Pressed on red and black swirled vinyl
Brand-new sound by the 14x Grammy winner!
Limited time album download included

Jerry Douglas is both a 14-time Grammy Award-winning musician and staggeringly prolific — he’s play on more than 2,000 albums as a session player or a leader. The Jerry Douglas Band is a three-year-old virtuoso septet that includes electric guitar (Mike Seal) drums (Doug Belote), horns (Jamel Mitchell and Vance Thompson on saxophone and trumpet, respectively), fiddle (Christian Sedelmyer), and bass (Daniel Kimbro), alongside his Dobro and lap steel. As a unit they careen across jazz, rock, bluegrass, folk, blues, and R&B with abandon.

The program on What If includes includes radical revisitations of tunes from Douglas’ past along with new tunes. The material is bracing and aggressive; it showcases the various strengths of this collective’s interplay as well as the solo prowess of its membership, writes AllMusic.

Though Douglas has recorded several of these songs previously; he turns them inside out here in bold new arrangements filled with unexpected elements. For example, in 1992 he covered “Hey Joe,” the Billy Roberts folk tune that became one of Jimi Hendrix’s most beloved blues-rockers, as an uptempo bluegrass song. Here, it’s recontextualized again with drums and fiddle-and horns instead of mandolin. Speaking of changing the feel, Douglas’ rendering of Tom Waits’ “2:19” is a funky revelation, dripping with soul-and vocals that sound like they’re rolling from the lips of a grizzled Beale Street bluesman killing it at 3 a.m., not a three-time Country Music Association Musician of the Year.

Douglas has performed in so many incarnations; at one point, he counted membership in eight bands — simultaneously. His recent history includes his band the Earls of Leicester — his version of the Flatt and Scruggs band — with Shawn Camp, Charlie Cushman, Jeff White, Johnny Warren, and Barry Bales; their self-titled 2014 debut earned Douglas his 14th Grammy. He’d already picked up eight with Alison Krauss & Union Station, with whom he’s closing out his second decade, and shared the Album of the Year win for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the film soundtrack that helped replant traditional roots music in the modern American psyche.