This autumn, two old friends and their musical cohorts hope to take us all on a brief journey to a place in the world for which most people spend their whole lives searching.
When the invitation comes your way, don't hesitate, because "Short Trip Home" (Sony Classical, due Sept. 7), which rising classical string stars Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer recorded with instrumental bluegrass greats Sam Bush and Mike Marshall, is one of the most inspired and beautiful listening experiences of our era and a work likely to be popularly embraced on the storied scale of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "A Pastoral Symphony" and "The Lark Ascending," Aaron Copland's suites from "Billy The Kid" and "Our Town," and Bill Monroe's "Kentucky Waltz" and "Scotland."
Intrigued by this cross section of lofty parallels and left-field comparisons? So were the players who located these sorts of textures in bassist/composer Meyer's 13 absorbingly panoramic tracks for the new album. "Edgar created a short trip home for all of us on the record," says celebrated violin virtuoso Bell with a chuckle, contemplating the haunting hybrid pieces former Indiana University schoolmate Meyer penned for the project. "It's not bluegrass of the sort Sam Bush and Mike Marshall usually play, and it's not strictly classical. Edgar brought us to another place, an eclectic, cross-pollinated place that's a little hard to describe, but it's a place where we were excited and comfortable to be."
"The precedents with this kind of music are gigantic," Meyer allows. "It might overlap with what Copland did, and it's just as likely it might not, but I have a tendency to see music as a shared body of knowledge about the sound of emotional experience."
The mere fact that Bell's elegant fiddle and Meyer's eloquently bowed double bass can conduct a down-home dialogue as inconsolably wistful as the one on "Short Trip Home's" title track-which cries out to be a classical crossover single-is a miracle of simple caring over conservatory cultivation. It proves that Bell's toddler-to-man musical training (which once caused The New York Times to compare him to Jascha Heifetz) didn't divest the Bloomington, Ind.--bred violinist of his Hoosier heart, any more than Meyer's keen grasp of Franz Schubert could eclipse his feel for his Tulsa, Okla., roots.
"In his writing, Edgar tried to cater to all of us, all our strengths," explains Bell. "The record started out as a duo album, and a lot of the pieces are still duos between the two of us, but he also left a lot of room for improvisation for Mike's guitar and fiddle and Sam's mandolin and fiddle, and he did a lot of bluegrass writing for my violin, which is something not done in bluegrass!"
The result is an effortless merger of classical and contemporary folk and bluegrass styles. It's a graceful gallimaufry (to use a mixtureminded word of Shakespeare's adopted on the American frontier) of the sort Sony Classical chief Peter Gelb has long been nurturing to undue skepticism, especially when one considers Bell's glowing recent "Gershwin Fantasy" with composer/conductor John Williams or his felicitous rendering of John Corigliano's fine score to the (flawed) new film "The Red Violin," as well as Meyer's magnificent 1996 collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and fiddler Mark O'Connor on "Appalachia Waltz."
"For me, 'Short Trip Home' came together naturally," says Meyer in his playful Southwestern drawl. "I especially love the way the instruments go together, but it's not a matter of making Sam Bush play Beethoven or turning Josh Bell into a bluegrass artist, 'cause nobody should feel they're out of their element so much as filling roles no one else could. As far as my own playing or writing, it's not a hybrid to me as much as just being myself."
Born Nov. 24,1960, in Tulsa, to Chattanooga, Tenn.-reared music instructor Edgar Meyer Sr. and Oklahoma native Anna Mary Metzel, the younger Meyer came of age in assorted Tennessee communities (Knoxville, Oak Ridge) where his father taught classical strings while burrowing into bebop in his off hours. In college, he moved from a dalliance as a Georgia Tech math major to a focused '79-'83 stretch in Indiana U.'s globally respected music school. At the time of their first encounter, Bell (born Dec. 9,1967, to Episcopal priest-turned-psychologist Alan Bell and his second wife, Shirley) was a 12-year-old prodigy, and Meyer was an eager 19-year-old novice who had inherited an obsession with bass-bowing techniques from his dad. They played Schubert together in chamber-music classes, but Meyer felt the itch of other influences. "I grew up in classical and jazz," says Meyer, "and when I discovered traditional music like bluegrass at 16, I was very moved by it." After graduating from I.U., Meyer gravitated to Nashville and from '86 to '92 was a member of the progressive bluegrass quartet Strength In Numbers with Bush, Bela Fleck, O'Connor, and dobroist Jerry Douglas. (Meyer has also recorded with Garth Brooks, Lyle Lovett, the Chieftains, and Billboard Century Award honorees Emmylou Harris and James Taylor.)
Bell, meanwhile, was recording prolifically (Bruch, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, Mozart, Kreisler, Walton, Barber) with the world's best orchestras and conductors for Decca Records before debuting on Sony Classical in '98 with the "Gershwin Fantasy." Bell's maverick streak led him to record works by such contemporary composers as Nicholas Maw and Aaron Jay Kernis, and he also joined Meyer in contributing to Sony's upcoming "Listen To The Storyteller: A Trio Of Musical Tales From Around The World," for which Bell solos on Wynton Marsalis"' "The Fiddler And The Dancin' Witch."
The spell that "Short Trip Home" has cast over its four musicians seems to promise an enduring association-if the quality of their camaraderie in its live performance on July 22 at lower Manhattan's Westbeth Theatre was any sign. They kidded each other with easy back-porch familiarity as they played their impeccably interlaced parts, Bell the flattered foil for Bush's sly sendups of his shyness as Meyer sought to maintain his decorum and Marshall looked on, much amused. But there was nothing flip about their musical passion, with the gliding intersections of the fiddle-andbass passages on pieces like "If I Knew" imparting a charged sense of longing that left many in the packed room quietly choked with emotion. When Bush, Marshall, and Bell crossed fiddle bows in front of Meyer and then leapt into the furious "Death By Triple Fiddle," it was a truly triumphant moment.
In sum, "Short Trip Home" is a stunning evocation of this nation's unfinished common search for a safe place. "A lot of music is about understanding and the desire to create some order and beauty," says Meyer. "I've been inspired by other people's efforts in that direction, and with 'Short Trip Home' I wanted to do the same thing."