Washburn puts the banjo in unlikely Chinese setting

Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet formed when Washburn sought out musicians to tour China. ''Our music is a product of being foreigners together,'' she says. (Elba Scofield)

Vocalist Abigail Washburn isn't just a fan of globalization. As the leader of the mind-bendingly bilingual Sparrow Quartet, she embodies all the best possibilities of the seemingly inexorable process hurling cultures together at ever-increasing velocity.

A clawhammer banjo player steeped in bluegrass and American old-time music, Washburn is also a passionate Sinophile who has created a beguiling repertoire weaving Mandarin lyrics and traditional Chinese melodies together with songs gleaned from the "old, weird America," Greil Marcus's enduring term for the age before electronic mass-media homogenization.

Flocking together with Washburn to help create the Sparrow Quartet's strange and wondrous music are some of the progressive bluegrass scene's leading visionaries, including cellist Ben Sollee, Grammy-nominated fiddler Casey Driessen, and banjo maestro Béla Fleck, who produced the ensemble's recent self-named album on Nettwerk.

"The band is more a child of China than of Nashville," says Washburn, 30, who performs with the Sparrow Quartet tonight at First Parish Church in Cambridge. "Our music is a product of being foreigners together."

The band was born on the road, when Washburn sought out players for several seat-of-the-pants tours of China. Starting as a duo with Driessen, the project evolved into a working quartet that has taken on a life of its own. After a US State Department-sponsored 2006 tour as the first American band to officially perform around Tibet, Washburn started developing intricate arrangements inspired by her musicians' extended techniques, such as Driessen's percussive, "chopping" bow work.

"We had a mission of using music and sharing culture in a way that emphasizes the good side of globalization," Washburn says. "We were going to China for an adventure, not money, and I never thought we'd be a touring band in the US, especially with Béla's schedule. As soon as I knew I was working with these guys, I started thinking creatively in ways I never had before. I started exploring things that I thought I wouldn't be able to handle for another decade. I brought the intellectual concept, but the record is really a group process, a collaboration."

Washburn's initial concept of blending her love of Chinese culture with her passion for old-time music was similarly organic. While studying Mandarin in Sichuan in the mid-'90s, she began developing a sense of herself as a human bridge between East and West, but her ambition to work in China as a business consultant took a detour when her career as a banjo player took her to Nashville, where she's still based.

Washburn made a name for herself in Uncle Earl, the acclaimed all-female, old-time string band. By the time she became friends with Driessen, she had already experienced an epiphany about how her disparate paths could intersect through the uncanny confluence of the banjo's percussive twang and Mandarin's tonal palette. When she asked him to join her on a tour of China, he was so impressed by her clawhammer settings for Mandarin poetry that he jumped at the opportunity.

"It just seemed like a winning combination in a strange way," Driessen says. "Even though I don't know exactly what's being said, the pronunciation of the Chinese lyrics went together perfectly with the banjo sound. I was just intrigued by the whole concept. Each of us in the band takes a unique stance on our instruments. All of us have been fascinated by many genres, and in the end bringing all those influences together helps you create your own voice. Everyone plays with a sense of adventure and tonal possibility."

Washburn is both a practitioner and an incisive theorist of her particular brand of globalization. Her website (www.abigailwashburn.com) includes a fascinating blog describing her far-flung travels, including the quartet's spring tour of China in conjunction with the Beijing Olympics.

Her music puts theory into practice, absorbing and reconfiguring old sounds and recasting them as enthralling vehicles that speak to the dislocation and unexpected juxtapositions of contemporary life. One of the album's most striking pieces is a medley pairing Fleck's funky "Old Timey Dance Party" with "Kangding Qingge," a mournful Chinese folk song Washburn learned in Sichuan.

While US audiences can simply marvel at the Sparrow Quartet's unlikely repertoire, Washburn knows she's in a fascinating and delicate position in China, where entertainment tends to be presented in safe packages. She makes a point of including ubiquitous traditional melodies in her sets to create a bond with her audiences before delving into the quartet's original songs.

China is a country obsessed with the future, with little time or official inclination to delve into the traumas of the recent past, from Mao's devastating Great Leap Forward, which sparked the 20th century's most deadly famine, to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Washburn not only seeks to serve as a conduit between America and China, but she hopes to open up space within Chinese culture to reclaim the past.

"When I write a song in Chinese, it's about more than entertainment," Washburn says. "I'm here to be part of progress, creating music that's new and different, that's a step beyond what people want to hear."