On the Powell Street Festival’s Web site, featured entertainers Shout!WhiteDragon are billed as a bluegrass band. But that’s not quite true, says multi-instrumentalist Kori Neil Miyanishi, who plays banjo and fiddle with the local foursome. Instead, his group plays old-time Appalachian music—and the difference, although small, is significant.

“In the simplest terms, bluegrass has become a performance-type music, whereas old-time music is a dance-based music,” he explains, on the line from his Vancouver home. “They function differently. The instruments—fiddle, banjo, guitar, bass, mandolin—all appear in both styles of music, but bluegrass is more of a sit-down thing. There’s also a great deal more improvisation on behalf of all of the players. Virtuosity is held in high regard in bluegrass music, but there’s greater range in old-time music. Virtuosity, with some people, is held in high regard, and with some people it’s not so important.”

It’s a theme Miyanishi returns to over and over again in conversation. Old-time music is for dancing, he stresses. The musicians are no more important than the dancers; often they don’t even perform on a stage. And as far as he’s concerned, his band is less noteworthy than the loose collective of musicians, cloggers, and square-dance callers that he’s helped organize. Calling itself Wrong Way Grand, it’s responsible for hosting a number of square-dance parties around the Lower Mainland, facilitating regular fiddle and banjo workshops, and producing an ongoing old-time music night at the ever-popular Railway Club.

“We had this idea that we wanted to put on a square dance, so we did,” he explains. “And we had it at the Cambrian Hall, and it was very well attended, surprisingly. I mean we were kind of surprised. So we said, ”˜Let’s do this again!’ ”

The workshops grew out of Miyanishi’s desire to make the dances self-sustaining. “The idea is that everybody learns the same repertoire, three or four tunes over the course of six weeks, and then we’d all come together at the end and have a band scramble and potluck and party or whatever, and just have fun. And part of the lure of being in the workshop is that they’d have an opportunity to perform for a couple of dances.

“Around the time of the second dance, we decided we needed a name, so we came up with Wrong Way Grand, which is a square-dance manoeuvre,” he adds. “So we started putting that on posters, just to give a cohesive face to what was going on.”

Shout!WhiteDragon is Wrong Way Grand’s de facto house band, and a fairly loose organization in itself. “Myself and Chris Suen on banjo and fiddle, we’re always there,” Miyanishi explains, adding that more often than not Viper Central string band’s Lorraine Cobb occupies the guitar chair. One of several bassists, mostly drawn from the Vancouver jazz scene, completes the quartet, which is sometimes further augmented by mandolin.

“We kind of scrambled the band together out of the instructors from the workshops,” says Miyanishi. “But it’s not like Shout!WhiteDragon is a big deal, necessarily, although we do want to do a recording. We’re just not focusing so much on the band as on the whole aspect of old-time music as it relates to dance and participation, I guess you could say. It all came out of dances and wanting to be a part of all that stuff.”

It’s a different approach than that taken by his previous band, Dyad, which released two critically acclaimed but commercially ignored albums of eerie mountain balladry before calling it a day.

“With that band, it was all about getting the music out and being creative and being promotional and all that kind of stuff,” Miyanishi notes. “And when we sort of quietly let Dyad pass away, I realized I didn’t need that. It was great to have and it was a lot of fun to be in, but what I really wanted and what I really needed was just to be playing music with friends.”

Which, he adds, has a lot to do with the grassroots appeal of old-time mountain music.

“It’s one of those things where it’s not about ”˜Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ ” he explains. “It’s about ”˜Oh, yes, you can do that,’ and ”˜Oh, yes, I’m going to do that.’ And it has this amazing ability to bring people from all walks of life together. I mean, I’ve been at sessions where there have been NASA scientists, tattooed punks, and schoolteachers all sitting around playing music. And you’d never see that in any other kind of modern social environment, as far as I can figure. It just draws people in to be who they are through the music.”

Shout!WhiteDragon plays the Powell Street Festival mainstage on Saturday (July 31).