Festival not so blue

The headliner at this weekend’s Blue Waters Bluegrass Festival is comprised of two Australians and one Englishman who don’t at all consider themselves bluegrass.

“We haven’t considered ourselves a bluegrass band for a very long time,” said Kym Warner, the mandolin and bouzouki player for the Grammy nominated Greencards, one of the festival’s main attractions. “We have instrumentation that lends itself to bluegrass but we don’t have a five-string banjo.”

Warner – who, by the way, is a guy – said The Greencards’ sound is more accurately described as progressive-folk. There are elements of folk, pop and Americana but “the new album is definitely not going to be a bluegrass record,” he said.

The members of The Greencards grew up on American music without the American media labels attached to it. Influenced as much by Gillian Welch as Neil Young, they came together separately in Austin, where they met at a jam and started a band that caught the attention of the likes of Robert Earl Keen.

The Greencards are about as far away as you can get from the bluegrass cliché that recalls “Hee Haw” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

The evolution of bluegrass looks to the incorporation of gypsy jazz, Latin and blues by David Grisman in the 1970s; the long-haired, rock ‘n’ roll blurrings of New Grass Revival into the ’80s; the country folk-pop of Alison Krauss in the ’90s and, beyond that, the access ease of Nickel Creek.

The festival lineup represents a cross section of local, regional, and national bands that continue to shatter bluegrass stereotypes, said Kevin Brown, the festival organizer who also is the host of KPBX’s Front Porch Bluegrass show as well as a member of local bluegrass band, Big Red Barn.

“This is not your yuk-yuk happy-banjo-playing bluegrass,” Brown said. “It took awhile to shake that.”