Factory Girl

Here's another take on source material from unlikely places: guitarist Corey Christiansen leads a quintet through a solid set of jazz adaptations of traditional folk and fiddle tunes like "John Hardy," "Shenandoah," and "Factory Girl." What's particularly impressive here is the way he manages to craft genuinely interesting jazz arrangements of harmonically dead-simple tunes like "Cluck Old Hen" and "Old Joe Clark." One of his secret ingredients is funk, and another is his ability to coax the African-American roots of some of these tunes out from behind their Anglo-Appalachian façades. It all works really well. Highly recommended to all jazz collections.