New to me, Jesse Appelman arrives in the New Year with his debut album as, at least in my wishful imagination, a harbinger of the exceptional music on its way over the next 12 months. It is comforting to be assured that folk music survives in such resplendent colors in these dark, foreboding times, when all else that makes American life bearable and more appears about to be ripped from us. (As a Minnesotan I feel a particularly close threat.) On the other shaky hand, Where We Go serves arguably to validate a long-standing conviction of mine: the worse the governance, the better the music. You might frame that theologically as the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. This is the giveth part.

Neither the internet nor the promotional material that came with my reviewer's package tells me much about Appelman except that he lives in California and plays the folk and bluegrass circuit there. Well, that and the fact he's a master of the mandolin, an instrument heard mostly in bluegrass these days but only once on this disc. With that exception Appelman is not Bill Monroe. Where the latter drew blues and jazz strains into his mandolin's voice, Appelman is more likely to reach to classical-tinged approaches. Of course, both artists depend most of all on a reimagining of older vernacular sounds of a kind that, if you're in a properly receptive state, has the power to carry you away in a swoon.

Where We Go features both originals and covers. Two -- Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train" and Gordon Bok's "The Hills of Isle Au Haut" -- are standards. Picked up by folk-pop, hit-spewing, smooth-harmony groups in the early 1960s, the former was so ubiquitous that in my early days it never rose above annoyance. It deserves better, as I learned in later years as more thoughtful musicians revived it. Appelman and companions (prominent West Coast roots figures) treat it as their own, sometimes taking it places where at points it is not entirely recognizable, which I absolutely do not mean as a complaint. The interpretation of Bok's gorgeous sailor's anthem owes more to Jody Stecher's version than to the original, which Bok first recorded around 1970, though even then it felt much older.

None of the 11 cuts is strictly traditional, but none feels as if it couldn't be. "Out in the Valley," composed by Yoseff Tucker, is a true story about Tucker's grandfather's life in the San Joaquin Valley of another era. It pulls off the trick (much more difficult than it seems) of being hard to think is anything but authentically old-timey. Laurelyn Dossett's "Anna Lee," is another could-be.

Appelman contributes self-composed fiddle tunes, each appealingly fashioned and performed. One bears the intriguing title "Liminal Criminal," the bluegrass-leaning piece to which I allude above. I don't know if he's familiar with the 19th-century legend of Spring-heeled Jack, but if someone ever makes a movie about that character -- I am surprised no one has -- the concept expressed in the title would make the tune a candidate for the soundtrack.

Jack surfaced in a seedy area of London in the 1830s, a menacing, violent individual who, so it was alleged, had springs on the soles of his shoes. These springs enabled him to flee pursuers via apparently impossible jumps. He proved weirdly elusive, though his self-identified victims insisted upon his reality even against growing skepticism. Reports continued in England, America and elsewhere well into the next century, eventually to be dumped into the folkloric category of leaping ghosts. If he was or is nothing else, Jack has always been liminal and criminal.

Where We Go is also an apt title for a year that opens with dread and uncertainty, but with the prospect of better if resistance declares otherwise. There's joy in these grooves if you choose to take it.

[ visit Jesse Appelman online ]