Sam Bush has always paid due respect to age-old traditions in roots music and bluegrass, but he has also carved his own path, mixing in dashes of jazz, rock and even Indian music. The winner of three Junior National Fiddle Championships before he graduated from high school, Bush is also a master of the mandolin and regularly switches between the two. “I’ve never just sat down and thought, ‘Well, I should make a mandolin album or I should make a fiddle album,’ ” he told Bluegrass Unlimited in 2022. “It’s the same way that I’ve gotten in trouble all through my musical career. I just want to make a big musical statement, and not necessarily any one kind of music.” Bush is the consummate collaborator, from a quarter-century with New Grass Revival to stints with Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, and Béla Fleck; with his own band, he bears the genre’s torch as a consensus pick among the pack.
