Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition, released in September, appears alongside the release of Stephen Wade's University of Illinois Press book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings & the American Experience, which I expect to be reading one of these days. In the meantime, the multi-, almost ridiculously, talented Wade's CD plays as I type, not just another old-time banjo record (not that there's anything wrong with that) but something unlike any other. Then again, Wade himself -- performer, scholar, writer, actor and (from all accounts) nice guy -- is pretty much one of a kind.

If you're a veteran enthusiast of mountain music, you'll have heard most, albeit possibly not quite all, of the titles in the song-list. (The gorgeous "Rocky Hill" will likely be as new to you as it is to me.) One thing you won't have heard, however, is any done quite this way, in arrangements that feel starkly traditional in the manner of performers -- Wade's musical partners here include experienced old-time revivalists Mike Craver, James Leva, Danny Knicely, and Zan McLeod -- so immersed in the sounds that they seem their natural vocabulary.

Yet the approach here is also finely textured and richly original. The most unusual instrument is Craver's pump organ, which provides a bottom to some of the arrangements. The fiddle, guitar, mandolin, washboard and bass, interacting with Wade's banjo, combine for an orchestral effect that causes everything it touches to feel as if freshly discovered.

The CD is conceived as a tribute to Wade's two principal teachers, Doc Hopkins and Fleming Brown, who taught him the mysteries of the five-string banjo when he was a folk-struck kid growing up in Chicago. Wade's relentless curiosity and desire to learn led him into the field and to the likes of Appalachian masters such as Bookmiller Shannon, Virgil Anderson, Kirk McGee, Gordon Tanner and more, as well as to archives where commercial and field recordings preserve the old songs and tunes.

Banjo Diary synthesizes Wade's immense knowledge of a music that it is clear he adores now as much as he did on that happy day he first encountered it. Besides its topnotch musicianship, this recording communicates the sort of joy you just can't fake. Exposure to it will do your heart good.