Music historians hunting for echoes of Kentucky mountain traditions would hardly expect to find them in San Francisco, a city geographically and culturally distant from Appalachia and long removed from any notion of bluegrass. Yet the Bay Area now hosts some of the most accomplished practitioners of old-time and bluegrass music, with the Crooked Jades serving as both active performers and stewards of the idiom’s deeper lineage. Band founder and leader Jeff Kazor has assembled an extensive archive of American heartland roots material that the group presents through both stage work and recordings. Their output encompasses the soundtrack Seven Sisters: A Kentucky Portrait, created for a PBS documentary, along with the debut album Going to the Races and Unfortunate Rake, Vol. 1, the latter co-produced by Richard Buckner. On Seven Sisters the ensemble employs period-appropriate instruments such as Weissenborns, minstrel banjos, banjo-ukuleles, and parlor guitars; most selections reach back roughly a century, many of them shaped by the style of Kentucky banjoist Roscoe Holcomb.
Alongside Kazor’s vocals and guitar, the Crooked Jades feature Lisa Berman on dobro, clawhammer banjo, and Hawaiian slide, Stephanie Prausnitz on fiddle, Tom Lucas on fiddle and banjo, and Kevin Sandri on bass, with Berman, Lucas, and Prausnitz also supplying harmony vocals. Concerts frequently incorporate guests Martha Hawthorne and Adam Tanner of 78RPM. The group has crisscrossed the United States and appeared in Louisville at an event organized by the International Bluegrass Music Association.
