New album breaks down musical walls

'No more of this breaking down music into all these different kinds," says super-mandolinist Chris Thile. "There's just . . . music."

Maybe "just music" is a good name for the captivating alt-jazz-bluegrass-classical on Thile's new album with super-double-bassist Edgar Meyer. Titled just Bass & Mandolin (Nonesuch)****, it's the first Thile/Meyer since 2008, and it fronts their current tour. The closest they'll get to Philly this time around is an Oct. 9 show at Richardson Auditorium in Princeton.

Bass & Mandolin is one of the few albums in which the principals are both MacArthur Fellows (Meyer, 2002; Thile, 2012). As for Philly roots, since 2003, Meyer has been adjunct associate professor of double bass at the Curtis Institute.

As for the music, it's just . . . music. The ear is led from genre to genre, fast to slow, song to titanic technomania, high seriousness to dark meditation to silly humor.

"Why Only One?" starts trippily, with cascades of Thile notes against Meyer's thumping . . . but soon breaks into something completely different. "Tarnation" is a speed-burner that manages to stay lyrical. "Look What I Found" has some of the tenderest moments on the album - and the most disorienting.

For contrast, they toss axes aside and, with Thile on guitar and Meyer on piano, perform the exquisite "I'll Remember for You," something Thile calls "a palate-cleanser, kind of like the sorbet course after dinner."

Thile and Meyer both keep very busy. Both are serious composers, and both have performed their compositions with full orchestras. Thile has a backpack stuffed with solo projects, such as prog-grass blazers the Punch Brothers. His best-known band, Nickel Creek, asleep since 2007, awoke in April with A Dotted Line. After his tour with Meyer wraps up on Oct. 17, Thile vaults the Atlantic and begins a European tour with keyboardist Brad Mehldau.

Meyer, whose featherlight, thought-quick playing is to the double bass what Thile is to the mando (check out their concert favorite, "The Farmer and the Duck": bit.ly/1uouk8v), irregularly teams with mix-masters such as Yo-Yo Ma, Béla Fleck, and Alison Krauss. Last year, he and Thile teamed with Yo-Yo Ma and Stuart Duncan for the Grammy-winning Goat Rodeo Sessions. Whew.

Thile credits Meyer as a music-mixing mentor: "That album he did with Béla Fleck, Uncommon Rituals, just blew the doors off my musical clubhouse." Meyer likes the way he and Thile work together: "There can be so many barriers between people, differences in experience, tastes, and personalities, but with Chris, we don't have those kind of walls."

Meyer says by phone that music-mixing came early. "My father was a bassist," he says, "but, they tell me, when I came home from being born at the hospital, he had Count Basie on the record player. At 5 years old, I heard Ray Brown on the record player and thought, 'That is how you play bass.' "

His father made sure Meyer acquired technical skill, but as a young man, the son "already saw there was no life if you wanted to be only a classical bassist." Almost no repertoire exists for the double bass alone. "So I was led naturally into an interest in indigenous musics, jazz, and other music in which the bass can shine a little more." At Curtis, he encourages his students to stretch their chops and tastes.

Listen to the duo's 2008 and 2014 albums together, and you might notice a difference. Melodies are handled with care. It's much as though the two are looking for ways, in the midst of this accomplished, head-stretching music, to beckon the listener in. Meyer says the creative process was better this time: "We took special care with the writing. We placed the music under intense scrutiny. We wanted to distill everything down to its absolute best self. The first time, we were a little rushed."

Thile says they made sure not to let their virtuosity overwhelm the melody. "Even if the melodies weren't lendable to the voice," he says, "we wanted something about them that felt as if it could be sung. We wanted a reason for people to come in and have a conversation with us. And you don't start a conversation with a stranger by talking quantum physics."

"Chris named the album," Meyer says. "And that's pretty much it. Two guys, two instruments."

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