American Patchwork Quartet Weaves Together Wide Musical Experiences to Find Common Ground

Folk archivist Alan Lomax once said, “America has a patchwork culture made of the dreams and songs of all its people.” In his travels, Lomax discovered songs that spoke to the American experience, many handed down and shared by immigrants from disparate backgrounds. That tradition continues today with American Patchwork Quartet, a group that finds common ground from a cross-cultural framework that has its roots in India, Japan, the American South, and the Motor City.

Comprised of Grammy-winning artists Clay Ross (guitar/vocals) and Falu (vocals), as well as acclaimed bassist Yasushi Nakamura and jazz drummer Clarence Penn, American Patchwork Quartet lean into their multicultural backgrounds on their self-titled debut album, released last week, by reframing 14 Western folk and blues standards into a truly unique musical experience.

Exploring Possibilities 

American Patchwork Quartet’s origin story, according to Ross, is just a set of “really fortunate circumstances that brought us all together.” Ross and Falu first met in 2016 while both were teaching artists at Carnegie Hall. They soon formed a close friendship and were looking for a way to collaborate, but Ross was busy getting his group, Ranky Tanky, off the ground.

“I was doing a lot of research in the folk archives of ethnomusicologists, like Alan Lomax,” Ross explains. “And I was collecting songs to bring to Ranky Tanky that were specifically Gullah songs.” Gullah refers to African Americans who mainly reside in South Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry region. Ranky Tanky specializes in playing traditional Gullah music within a jazz-type framework.

“In doing this research,” Ross continues, “I came across songs that were not Gullah but that I really fell in love with.” He collected folk songs from the Appalachian Mountains as well as blues and fife-and-drum music from the Mississippi Delta. He saved them in a folder for later. “I had this little collection of songs that I wanted to explore.”

It was also in 2016 that Ranky Tanky (who won the Grammy for Best Regional Roots Music Album twice, in 2020 and 2023) first played the Monterey Jazz Festival. “It was one of our first big breaks,” Ross recalls. On the ride to the airport after the gig, Ross shared a car with Clarence Penn, a drummer who’s performed with jazz greats from Betty Carter to Stanley Clarke and was a protégé of Ellis Marsalis. “I was really intimidated by Clarence,” Ross admits. “He’s a very renowned musician. And he’s a very brooding, kind of serious person.” Both their flights were delayed, and they wound up stuck at the airport for about 10 hours, where they bonded over conversations about family and “everything in life,” Ross says. “We became really good friends.”

As the years passed, Ross found himself returning to that folder of songs. Wanting to explore their possibilities, he reached out to Falu. “I said, ‘Let’s try these songs and see if you can find something in them that you can connect with,” Ross recalls. “And sure enough, she found songs that she really fell in love with.”

For Falu, who was born in Mumbai and grew up in India with a background in classical Indian music (and was awarded the 2022 Grammy for Best Children’s Album), the types of songs Ross presented to her were unknown territory. “The way Clay and I had bonded, I felt I had a safe space to try things that I’ve never sung,” Falu explains. “Clay gave me that cushion, to sort of explore and grow and take risks. So, I took a chance. ‘Okay, let me hear some songs.’”

‘One Sacred Thread’

The first song Ross presented to Falu was “Pretty Saro,” an English ballad that traces back to the early 1700s but made its way to the Appalachian Mountains by early in the 20th century. Alan Lomax recorded several versions when he visited the area, and it’s been recorded over the years by Bob Dylan, Rhiannon Giddens, and many more. Falu fell in love right away. “What a beautiful melody,” she gushes. It can be in any language. I can write lyrics in Hindi for that, and it will work.”

Melodies first attracted Falu to all the songs Ross brought to her. They were melodies that had been passed down for generations, a tradition with which she could identify. “It’s very close to my music,” Falu says. “Because I’m the 11th generation carrying on the traditional North Indian classical style of music. So, I understand how meaningful it is to carry on generational music, be it folk, be it classical.”

American Patchwork Quartet (photo by Matt Carr)

One of the songs she connected with instantly was “Shenandoah.” “The melody just speaks for itself,” Falu explains. “I don’t have to do anything! And it crosses boundaries. The song is universal. I don’t think it can be just American folk music. I think ‘Shenandoah’ is something the whole world can see as its anthem. Any culture who has seven notes, even five notes, can sing it. I mean, we’re blessed, [in North Indian classical music] we have 22 notes. So singing ‘Shenandoah’ was comfort. It was home. It was very close to folk melodies that I learned growing up in India.”

Falu didn’t want to just sing about Shenandoah, she needed to learn about it. “After we started, COVID hit,” she recalls. “So, we had all the time in the world to explore. Clay sent me some documentaries that I could learn. I needed to know about the Civil War of America. I needed to know about how the Missouri River was such an important river for trade and for bringing in different cultures and people. It’s all new for me. I wanted to be very honest. I wanted to understand authentically what this really means. I’m an immigrant. This doesn’t come easily to me. I must research. I must understand the history of the beautiful stories that Irish and German immigrants brought to this country. It’s the same. It came 400 years ago from different parts of the world. And now Indian immigrants are singing this. We all share one sacred thread of humanity.”

