Banjo player and bandleader Alison Brown is usually tagged as a bluegrass musician, but she’s a more diverse artist than that. Her original acoustic music brings together bluegrass, jazz, folk, country, pop, old-time, Celtic, and even Latin flavours. In lesser hands, that could be a recipe for stylistic inconsistency. However, Brown’s intelligent arrangements and fluid, understated playing give remarkable coherence to musically varied albums such as her most recent release, Stolen Moments, which includes versions of Paul Simon’s folk classic “Homeward Bound” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Angel”.

“I’m happiest when I feel like we’ve woven all the different influences into a tapestry that holds together, and in which no single strand sticks out too much,” says Brown, reached in Nashville, her hometown for the past 18 years. “We sound jazzy to bluegrass and folk fans and bluegrassy to jazz fans, and nothing is going to change that. What characterizes our music more than anything is that it’s melodic, it’s accessible, and it’s eclectic.”

As a teen prodigy in the ’70s, Brown started out playing straight-ahead bluegrass. It was only when she sat down to write songs for her first solo album, Simple Pleasures, in 1990 that the multiple influences emerged. “It was nothing I set out to do consciously. It’s just that all the different things I’ve listened to as someone who grew up in southern California began to come out, and to combine.”

She drew inspiration from the newgrass music of fellow banjoists Tony Trischka and Béla Fleck, who pushed the boundaries of acoustic roots music with adventurous chord progressions and jazz harmonies. “The first time I really liked jazz was hearing it from those guys. They synthesized it with bluegrass, and blazed the trail for those of us who want to go exploring on an instrument most people associate with car chases and bank robberies.”

Since then, Brown has released eight innovative albums, most of them with the Alison Brown Quartet, formed with her husband and bassist Garry West. “The challenge since my first record has been to figure out the best way to present the music live. That’s how we’ve come up with our combination of instruments—essentially a jazz trio, with piano, bass, and drums, and then banjo.”

Brown continues to experiment and create musical hybrids. “Latin music works surprisingly well with bluegrass, and that’s a direction I want to explore more. I don’t know if it’s because the banjo has a lot of personality as a percussive instrument. It fits in the groove very nicely.”

Recently, Brown has spent time in the studio with her colleagues, cutting their next album and taking a new approach to writing and arranging. “In the past, I’ve come to the band with a pretty good idea of the structure of the tune, then as we started to play it everybody weighed in with their own musical individuality,” she says. “This time, most tunes are cowritten with another member of the band. It’s been good to get out of the rhythmic and harmonic box I live in and try something else.”

The Alison Brown Quartet plays the Capilano College Performing Arts Theatre on Friday (March 28).