What is this I hear about progressive newgrass?

Ya know, some people have started calling our music progressive newgrass.  I'm not quite sure what that means do you?  Let's see if we can figure this out.  "Progressive" used to be applied to a political movement that had it's heyday in the late 1800's to the 1920's.  Now we at the corporate offices of Nevah prefer to keep our political opinions to ourselves (mostly) - do we lean right or left?  Hard to say - I think it's all about the balance.  And I don't really think it affects the music we play all that much.  Although I hear that there is a song being forged at the Nevahsongs mill as we speak that addresses the rightness and/or leftness of certain band members.  But if you take progressive to mean forward looking, well....a lot of our tunes are from our childhoods - the music we grew up with.  That's more looking backwards.  BUT, we don't try to copy those tunes note for note, we try and make them our own.  I'm not sure whether this is forward or backwards.  BUT if one considers that the essence of Nevah lies in the double negative - then maybe looking backwards is actually forward looking!

OK, now if I still have you let's examine the second word "newgrass".  That's a term that's been bandied about in the bluegrass world for a number of years - at its most generic it meant long hairs playing bluegrass during the 60's.  A lot of those long hair types really were playing traditional bluegrass - honoring the (shorter-haired) masters of the genre.  The long hair was the revolutionary act even though the music was really not that much different.  Now Newgrass Revival came along sometime in the late 60's - all fairly young guys caught up in the youth movement of the day.  The music of the youth movement was primarily rock by the late 60's, and the newgrass revival band (which included the now elder statesman Sam Bush) I think provided a beautiful synthesis of rock and bluegrass.  They played great bluegrass, but had a rock attitude and extended the soloing beyond the 8 bar format.  Really no one did the newgrass better than those guys, although there were other bands that sprung up doing similar kinds of things.  One of the beautiful things about bluegrass music was and is a respect for tradition.  So even while everyone was "doing their own thing" and "tuning in and dropping out" they still admired their elders.  So while there maybe was some bad feelings (like the Newgrass Revival Band not being allowed to play at Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom Festival unless they cut their hair - which of course they didn't do!, or Roy Acuff's extreme reluctance to play on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Circle" record), eventually everyone mellowed out, had a beer, and kept on pickin'.  So that's newgrass - kind of a rock and bluegrass mix that really didn't go much beyond what the Newgrass Revival Band did.  There were other movements in bluegrass like the "new acoustic music" movement in the 70's which took the stringband format into  other musical genres (primarily) jazz to which the term "progressive" could be applied.  Now I don't know if any records came out like "Pickin' on 'Trane" or "Pickin on Eric Dolphy" but some of those cats got pretty out there (including our Newgrass Revival friends who continued to grow and expand their musical tastes). 

Ed Russel on Flute - Nevah Band

Eric Brown on Percussion - Nevah Band

But that's not us.  We're back with the music we love to play (much of it derived from what we heard growing up), which is diverse but more or less based out of the stringband format.  We got a banjo (boy do we ever!) played by Hal, mandolin (played with style and grace by R. Silver esquire), and acoustic guitar played by (who's that guy again?).  We got a rockin' bass played by Herr Phil  - so there is the kernel of the newgrass.  We got  sax and flute (Ed) and congas (Eric) which usually reside in the jazz idiom, and even tho' we are not really a jazz band, we've been known to swing a little.  And there is that minor key gypsy thing that keeps seeping in.  Bringing us back down home is Jack's soulful pedal steel and dobro playing.  So progressive in that we look forward by looking backwards and are not afraid to look jazz in the eye while playing acoustic-based stringband music with an electric pedal steel and bass guitar, flute and sax and congas.  Progressive Newgrass?  Why not?  What would you call it?