Of the rushing river of records heading toward us, there are two I’d like to mention, one imminent and one on the horizon: “Love Has Come for You,” by Edie Brickell and Steve Martin, which arrives in April, and “We the Common,” by Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, which arrives this week. Brickell and Martin’s record is a banjo-and-singer collaboration, a form without many footprints. They draw several of their references from bluegrass and old-time banjo styles and from modal forms, the type of reserve that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have visited and absorbed by a different, more plainspoken route. It’s a capacious reserve, though restricted compared to, say, jazz, with its often much broader instrumentation and more complicated harmonic structures…

Alec Wilkinson listens to new albums by Edie Brickell and Thao Nguyen, and looks at the origins of bluegrass: http://nyr.kr/12r4vGA

Photograph by Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty.