TEAM LAST CALL

At this point in his career, Gabe Witcher has a fairly sophisticated palate. He’s sampled the finest vintages of the finest strains of music, sniffed, swirled and spit.

Since the age of 5, the prodigious fiddler has performed with the most titanic of bluegrass legends, recorded on more than 300 records by artists from Willie Nelson to Beck, and contributed to film scores ranging from Brokeback Mountain to Toy Story. In short, the dude’s been around the block a time or two. But that didn’t stop Witcher from freezing up the first time he heard the composition his Punch Brothers bandmate Chris Thile had developed for the band’s debut – a 42-minute, four-part suite titled “The Blind Leaving The Blind.”

“I pressed play for the first time and it sounded like Super Mario Brothers on crack,” Witcher laughs during an interview from his southern California home. “It took me three or four days. I had to slow it down, get inside of it and read the score. Once I started to be able to hear it past the video game-iness of it, it started to make sense.”

That particular opus – the centerpiece of Punch Brothers’ debut album, Punch – was the launching point for the band’s sonic voyage into what the New York Times dubbed “American country-classical chamber music.” As unlyrical as that title may be, it’s as good a tag as any, although still barely vague enough to contain Punch Brothers’ expansive sound. Armed with banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and upright bass, the five virtuosos deftly transcend the limitations of acoustic music and yield something literally and figuratively unheard of, something that breaches the worlds of both Bill Monroe and Bjork and inhabits every inch of the land between, from the complex grandiosity of classical music to the precise immediacy of pop.

Witcher puts it in simpler terms: “Music that we like, put through the filter of a bluegrass ensemble.”

“We’ll play a Radiohead song, and we’ll do Bach, then we’ll play Flatt & Scruggs, then The Strokes,” he explains. “Music is just music. It’s all made up of the same stuff. A good piece of music will translate through any medium, any instrument.”

Witcher and Thile, the latter most famous as one third of million-selling newgrass trio Nickel Creek, hit upon the concept for Punch Brothers (named after the Mark Twain short story Punch, Brothers, Punch) in 2006 while commiserating over recently failed relationships with the help of plenty of whiskey and several jam sessions. The idea to start a band came immediately, but didn’t come to fruition until Thile introduced the first tastes of “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” a meandering, yet intricately plotted piece pregnant with leitmotifs and counterpoints. The two dropped their other projects, rounded out the band with friends and likeminded musicians, young prodigies all, and set off like Magellan into the black waters of sound.

“It’s been the best, most positive musical experience that I’ve had,” Witcher enthuses. “One of the things that I think interests all of us as musicians is to come up with something that people haven’t heard before, that we haven’t heard before. We’re always searching for a new texture, a combination of instruments, a new form of song, a new way for a collection of notes to be ordered. Especially coming from the bluegrass world, there’s a lot still to be explored.”