Kathleen Parks grew up learning Irish fiddle in her Irish family, and listening to her father play jazz trumpet, but it was while she was a student at the Berklee College of Music that her musical life shifted. That’s when she heard bluegrass for the first time.

“It sounds like Irish but twangier,” she says, “and I want to shake my hips.” She feels an energy in its free-shifting improvisation — like Irish music and jazz combined.

In the expanding Boston bluegrass scene, Parks fiddles and sings in the band Twisted Pine, which also features Dan Bui on mandolin, Ricky Mier on banjo, Rachel Sumner on guitar and vocals, and Chris Sartori on bass.

The group is catching national and international attention, too. They’ve performed recently at festivals from Rockygrass in Colorado to Celtic Connections in Glasgow, Scotland; received a grant to record their debut full-length album in Nashville, Tennessee; and been nominated for an International Bluegrass Association Momentum Award. This week they return to Mass MoCA’s FreshGrass Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, where they won the band competition last year.

Photo by Joan Harrison

“[FreshGrass] is the capstone of the summer,” Bui says. “We’re excited to be there.”

Bui, Mier, Parks, and Sumner met through Berklee, and Sartori met Mier at a music jam. At parties and informal gigs, the group solidified their pleasure in playing together. “For me that’s what fuels the music — the spontaneous interaction with other players,” Mier says.

Twisted Pine honed its style at the Cantab Lounge, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bluegrass hub, evolving their playing from an informal jam to a melded group. Now they play there once a month, working out new material and arrangements.

“It gave us an excuse to get together, call out tunes, and spice it up,” Sumner says of the gig. “A lot of bands have gotten their start there.”

Twisted Pine has shaped its sound out of high-energy standards and original tunes. Sumner and Parks both write original songs, and all the band’s members have worked out arrangements.

“People sometimes have a strict definition [of bluegrass] — it must be Scruggs-style banjo,” Sumner says. “We’re a little loose; we come from different backgrounds.”

Mier, who played slap bass in jam bands, picked up banjo after he and Bui became roommates. Sartori played jazz, funk, and R&B fusion before he met them.

“I was classically trained on flute,” Sumner says. “I didn’t know chords.”

But the fluid flexibility of bluegrass moved her. “It was new for me,” she says, “because classical orchestras and ensembles … are stiff. I was drawn to this because I was starved for it in the classical world.” So she picked up the guitar and began writing her own songs.

Parks says her songs often have a rock feel, influenced by Paul McCartney and Elliott Smith. Sumner calls her tunes “story songs,” often drawing on her life. One song, for instance — which Twisted Pine will perform at FreshGrass — recalls a Christmas Eve when Sumner and her family were evicted from their home.

“It’s one of the worst things that’s happened,” she says, “and I figured out how to channel it [into music]. I like finding beauty in horrible things.”

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Brad Wells, professor of music at Williams College, heard in the 1990s Tuvan throat singers performing with a classical Western group of women vocalists. Together they sounded gorgeous but constrained, he says, two distinct ensembles in different sound worlds. They gave him an idea: He wanted one ensemble, a group that could study with master musicians from around the world to bring disparate sounds together. It would give composers a breadth of expression they rarely find.

Photo by Mark Shelby Perry

In 2009 Wells held auditions and invited eight musicians to Mass MoCA for a residency. The group, called Roomful of Teeth, has returned every summer to study Tuvan throat singing, Appalachian yodeling, Hindustani melody, classical Persian ornamentation, belting, Inuit throat singing, Korean P’ansori, Georgian singing, and Sardinian cantu a tenore.

The group’s name, Wells says, invokes the permanence of bone against the fleeting sound of the voice. While they look like a choir — it’s a group of vocalists after all — Wells insists Roomful of Teeth is a band, not a choir. Choirs have sections of voices and blend them carefully. Here, as in a band, each musician is unique. Many Roomful of Teeth members compose their own music, including Caroline Shaw, who in 2013 became the youngest winner of a Pulitzer Prize in music for her “Partita in Eight Voices.”

The group’s breadth and independence have served them well. In 2014, Roomful of Teeth won a Grammy Award for chamber music. Wells knows of no one else blending traditions like this.

Photo by Bonica Ayala Photography

This summer, composers came to Roomful of Teeth. In a change of pace, this weekend’s performance will feature a collaboration with Mass MoCA composer-in-residence Ted Hearne, who wrote a work for them; jazz pianist Fred Hersch; composer Anna Clyne; and Wally Gunn, who wrote two new movements for “The Ascendent,” a work Roomful of Teeth performed on its April 2015 album, Render.

“Hearne is the embodiment of a new generation of composers coming up who have listened to all sorts of music, from the most refined and obscure Western classical to rock and punk and jazz, and don’t see divisions between them,” Wells says. “He adapts influences with energy and ease.”

So does Roomful of Teeth, absorbing influences across the world. “It’s inspiring, humbling, ear-stretching,” Wells says. “Always a feeling I get is one of awe — when you hear people who are masters of singing styles radically different from yours, and they are sitting a few feet away, and you hear them explore what they do … You hear the richness of someone’s native singing style, and they have a breadth and depth we will never have. We’re coming as visitors and as adults.”

Top photo by Bonica Ayala Photography

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