Tin Hat Trio

This innovative trio uses an array of instrumentation—toy piano, harmonica, violin, viola, guitar, dobro, harp, tuba and percussion—to confuse boundaries between jazz, world, classical and other musics. If you thought there wasn’t much common ground between these supposedly disparate genres—with a little tango and Eastern European gypsy music thrown in for good measure—a listen to this puzzling aural soundtrack will change your mind. Blurring the line between composition and improvisation, the group fuses European concert-hall traditions with a distinctly Western American rural sense of open land and sound to conjure a territory still to be defined—Morricone’s out in the rain, the horizon is tweaked, and gauzy textures hint at ever-shifting conclusions.