Christmas music with a Nashville accent

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, 'Jingle All the Way'

Any song that combines bluegrass banjo picking with Tuvan throat singing would be considered odd, but when that song is holiday standard "Jingle Bells," you've entered another league of weirdness entirely. That's how Nashville banjo virtuoso Fleck opens his new holiday disc, setting the stage for a dizzying suite of jazzy genre mashups and displays of instrumental mastery. You can only imagine the polyrhythmic mayhem that ensues when Fleck gets his nimble fingers on The Nutcracker's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy."

- Dave Paulson