The audiences for jazz and bluegrass may strike one, reasonably enough, as entirely separate, as they are indeed. To the degree that an overlap exists, it occurs on occasion when a band in the latter category erupts into a prolonged jam and engages in improvisation that takes the music outside rigid melodic structures, listener appreciation of which likely requires assistance from organic substances. Such outfits owe more to the Grateful Dead and psychedelic excess than to jazz as ordinarily defined. I like the Dead okay, but as a general proposition, jam bands leave me cold.

New Horse & Buggy is something I don't recall encountering before. I can't swear to that inasmuch as I've listened to a memory-crushing lot of music, including bluegrass music, over the course of a long, obsessed life, but of course there's a whole bunch that's sneaked past me. I would think, though, that I'd remember. The album's 10 cuts are approximately evenly divided between purely Appalachian-flavored songs and straight-ahead urban jazz, the latter consisting of compositions by the likes of legends McCoy Tyner and Wayne Shorter.

Section House, meaning all six members who learned their chops plying the bluegrass and country trades, is headquartered in Nashville. It consists of Aaron Ramsey (banjo), Bryan McDowell (fiddle), Cory Walker (banjo), Gaven Largent (dobro), Jake Stargel (guitar) and Jeff Partin (bass). Among them they've won a gasp-inspiring assortment of awards for excellence in their craft, and they've all performed on stages and in studios with some of the finest, including Ricky Skaggs, Sierra Hull and Mountain Heart. Buttressed by extraordinary natural gifts and long experience, they are able to pick at a level that barely seems achievable but never comes off as remotely over-indulgent.

The downhome side comes joyously through, as with any top-level hard-core traditional band (nothing about Ralph Stanley's "My Long Skinny Lanky Sarah Jane," for example, feels less than entirely true and natural), but so do the jazz numbers, which -- though played on hillbilly strings -- are to be appreciated without allowance or condescension. In short, this is the authentic, not the exhibitionist. Even a jazz snob, I suspect, could embrace what Section House does with the work of the masters.

As you listen, you may be thinking, how is this possible? Even less ambitious bluegrass pickers attempting something short of jazz intricacies (e.g., Beatles tunes) as often as not succeed only in exposing the limitations of their instruments and sometimes of their imaginations. Here Section House creates what a tiny number of courageous souls would dare speculate could be done. It's not something that could be classified "bluegrass and adjacent." More accurately, this is an oxymoron: bluegrass country and a distant nation joined by a common border.