The terms "star" and "all-stars" have become cheapened through overuse in the music business but, if we take a star to mean someone of truly exceptional ability, then Dobro master Rob Ickes, banjoist Noam Pikelny and fiddler Casey Driessen sail effortlessly into this category.
Although not perhaps household names themselves, between them they have enhanced the work of Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Alison Krauss, to name but three.
Given their own platform, they put on a show of American roots music that had their audience - well, me, certainly - pinching themselves to see if this was really happening in the intimate confines of a pub in Leith.
All three players have solo recording careers and, without any hint of peddling their own wares before the others', each brings his own contribution to the collective by means of original compositions and/or arrangements of well-known tunes and songs. As they swap roles from accompanist to soloist, with Driessen's percussive chipping of his bow against the fiddle strings providing emphatic rhythms, there's not so much a competitive edge as a case of here's how inventive the banjo/fiddle/dobro can be on this one.
At times the culminating invention got so hot, you expected to see smoke. If Driessen's vocals are just a little workaday, then the bluegrass expression and sheer romping excitement of his fiddling, the surging, bluesy inflections and harmonics that Ickes draws with a metal bar on guitar strings and Pikelny's sophisticated extrapolations give the music enormous lift.
They continue this short Scottish tour at the Glenmavis Tavern, Bathgate tonight and the Acoustic Music Club, Kirkcaldy tomorrow. Be there or be regretful.
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