01:00 AM EST on Thursday, March 30, 2006

According to Jeff Kazor of The Crooked Jades, playing new, original music that mixes well with old-time Americana classics requires a "regressive-progressive" approach.

This is, you need to go back to the roots of the roots to find that there's a lot more to traditional music than what you've been sold as traditional.

"I always wanted to be accepted into the old-time guard, and I've gotten way past that now. I just feel like they are purists, and they want to preserve the music, and that's what needs to be done. And I want to do the same thing, but I have to do it for today.

"And I think back to old-time music in the late 1800s to the 1920s, it was constantly moving. The music wasn't frozen in time."

On World's On Fire, their latest record, the Jades bring the skills needed to pack an old-time American-music wallop: Kazor's voice is a weighty mumble, while Jennie Benford (also of Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops) is soft and sweet, or soft and creepy, whichever the song requires.

That's the first thing you notice. The second thing you notice is the instrumentation. Along with the usual guitars and banjos and such, there's bowed acoustic bass, jaw harp, fretless banjo and more.

Listening to American music from the late 1800s to the 1920s, Kazor says, "they were using jaw harps and harmonica, cello, ukuleles, banjo ukuleles, pump organ -- and I love that stuff. It's a part of old-time music. And it's funny -- we incorporate that stuff and people say, 'That's not traditional.' "

THE JADES' APPROACH reaches its quintessence on "Goodbye Trouble the Soul of Man," a Kazor original that sounds like the vintage stuff, with call-and-response, handclaps and ominous cadences, which leads into "One Girl on the Turnpike Road," a Benford original full of spooky drones and the imagistic lyrics of a young woman on the way out of town.

Of "Goodbye Trouble," Kazor says, "A segment of the song is for today and another segment is from the past, and it's butted up against each other. . . .

"It works, but it has this feeling that this is something that we're living in, and it's in between two worlds . . . and reflecting what's going on in our lives, and in politics and the environment."

Writing songs that work like originals and traditionals at the same time requires a thorough knowledge of the genre, says Kazor, who's been studying old-time music for 15 years.

"After playing traditional music for a time, and studying it, and just sort of immersing yourself in it, you sort of put these limitations on yourself as you're creating it. You write in that genre. . . .

"We're really trying to make the music our own. And we're not bringing in some amps and drums and electric guitars and trying to modernize it that way. Essentially, we're going further back -- we're going into the African and European roots."

KAZOR FORMED the original Crooked Jades in 1994, but there were problems, he says, with the amount of touring the band was doing. So he put together the current lineup two years ago from "sort of traveling the country [with the original lineup] and finding all the great musicians."

When he heard Benford sing, for example, he said, "I just had to sing with her."

Now the Jades are bicoastal, with Kazor, banjoist-guitarist Erik Pearson and bassist-singer Megan Adie living in the Bay Area and Benford and fiddler-mandolinist Adam Tanner in North Carolina. They communicate a lot by sending CD-Rs to each other, Kazor says, and the only problem "is trying to get into a groove before we get on tour."

The band spends about four months a year on the road, Kazor says, and will swing through the middle of the country in the spring. Then it's off to England for June and the rest of Europe in the fall.

Old-time music, of course, got a boost in this country with the popularity of the movies O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain. Kazor says "the O Brother thing was really helpful," before waning for a while. Now, he says, he observes another resurgence.

"It seems like old-time string-band music is more, not to say on the cutting edge, but a lot more alternative, a lot more interesting, than what's going on today. . . . Maybe things are getting a little tired in that world.

"There's a lot of gravitation to more of a roots music, and it seems like there's a backlash [against] technology enveloping a lot of our lives, and trying to find some sort of solid ground, some sort of roots."

The Crooked Jades and the Hunger Mountain Boys are at the Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., Fall River, tonight at 8. Tickets are $14; call (508) 324-1926.

Dig this:

Richard Julian

Get back to the Narrows Saturday night for Richard Julian, a smart, urbane singer and songwriter (and quite a decent guitar player too) whose latest, Slow New York, serves up short-story-style songs heavy on detail in a sparse setting.

Randy Newman digs him; Marshall Crenshaw digs him; Norah Jones digs him. So there you go.

Tickets are $12 in advance, $14 the day of the show.