What was challenging for Falu, however, was harmony. “We chose songs that spoke to both (Ross and me), melodically,” she explains. “But harmony is something I didn’t even know. That’s a different concept. I had to learn it for APQ, but I didn’t grow up with that style. But I learned and then we developed the sound together.”

Classical Indian music, according to Falu, is based on melodic scales. “We have a thousand different melodic scales that evoke emotions and feelings,” she says. “We have certain rules that we must follow. Then we have (our) folk music, which is mountain music that my great-great grandma sang. And that’s a given. It’s like if you eat in the soil of India, you breathe that music. But harmony was a concept that that I learned when I came to America. It is not in our music at all.”

Shaping Songs

Once the songs were picked, Ross approached Penn with the concept of American Patchwork Quartet. Both Penn and Falu loved the idea. “They had never met before,” Ross explains, “but I wanted to bring them together. Then Clarence immediately thought of Yasushi Nakamura to round out the group and make us a band.”

Born in Tokyo, Nakamura first came to America when he was 9, later attending both the Berklee College of Music and Julliard. Over the years he’s collaborated with Wynton Marsalis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Steve Miller, and others. “Yasushi was one of the first musicians I played with when I moved to New York,” Ross, a native of South Carolina, says. “Clarence had (also) been playing with him a lot and they had formed a really strong brotherhood.”

American Patchwork Quartet’s Yasushi Naka mura, Clay Ross, Falu, and Clarence Penn (photo by Sandlin Gaither)

Armed with Ross’ folder of folk and blues songs now pared down to the best 14, the quartet convened at Echo Mountain Recording in Asheville, North Carolina, in May 2022, and the arrangements began to take shape. “I often create a general template with some pretty clear ideas on what I think would be cool,” Ross explains. “You know, some kind of general benchmarks, but I’m very open to let things be shaped.”

Ross and Falu handled many of the arrangements, but a few tracks exhibit a full collaborative effort. “There are cases where on a song like (the traditional English folk song) ‘Cuckoo Bird,’” Ross says, “where me and Clarence and Yasushi are kind of bouncing ideas off one another. And then there are other songs like ‘Pretty Saro’ where I had it exactly the way I wanted. Everybody in the band are just exceptional musicians and can read the chart and play it just perfectly, then memorize it and put their own gravitas into it, but it’s essentially the way that I envisioned it.”

One track, the Skip James blues “I’m So Glad” that’s been covered by Cream and Deep Purple, among others, features a challenging arrangement courtesy of Penn. “Originally that song was a lot more straightforward, kind of a groovy blues thing,” laughs Ross. “And then Clarence said, ‘Well, let’s try it like this.’ And he framed it with this really cool groove in that has 15 beats. We were all furious at him for handing that to us the day before we recorded our debut album! I was like, ‘Man, are you kidding me? You’re gonna make me try to wrap my head around this the day before we’re about to record?’ I was really upset about it.” After sitting down and working with it for about four hours, Ross finally figured it out and went for it. “It’s actually one of my favorite pieces on the record,” he admits. “That’s how these things work sometimes.”

Throughout American Patchwork Quartet, it’s illuminating to hear Falu’s contributions to songs not native to her homeland: the way she expands the reach of the original melody in the album opener “Beneath the Willow” as well as her treatment of the middle section of Blind Willie Johnson’s classic “Soul of a Man.” On the 17th-century Scottish ballad “The Devil’s Nine,” Falu added Hindi lyrics to broaden and deepen its meaning. “That’s a very complicated song,” she explains. “First of all, it’s a 10-beat cycle. I call it 10, Clarence calls it five. Because they look at rhythm in a very different way than how I look at it.” In addition to Falu’s new lyrics, she contributed a rhythmic idea from her native India.

“It’s something called ‘chakradhar,’” Falu explains. “In our culture, we believe in rebirth. And the downbeat, the first beat in any cycle, is very important to us. So, we do three cycles, and we land on the first beat, which releases all the energy in the universe.” Falu felt “The Devil’s Nine” was the best vehicle to introduce this rhythmic method to a Western audience. “The rhythmic parts of the music are so complex,” she says. “But when you land on the one with so much fun and love, the whole universe brightens up.”

Occasional disagreements over rhythmic counts aside, Ross believes the reason APQ works so well is due to mutual respect.

“We connected first as people, as human beings,” he says. “Me being the sort of curator of the group, I have a personal relationship with every member. Now everyone knows one another. But that trust was what made it work in the beginning, that allowed us all to come together and try to make this project a reality.”

That respect, according to Falu, extends to each member’s cultural background as well as the music they make. “What we’re trying to do,” she says, “is basically respect both cultures but draw freely from them to make it something that is unique, fresh, and our own.”