E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fiddling around town Bluegrass and more at the Cantab BY TED DROZDOWSKI

It’s a little after 8 p.m. when musicians begin drifting into the Cantab Lounge in Central Square. After a few minutes, the sound of a fiddle slices through the conversations in the bar as Alan Kaufman sits on a metal and vinyl chair in front of the stage and starts bowing his instrument, which he holds low, above his leg, old-time mountain-music style. Soon he’s joined by a guitarist. Then an upright bass that’s just come through the door in a canvas case emerges, and its owner begins thrumming out time. Soon the night’s host, Geoff Bartley, takes out a beautiful Martin guitar — a new model he helped design that bears the signature of folk legend Tom Paxton, whom he’s been accompanying for a decade. A dobro player enters the mix, his instrument propped horizontally against his belly as he works its strings with finger picks and a heavy steel slide bar. By now the musicians have formed a sizable circle in front of the stage. Someone starts singing — old tunes by the Carter Family and Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash’s "I Still Miss Someone." The jam, which has grown and is changing members casually, seems like something you’d find on a back porch in Kentucky or the outskirts of a bluegrass festival instead of a friendly but roughshod Cambridge watering hole that’s for decades hosted the residency of the R&B singer known as "the Peanut Man," Little Joe Cook. The players are good, or on their way to getting there. And the audience has grown, too, taking all the seats at the bar and tables and nearly filling the room, even though it’s a Tuesday night in August, ostensibly the depth of the summer doldrums.

By 10, when the evening’s featured band, Southern New Hampshire’s Monadnock, take the stage, the Cantab is packed and another smaller jam has sprung up downstairs, this one with fiddler Matt Glaser in its nucleus. Glaser is an author and Berklee instructor who has played with Bob Dylan and Yo-Yo Ma and on dozens of records — a master of folk and jazz styles. Other locally based roots luminaries, like the songwriter Mark Simos, also occasionally drop in.

The blue-shirted, tie-wearing men of Monadnock launch into a hot set — often fired by the sparking banjo solos of Alan Stapleford — that includes upbeat standards like "Salty Dog" and new tunes like their own "Monadnock Trail." As mandolinist Craig Engel puts it, "We sing about sad things, but it’s happy music." And infectious. Although a steady hum of conversation and the brisk bar sales compete a bit with their playing — after all, what’s happening here is a bona fide scene — people are swaying along or keeping their eyes on the bandstand. And when Bartley passes the hat for Monadnock, since there’s never an admission to his Tuesday-night bluegrass parties, almost everybody meets or betters the suggested $5 donation. To the point where he has to keep scooping the bills back inside the brim and tapping them down like leaves filling a trash bag.

"I think not charging a cover allows me to put more money into the hands of the featured band and helps build community," Bartley, a well-established folk artist who has been touring for decades and whose recordings are available via www.geoffbartley.com, explains when we sit at the bar to talk. "It also instantly rewards bands that have a strong live show."

Very strong live shows have been the norm at Bartley’s bluegrass nights for several years now, and the jams that pop up on the upstairs stage after the featured bands finish and in little clusters downstairs throughout the evening have become a proving and training ground for casual and professional players not only from New England but from throughout the country. These Tuesday hoedowns have even become a stop on the national bluegrass circuit for established club- and festival-level veterans like the James King Band, who’ll appear on August 31, and rising stars like King Wilkie, who tore up the room a few weeks back. Both hail from Virginia.

"When I started this night, in September 1993," Bartley says, "I wanted it to be mostly a pickin’ party," where musicians could drift together and start playing. Bartley’s Tuesdays are a sequel to the successful Monday-night acoustic open mikes he began hosting at the Cantab in 1991. "We did have a bunch of slow years." But he stuck with it, personally inviting musicians and hauling his own PA in and out of the club, which has never owned a sound system. "We were kind of slow until O Brother, Where Art Thou? came out in 2000," he says, referring to the Coen Brothers film that gave bluegrass a rebirth with its hit soundtrack and the song "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow." "Also, at about that time, we made a slight format change, putting the feature band on at 10 instead of 9. Then success happened almost overnight. There’s very much a social aspect to it, with mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings in the audience, a lot of attractive young people. So it gets a little loud at times, but this is a bar. And for the owner, Richard ‘Fitzy’ Fitzgerald, it’s like having another Saturday night."

For musicians like Kaufman, a Brighton resident who plays with the popular Cambridge-based nuevo-retro roots outfit Tarbox Ramblers and has been a regular at the Cantab’s bluegrass nights for several years, the scene is a magnet. "What draws me into it is this sense of community. The spontaneous jams are just that. You leap up on stage or get together in a small group, and you have no idea what you’re going to be playing or when you’ll be taking a break. It’s trial by fire, but it generally works out well. I know a lot of the musicians here, and we’re like a family that gets together on Tuesday nights to have fun!"

Whereas Bartley rules the Cantab’s stage with his bluegrass Tuesdays and acoustic open-mike Mondays, Wednesday through Sunday, the upstairs is the property of Little Joe Cook, who began his term of office there in 1985. At 81, with a few strokes under his belt, Cook shows no signs of retiring soon — especially when he’s leading his band the Thrillers through a set that struts a fine line between entertaining kitsch and old-school showmanship.

But beginning in mid September, the downstairs, which is now best known for its weeknight jams, poetry slams, and comedy, will get a fresh lease on life. Owner Fitzgerald has engaged Adam Oh, an energetic personality who leads the punk-blues ’n’ rock band Rollover Baby, to return roots rock and blues to the room on weekends. So far, the space, for years known as the Third Rail, has been repainted and given a new stage and lighting and a sprinkler system, and it’s due for a dedicated PA before its September 17 & 18 grand reopenings. It’s also been rechristened the Cantab Underground, a name that honors the history of the club, which older locals say was once a speakeasy, and boasts of a future that Oh says will embrace an indie rock and blues æsthetic.

I found out about the Cantab Underground when Oh asked me to consult with him on the space’s key grand reopening event, a benefit for the Algebra Project on September 18. The line-up features Eli "Newsboy" Reed, a young, emerging local artist steeped in the vintage soul-blues sound, Oh’s Rollover Baby, former Fabulous Thunderbirds guitar wiz Troy Gonyea’s new rock outfit the Howl, and others to be announced. (I should add that my own band, the Scissormen, will also play.) The goal is to raise as much as possible for the Algebra Project, a Cambridge-based national mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low-income students and students of color acquire the math skills they need for college and modern life. The Algebra Project was founded in the ’80s by civil-rights activist and math educator Robert P. Moses, a contemporary of Dr. Martin Luther King. Watch this space and "Arts News" for more details.