Bryan Sutton (courtesy Sugar Hill Records)

Nashville, Tenn., — For a variety of reasons, it’s harder than you might think for groups of musicians who’ve assembled for tours and special performances to preserve their unique chemistry on tape for fans and historians. Studio time and expense, multiple commitments and sheer logistics usually overwhelm the noblest archival impulses. Even artists who keep every clipping, poster and video cassette from their career usually can’t produce audio documents that capture fully and professionally what these special and sometimes historic gatherings actually sound like, which is funny considering that’s why they came together in the first place.

Bryan Sutton took this perplexing reality as a challenge. He thought about the varied groups and collaborations he’s been part of during his relatively brief but prodigious career. Then, wearing his producer’s hat, he invited these sleeper cells of super-pickers into studios to do their thing, as he puts it, almost live. The aim was to keep these meet-ups simple and spontaneous – to channel the synergy they’d built on stage in the reassuring comfort of the studio. The results have a sizzle and depth that’s hard to capture or define.

The musicians in these sessions reflect just how central Bryan Sutton has become to acoustic music, and not so many years after arriving as the fireballing flatpicker in the influential bluegrass revival band Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder. That’s where most of us heard him first, and then suddenly he was everywhere, hailed as one of the finest guitarists of his generation. Soon after moving to Nashville from his native Asheville, North Carolina, Sutton’s musical world expanded by way of country sessions and elite band invitations.

He takes some justifiable pride in getting called to fill in for Tony Rice on the so-called Bluegrass Sessions tour with Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, Stuart Duncan and Mark Schatz. For Sutton and others in his generation, these were some of the founding fathers of newgrass, and Bryan has joined variations of that lineup in a variety of settings, including the so-called Telluride House Band at the iconic Colorado festival. It’s been a watershed musical relationship whose bright prospects are audible in this disc’s first track, the Bryan Sutton original, “Morning Top.”

Mandolinist Chris Thile, one of Bryan Sutton’s best musical foils and friends, appears twice on this album. In track two, Sutton re-joins the band Thile pulled together for his first big post-Nickel Creek foray. Call it the How To Grow A Band or a proto version of the Punch Brothers, this grouping with fiddler Gabe Witcher and banjo savant Noam Pikelny is becoming something of an heir apparent to the newgrass founders, both for their instrumental virtuosity and their compositional daring. Bryan Sutton shared guitar duties for a time with Chris “Critter” Eldridge, and the bond forged during those tours is captured in the breezy, harmonically surprising “Big Island Hornpipe.” Thile returns at the very end of the record for a purist’s delight, a guitar/mando/twin-voice bluegrass stunner in the vein of Skaggs and Rice. The vocals on “I’m Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar” are tight, and the picking comes off as a fugal bout of Bach versus bluegrass.

Between those bookends you’ll find a couple of delightful forays with Tim O’Brien and Hot Rize, a duo number with banjoist Fleck, a lyrical duet with fellow guitar stylist Russ Barenberg and the swinging strings of a hot club style band including old friend Aubrey Haynie on fiddle and the astonishingly dexterous Jeff Taylor on accordion. The glue in this eclectic collection is Bryan Sutton’s exquisitely honed style, which manages to stay very much grounded in bluegrass even as he strides ever forward toward the new American acoustic music he and his gifted friends are forging.

The painful paradox is that every time musicians of this caliber get together something unique and unrepeatable happens, and yet it would be impossible or at least unwieldy to record every encounter, every note, every run of every song. But when selectively made, as they have been here, we get a precious postcard from a human and artistic encounter that will never happen exactly the same way again.

– Sugar Hill Records (adapted from the liner notes by Craig Havighurst)