Three for the Road

Just as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Mark O’Connor and bassist Edgar Meyer were finishing recording what would become their popular 1996 American folk-inspired album “Appalachia Waltz,” the three players looked at one another and said, “Let’s do this again.”

And why not? Having already performed numerous concerts together, the trio had taken a liking to their new collaboration--and their quest for a new middle ground between classical, country, folk music and traditional Anglo-Celtic fiddling styles. The threesome’s hunch that they had hit on something good was confirmed by the American record-buying public, which purchased more than 250,000 units (a very strong showing by classical standards) and kept “Appalachia Waltz” on the Billboard classical charts for 98 weeks.

So last summer, after more than three years spent in their separate artistic universes, the Appalachian troika went back into the studio, again for Sony Classical, to record a sequel album called “Appalachian Journey.” In record stores this week, the new release will be accompanied by a three-continent tour, which stops at UCLA’s Royce Hall on April 1.

And while Ma, Meyer and O’Connor are proud of the first album they made together, they’re adamant that the new one has a reason for being beyond just repeating a winning formula.

“If the first thing was successful, any sequel almost always falls flat unless it’s individually motivated outside of whatever came before,” Ma said after a recent radio taping with his two colleagues at the Right Track recording studio in New York. O’Connor added, “The first time we were shooting in the dark on some of this stuff. This time we really knew what we were writing for, and you can hear it in some of the results.”

Like its predecessor, “Appalachian Journey” consists mostly of original music composed by O’Connor and Meyer. The style of many of the pieces is heavily influenced by Copland’s Americana period, during which he wrote famous works based on folk material such as “Billy the Kid” (1938) and “Rodeo” (1942). Some tracks on “Appalachian Journey” sound like traditional reels or waltzes, while others like “Duet for Cello and Bass” and “Vistas” have a more classical sensibility. Still others, like “Indecision,” spotlight the violin over a funk-style bass accompaniment. The new album also includes cameo appearances by folk legend James Taylor as well as fiddle player and vocalist Alison Krauss. Even with all its variety, the overriding tone suggests chamber music more than it does a fiddling contest or a romping country band.

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From the outset, the three players were an unlikely combination. Ma brings to the group clear celebrity status. He has earned a reputation for his musical curiosity across genres. Fundamentally, however, he is a classical player deeply grounded in that milieu and, by his own admission, has had to work hard to pick up fiddling styles. These styles do overlap with classical, since traditional fiddling has a distant ancestor in Baroque violin, but the music also contains a unique rhythmic complexity as well as a specific vocabulary of ornamentation that Ma has had to learn from scratch.

The cellist has clearly taken to the project and even integrated some of the material into his general repertory, going as far as transcribing a solo arrangement of “Appalachia Waltz’s” title track, performing it in recital and recording it on a recent disc of contemporary music for unaccompanied cello. Ma seems to see himself as a pioneer of sorts, breaking ground in a new genre for his instrument.

“Even within the classical tradition, the cello as a solo instrument developed relatively late,” he said. “When Brahms heard Dvorak’s cello concerto, he apparently remarked, ‘How come I didn’t know the cello could sound like that?’ ” Now many listeners are no doubt saying the same thing about Ma’s fiddling.

Meyer is the group’s switch hitter, having built a career that straddles Nashville and Lincoln Center, collaborating with progressive bluegrass artists such as Sam Bush and Bela Fleck, but also with classical players such as the Emerson String Quartet. He has composed about one-third of the pieces on the new album, which he hopes will help bridge the “chasm between classical music and other very active and interesting forms of music.”

In Meyer’s eyes, the classical establishment suffers from what he calls a “sense-of-greatness syndrome,” in which music gets associated only with great works of historic merit and many present-day players are too intimidated by that tradition to experiment with composing themselves. “You don’t want to besmirch it all by writing a little ditty,” he said.

Ditties or otherwise, the rest of the original writing on the album was done by O’Connor, who seems to be the driving force behind this eclectic style of music. His eclecticism comes in part from his background, studying with Texas fiddling master Benny Thomasson and jazz giant Stephane Grappelli. Times music critic Mark Swed praised him as “one of the most talented and imaginative reinventors working in music--any music--today.”

Moreover, his instrument is central to the classical and folk traditions, and as such it can be used as a bridge between the two while leaving room for ambiguity. In O’Connor’s hands, is it a fiddle or a violin? Probably a little bit of each, and the tension breathes life into the compositions. Ask him what kind of a musician he sees himself as, and he’ll most likely give you the honest, if elusive answer--American. “I identify with almost everything that I’ve heard in America, and I think a little of it goes into my playing,” he said.

