Banjoreno

Our fair city, the birthplace of the jug band, is also home to The Jawbones, a trio with a taste for that venerable music and its step-cousins: ragtime, hokum blues and hillbilly dance tunes. Propelled by the staggeringly versatile and gifted fiddler Scott Moore, they tear through songs made famous (so to speak) by the Dixieland Jug Blowers, Bo Carter and Charlie Poole, as well as original compositions like the “Louisville Shuffle” and Moore’s swinging paean to pickled bologna, “Pickle Dog Rag.” A take on Uncle Dave Macon’s “Bake that Chicken Pie,” led by guitarist/vocalist Jim Webb, is The Jawbones at their best — warm, congenial and free of the bluegrass affliction of virtuosic over-playing. Moore can’t help the pyrotechnics at times, but they don’t ultimately keep The Jawbones’ efforts to whip an unruly burgoo of old-time American music into the shape of an album from sounding good and often great.