It seems like there’s three acceptable ways to approach old-time string band music nowadays: either play wanktastic academic jam-band bluegrass for the dreadies, affect a pissed-off punk-grass posture, or play it so straight that any sense of life is effectively drained out of musical forms that once celebrated the earthly, the visceral, the emotional and the carnal–hence the term “folk” music. (Let’s not talk about the faux-hillbilly schtick approach, which should have been dead and buried about fourteen years ago.)

I’ve never had much time for the first option, as I openly despise anything reeking of “jam” band music, and the third option feels too much like a classical recital to get any enjoyment out of. Increasingly, I’ve grown bored with the punk-grass phenomenon.

That’s why I appreciate San Francisco’s Crooked Jades as much as I do–not all of their music appeals to me, but frontman Jeff Kazor makes a strong effort to unearth truly obscurantist threads of American folk music, the bizarre strands that have disappeared in the decades as ideas of folk, string-band music and bluegrass have been codified and rendered painfully dull. Here’s an excerpt from a feature I did on the band for the Metro Santa Cruz a couple years back:

“People want the form frozen in time, but when you do that it becomes stagnant,” says Kazor. “We’re artists sensitive to the world and the environment, and it’s impossible to stay in a bubble to what’s going on in the world.”

To this end, the band aims for an eclecticism in its music that has been largely forgotten by the strict bluegrass traditionalists and old-time revivalists. Kazor points back to the original world music folk forms that influenced the development of old-time music, and aims to reconnect it to European and African traditions that disappeared from the form as it cemented itself into the very strict formalism of bluegrass.

“Some people may feel that there is too much of an edge to the Crooked Jades. … We’re really into restoring all that lost music. It seems bluegrass straightened it out and made it more accessible,” Kazor explains. “The band is really all about restoring what has been lost.”

The Jades are all over the place, and sometimes can test your patience, but at least they’re leaping high and reaching for some truly unique and original art, unlike most of their ilk who fail to breathe any new life or sense of relevance into music forms that desperately need new, revolutionary lifeblood. The Crooked Jades are great because they’re revolutionary, but not in a slavish, obvious way–they’re tweaking the form, ripping it asunder, and rediscovering much of what has been lost in modern folk.

Crooked Jades website | Myspace | Buy World’s on Fire