stage with a supporting cast of Dean Osborne, Bobby Osborne Jr., Curtis Burch and J.P. Mathes along with the Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music Ensemble.

The bluegrass-meets-newgrass tour was hatched in a somewhat surprising locale: a Broadway stage in New York City.

About 1½ years ago, Dean Osborne lent his talents to "ETHEL Fair 2008," an eclectic event hosted by his friends in ETHEL, a New York-based, Juilliard-trained string quartet. The event showcased, among others, harmonica virtuoso Howard Levy and singer Jill Sobule.

The audience included a representative from ETHEL's booking agency. Fascinated by the warm reception that the New York City audience gave to traditional and bluegrass music, the rep got in touch with Osborne, hoping to expand her business.

"She wasn't interested in representing just concerts, but wanted to represent a concept that didn't occur very often," Dean Osborne said from his office at Hazard Community & Technical College in Kentucky. "So I tried to come up with a pairing that had never taken place before."

Osborne didn't have to look far. The answer surrounded him. He's Bobby Osborne's cousin; he's the promoter of Crowe's annual summer festival; and he's the director of the Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music, the only community-college program of its kind. Not to mention that Bobby Osborne and Crowe had never shared a stage.

"You've got two icons that have a worldwide fan base, and you've got a school that caters to the instruction of our music to the young people at the community-college level. And you put those together in one evening of bluegrass for the ages, from the young to the masters. . . . It's a dream of ours to take bluegrass to audiences who don't normally hear it and places where bluegrass doesn't usually travel. And it all started on Broadway."

Having Crowe serve as the master portion of a master-meets-youth concert event is fitting and a bit ironic.

It's fitting because, in addition to a genre-defining catalog of his music, Crowe's legacy is defined by the alumni of his New South Band: Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice, Keith Whitley, Jerry Douglas and scores of other pickers who consider him mentor and primary creative influence.

The significance of this is not lost on Crowe.

"It's good to know that people who you helped appreciated it," Crowe said by telephone from his Kentucky home. "I learned as much from them as they did from me. They didn't know it, but I did. You can learn a little bit from everyone. You have to keep your eyes open, your ears open and your mouth closed."

Crowe's role on the tour also is ironic. With his penchant for co-mingling strains of rock, rhythm and blues and country with bluegrass, he upset more than a few of his bluegrass elders when he broke into the business about 55 years ago.

"The reason I'm playing banjo is because of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, especially because of Earl Scruggs. He was the one I wanted to pattern myself after, and I did," Crowe said.

"Then I started playing with other groups and played other kinds of music. . . . You always heard different things. I took what I heard and what I liked, and I patterned myself after that. I tried to mix country and rock and rhythm and blues and bring it into the bluegrass genre. Basically, I did the Scruggs type of playing. But I realized that you can't beat a man at his own game. You have to do something a little different."

Sunday's audience for the Modlin Downtown Series event will be treated to what Dean Osborne describes as a "mini-festival" with individual sets from the Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music Ensemble, Crowe and New South, and Osborne and his Rocky Top X-Press.

But there should be time for large group work as well.

"I think we might do a finale toward the end of the show," Crowe said. "We might all get together and do a song or two together. People enjoy that. They enjoy seeing different groups pick together because it's something they don't get to see. It's fun to do every once in a while."