Bluegrass Band Goes The Extra Mile

“You know in The Grinch when he has a ​‘wonderful, terrible idea? That’s how we’re feeling about learning all of this,” said Chris Evans, Mile Twelve’s guitarist. He and the rest of the band — David Benedict on mandolin, Catherine ​“BB” Bowness on banjo, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Evan Murphy on guitar and vocals, and Nate Sabat on bass and vocals — grinned ruefully at the packed house Thursday night at Best Video Film & Cultural Center in Hamden. He had just explained that to shake up their tight tour schedule, the band had decided to learn — and play at Best Video for the first time — the entirety of Tim O’Brien’s landmark bluegrass (country? acoustic?) album Fiddler’s Green, an album that clearly carried the heart of the band.

The audience packing the intimate space of Best Video as part of the GuitartownCT concert series was rapt with attention. It was a room full of fans of acoustic music and particularly bluegrass. A good portion of them loved Fiddler’s Green too. They sang along quietly to ​“Long Black Veil,” replete with harmony, and murmured in appreciation with every mention of other artists — Zoey & Cloyd, Chris ​“Critter” Eldridge, Edgar Meyer, Brian Sutton — who had either collaborated with O’Brien on Fiddler’s Green, or with Mile Twelve themselves, as they produced a new album and had recently recorded some brand-new songs. One man sported a cap that said ​“Bluegrass Rules!” in jaunty sans serif embroidery. Other performed the traditional musician’s greeting of a half nod to people seen in the local jam circuit.

The first set did indeed consist of the entirety of Fiddler’s Green. Each member of the band grinned and explained a particularly meaningful part of the album to them, and as the songs went by, it became a chamber concert of sorts. Different combinations of instruments — guitar, bass, and fiddle, or just guitar, or fiddle and banjo — added motion and variety to the already deep texture of the album. Evans occasionally had to refer to sheet music to get the lyrics, but no one seemed overly fussed about it. It was a treat to hear this album live, and to learn with the band as they played through it.

Evans wasn’t shy about pointing out how challenging the music was. ​“That had more chord changes than a Coltrane song,” he said after a particularly chord-heavy song, referring to the jazz composer’s notoriously complex harmonic structures. There is something really special about hearing an album played all the way through: not only does the audience hear the mastery of the songs as they are written, but they get purely loving renditions of them. This helped us feel like we were witnessing an almost sacred transmission.

After a brief break, the band dipped into more familiar territory, covering a few bluegrass standards, and finally, more than a few songs in, touching on their own written material. Bassist Nate Sabat introduced an almost orchestral rendition of ​“Liberty,” a song that told his family’s story of immigration from eastern Europe and making roots in New York City, eliding it with a prolonged instrumental song that felt like a movement in a symphony. The influence of other quasi-orchestral bluegrass bands — particularly the Punch Brothers — was felt, particularly in some of the banjo and mandolin arrangements, but the sheer dynamic flexibility of the group to go from a single clear note sung by Evans to a full fledged sea of sound by the full ensemble made every song a journey. Mile Twelve fit nicely in the canon of chamber bluegrass music, with instrumental virtuosity and a magnetic quiet that put the band in a class of its own.