One style was born under the karst crags of the Yangtze River valley, the other in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains in the southern United States. Superficially, few sounds are more dissimilar than Chinese music and American bluegrass, but two bands of bold adventurers have just set out to prove that they can, in fact, coexist.

The location for this daring experiment? Right here in Vancouver—where else?

It’s telling that neither of the expedition leaders—Mei Han of the Red Chamber quartet and John Reischman of the Jaybirds—is a B.C. native. Han emigrated here from China, where she was an acclaimed master of the zitherlike zheng, while Reischman is a transplanted Californian and one of the world’s premier mandolinists. They’d probably be just as well-known in their respective fields had they stayed at home. But here, in their adopted hometown, they’ve each discovered new collaborative possibilities—and a musical friendship that will see their bands share a stage at an upcoming Vancouver Community College concert.

The spark for this cross-cultural venture, which will culminate with a rousing octet performance of tunes from the Chinese repertoire and Jaybirds originals, came when Han contacted Reischman about taking some mandolin lessons. In addition to the zheng, she plays the liu qin, the soprano version of the familiar Chinese lute known as the pipa, and thought that learning mandolin technique would add to her expressive powers.

“Before that, I’d jammed with bluegrass musicians on festival stages, and I was just fascinated by bluegrass music,” Han explains, reached by phone at her East Vancouver home. “And when I formed this band, Red Chamber, two years ago, I thought there was a parallel between this kind of string band and a bluegrass band. Basically, they have lots of things in common, but also a lot of things that are not common in current Chinese music—things that were part of traditional Chinese music, but that we don’t have right now.”

She explains that Chinese music as we know it today has been adversely affected by a century of homogenization: once the music became codified, written down, and taught in conservatories, it lost a lot of its emotional content.

“The technique right now is so phenomenal in China,” she allows. “But the problem is that compositionally, and ideologically, they’re still at the stage of 19th-century classical music. The language is quite stiff, and the interpretation is showy—the performance is shallow.”

Han’s prescription for Chinese music is both traditional and forward-thinking. She advocates a return to the musical practices of the pre-industrial past, when amateur musicians would convene to make up their own tunes based on common rhythmic structures, but she also wants Chinese performers to learn from global musical styles, including bluegrass, contemporary composition, and modern jazz.

“We copy music, we read music, we can play it, but we have lost the ability [to improvise],” she notes. “It’s like we used to fly, but now we only walk. We have wings, but we don’t fly.”

For Reischman and the Jaybirds, whose Stellar Jays CD was nominated for a 2008 Juno, collaborating with Red Chamber’s Chinese musicians isn’t necessarily a chance to rejuvenate their art. After all, bluegrass—despite its deep roots in English, Scottish, and Irish folk styles—is less than a century old. But Reischman is an eclectic musician by nature, having explored Brazilian music and jazz in his duo with guitarist John Miller, and he’s always happy to learn something new—as he did when he added his mandolin to the traditional tune “Bubugao” during a 2007 Red Chamber showcase.

“I learned to play that with them last year, and it’s pretty amazing,” he says, reached in Boston, where he’s readying a book of his original compositions. “It’s not too complex harmonically, but the form is such that it doesn’t repeat phrases more than once, if that. So to follow the tune you just sort of have to learn it by rote, and that was a good challenge.”

Like Han, Reischman sees some parallels between his group’s lineup of mandolin, banjo, guitar, and bass and Red Chamber’s instrumental complement. “The san-hsien is sort of similar to the banjo, and the liu qin is pretty much the same as the mandolin, only single-stringed, and the ruan is sort of like the guitar,” he notes. “I mean, they’re not exact, but they can provide the same kind of tonality and rhythmic role.”

So perhaps the meeting of Red Chamber and the Jaybirds is not quite as unlikely as it seems. It’s still a brave undertaking, though—and the kind of intercultural exchange that is fast becoming a Vancouver specialty.

Red Chamber and the Jaybirds play the Vancouver Community College Auditorium on Friday (May 2).