Events

[BLUEGRASS] The Grammy Awards may be flawed in countless ways, but there’s good reason why bluegrass-hybrid chanteuse Alison Krauss has won 27 of them: over 30 years into a career she began at the wee age of 10, her talent remains downright shocking. For her latest, Windy City (Capitol, 2017) she took a different tack than ever before, and it paid off. Krauss has previously released so-called solo albums, but they’ve always more or less been loosely disguised Alison Krauss and Union Station records. This time, however, she embarked on a project with a completely different means of inspiration, using her chemistry with a particular producer as the guiding force. Perhaps buoyed by a different study in chemistry — 2007’s Raising Sandwith Zeppelin legend Robert Plant — Krauss felt the urge to work with Nashville’s Buddy Cannon after loaning her pipes to another artists’ album he happened to be producing.

Though not strangers, Krauss, 46, was struck by her drive to deliver the goods in the studio with Cannon, whose list of production credits is a staggering classic country hall of fame: Willie, Dolly, Reba,  and Merle top the list. That desire to work hard and an interest in digging for material from a bygone era launched Windy City. The disc retains an old-timey feel, and with Cannon’s assistance, Krauss mined areas of the American songbook that her work with Union Station definitely hasn’t (though those projects have turned up some surprising choices as well, including that goose-flesh inducing cover of The Foundations’ “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You”), including not one but two tunes made famous by Brenda Lee (“Losing You,” “All Alone Am I”), Glen Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind” (written by John Hartford), and the Cindy Walker/Eddy Arnold classic “You Don’t Know Me,” from a Ray Charles’s 1962 country album (yup, that happened). She makes Willie Nelson’s “I Don’t Care for You” into a biting, jazz-tinted stunner and liberates “River in the Rain” from the 1985 Huckleberry Finn Broadway musical. The results are languid in all the best ways — even the comparatively up-tempo tunes have a stunning southern grace built into them.

Krauss is never in a hurry, taking her time to properly inhabit and convincingly deliver each song as if it were an aspect of her own story; her angelic pipes sound right at home in these narratives. In the end, Windy Cityfeels a bit like a concept record, although that’s not really the intention. Still, it’s largely a mediation on the timelessness of heartbreak, and yet it avoids the classic country woe-is-me format by a mile. Rather than touring Windy Citywith all her usual suspects, Krauss has been on the road since last year with a band that blends Union Station with some surprise faces. For her upcoming show on Saturday, June 23 at the Chautauqua Institution, she’ll have the Cox Family’s Sidney and Suzanne Cox to assist with harmonies while drummer Jay Bellerose, guitarist James Mitchell and keyboardist Matt Rollings join forces with well-known AKUS mainstays Ron Block and Barry Bales to complete the crack team. The show kicks off the season for Chautauqua Institution’s open air amphitheater, and tickets remain at various price levels.