The end result from this improbable threesome is a musical fusion that is hard to locate in any one tradition. The first album was tracked on Billboard’s classical charts, which the players didn’t seem to object to, though they are quick to point out that even classical music can be seen as a hybrid of different styles. (Ever the historian, Ma reminds the group that the 19th century European quest to develop “pure” national schools of music served to obscure the cross-fertilized nature of many classical styles.)

Whether this group’s music is classical or not, there is little disputing that the first album sold much better than most traditional classical recordings. The sales confirm a major trend in the recording industry over the last decade, in which profits have dropped off for most of the standard repertory, leaving the crossover albums to help the labels pay the rent and fund their less lucrative projects. Unfortunately, the crossover albums that do sell (and many that don’t) are often artistically questionable--consider Michael Bolton’s less-than-convincing opera aria recording or Luciano Pavarotti’s unsuccessful attempts at pop--which have stuck “crossover” with a pejorative connotation.

All three players, in fact, bristle at the mere mention of the word.

“A crossover can be some cynical amalgamation of different forces where you do something just so that it will sell,” Ma said. “The purity has got to be the quality of the musicianship.”

O’Connor seconds: “We’re not a product of a crossover market, we just wanted to play together.”

He adds that the group didn’t even schedule a recording until after their second concert together. “And in my case, what am I crossing over to? It’s not as if we’re playing Brahms or something. I’m just doing what I do.”

Peter Gelb, the president of Sony Classical, had a slightly more cynical take on why projects receive the crossover label. “If you listen to certain quarters, anything that is successful is no longer considered classical music,” he said. “We are in direct opposition to the kind of modern classical music that has this built-in defeatist approach in which audiences are not really welcome.”

The quality of their collaboration does rise above the typical crossover fare, but Billboard chart manager Marc Zubatkin speculates the new album’s guest appearances by Taylor and Krauss may help land “Appalachian Journey” on the classical crossover chart nonetheless.

Regardless of which chart the album ends up on (and it will almost certainly be high up on one of them), the larger question of the music’s roots persists, as does another thorny concept that invariably arises when musicians make claims to a traditional style: authenticity. Is this music authentically grounded in fiddle traditions of O’Connor’s youth or in the sounds of Meyer’s and O’Connor’s Nashville past? And does that even matter?

From the trio, the answers to both questions seem to be a qualified no. Instead of claiming an authentic status, the musicians see themselves in an organic, evolving relationship to traditions.

“Being authentic can be a good thing in that often people who are fixated on that are also fixated on having very high standards, so they may maintain something they think has tremendous value,” Meyer explained. “On the other hand, most of the kinds of music that I’ve been excited about are hybrid in their origins.”

O’Connor adds, “If I were completely authentic, I might not have found my way to joining these two great players at all.”

And, as O’Connor says, neither of the “Appalachia” albums contains much music that can legitimately be considered Appalachian. The violinist says he has been influenced generally by the music of that region, but he concedes that his compositions are about as Appalachian as Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” which includes a Shaker melody and was given the title only after it was composed.

“Copland never even visited Appalachia,” O’Connor said. “I’ve actually spent time there.”

But if the music is not Appalachian per se, then why evoke the region? Again, Copland’s example comes up: Appalachia is a symbol of something larger than itself, and as a symbol it has a legacy all its own.

“In the history of American music, Appalachia appears over and over again as an imaginary landscape of American identity,” explains Aaron Fox, an ethnomusicologist and assistant professor of music at Columbia University. “It represents a land that time forgot, a place outside of politics, a space for nostalgic projection. This is, of course, all strictly fantasy.”

Indeed, this interpretation of Appalachia as a repository for a mythic national past--a bastion of happy homesteaders and agrarian virtue--sheds light on part of the music’s appeal. In a way, these albums can be seen as a kind of American roots music, at a time when roots music enjoys tremendous popularity. And as the group carries its repertory into the international context, through records as well as concert tours of Europe and Asia, one might even see the two discs as a new type of American world music. They certainly share that market’s general formula of extracting elements of folk traditions, adding high standards of technical virtuosity and repackaging them in the garments of a cosmopolitan sophistication.

That, as Fox puts it, “the real Appalachia is America’s third world, a site of violent ideological, political and racial conflict” points to the deep irony in the music’s title and its associations. It is an irony, however, that will probably not prevent an urban and suburban listening public (not to mention an international one) from enjoying the wistful lyricism and foot-stamping rhythms, and hearing in them tokens of a simpler past.

For their part, the musicians prefer to cast away the labels--Appalachian, classical, American, whatever. “A lot of people need labels to get known,” O’Connor said. “Even more so now, we don’t need the label. People are listening to us from our first album, and we’re just being who we are. When people think of Edgar Meyer, Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor playing together, that now conjures up an image, and I love that.”

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Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor, April 1, 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $40 to $300 ($300 includes a UCLA Performing Arts benefit dinner). (310) 825-2101.