First the elders paid tribute to their forebears in song, then the younger generation tore up the place during the first night of the fourth annual Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Festival, held at the Auditorium Theatre Saturday. (The blues wasn’t in evidence despite the name of the festival, which continues next Saturday at the Congress Theater with country-rock band Drive-By Truckers and many others.)
Anchoring much of the music was the bluegrass quartet the Travelin’ McCourys, the members of which displayed both musical virtuosity and impressive stamina as they backed performers through three separate sets of nearly an hour each. Loping acoustic bass drove the fleet tempos of songs filled with sparkling mandolin, sweetly sighing fiddle and clattering banjo.
The finale paired the group with mandolin player and Chicago-area native Jeff Austin from Yonder Mountain String Band and acoustic guitarist Bill Nershi from the String Cheese Incident. Their decades on the jam band scene was evident in solos that extended long past the concise turns in traditional bluegrass, sometimes meandering aimlessly.
The group was on fire, though, as Austin stomped his feet with excitement and barked his way through a medley of the traditional folk songs “Raleigh and Spencer” and “Jesse James” and played a blazing twin mandolin solo with Ronnie McCoury. If Nershi’s goofy rap “Jellyfish” was an unfortunate end to the evening, he brought a sweet charm to his rendition of Tom Waits’ “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night.”
Earlier, the Travelin’ McCourys accompanied their 72-year-old patriarch, Del McCoury, and mandolin player David Grisman during a set of songs associated with the late bluegrass incarnator Bill Monroe, who would have been 100 years old last September.
McCoury, who performed with Monroe in the early 1960s, and Grisman, a pioneer of the 1970s progressive bluegrass movement, cheerfully paired their voices on the opening “My Long Journey Home.” As the set progressed, Grisman’s rippling mountain stream solos and the McCourys’ exuberance grew more delightful, concluding with Grisman and Del McCoury wrapped in a warm hug.
Del McCoury also hewed closely to Monroe’s bluegrass template during his own set, as he sang high lonesome melodies in a gnarled tenor and his group joined him at a single microphone in four-part harmonies.
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Grisman headed in the opposite direction during a set with his own quintet, which included a drummer and flutist, mixing bluegrass into a stew that also included jazz, funk and bossa nova to yield mellow, warm instrumentals.