King Wilkie

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most tradition bound of genres: King Wilkie was supposedly the name of Bill Monroe's favorite horse. And they perform straightforward versions of standards like "In the Pines" on their album Broke.

The sextet that took the stage (a little wide eyed) at Hill Auditorium was something else again: a thoroughly contemporary group of young people who had found new resonances in tradition. In place of the formality of Bill Monroe and the other figures of classic bluegrass, they had loose-limbed charisma. They play nightclubs and bars as well as folk clubs and coffeehouses, and with one exception they didn't grow up with bluegrass at all. Two of the band's central members, mandolinist and vocalist Reid Burgess and guitarist Ted Pitney, attended Kenyon College in Ohio, not noted as a bluegrass stronghold. They plunged headlong into the music after attending a bluegrass festival and getting hooked.

King Wilkie, in fact, has some affinities with the Yonder Mountain String Band, a new acoustic jam band that has gained a strong youthful following by taking off from the bluegrass point of departure of the original jam band, the Grateful Dead. King Wilkie's musicians have a relaxed quality, not the tight-wire edge of traditional bluegrass, and they have a good shot at attracting Americana radio programmers to their music. But instead of going off into long improvisatory jams, they stick to older songs and to new compositions following traditional models. They dress in jackets the way the oldest bands did, and they do the intricate dance of sharing a couple of microphones, a traditional limitation that a few modern bands have turned into a virtue.