Alison Brown has been a pioneer throughout most of her still young career. She's been the pre-eminent female banjoist in acoustic music even before her first solo album, "Simple Pleasures," was released on Vanguard a full decade ago.

Prior to that, her duo album with fiddler Stuart Duncan ("Pre-Sequel") and stints with Northern Lights and Alison Krauss & Union Station plus a later tour of duty as Michelle Shocked's musical director during the latter's "Arkansas Traveler" period, brought her both valuable experience and a glowing reputation.

Brown's bebop-influenced album, "Quartet," and her leadership in the eclectic Nashville label, Compass, further established her as a woman whose career choices are driven by daring and experimentation.

So why is her sixth album as a leader, "Fair Weather," a return to her acoustic music and bluegrass roots after fronting a banjo/piano/bass/drums ensemble for the past few years?

"I thought it would be great fun and a good challenge to make a bluegrass record. And it's something that I don't really feel like I've ever set out to do before. All my records have always been trying to push the envelope in some way or other. But I came up playing bluegrass music, and that's how I got my start, and I just thought it'd be great to get some of my favorite bluegrass musicians together and make a record that could be considered all the way around to be bluegrass."

"I think my goals as an artist and for the label are the same, which is mainly to make a product that is marketable and as focused as I can towards a niche. That actually was one of the fun things about this record as my other records have tended to be this jazz/folk hybrid, which is trickier to market."

"With this record it's great, because it's a bluegrass record - that's what my goal was as an artist, and as a label, the goal is to just make everybody who's a bluegrass fan want to have the record. It's actually worked out great."

While "Fair Weather" will appeal to acoustic string music purists who might have been turned off by the jazzier components of her last two releases, this is by no means all hard-core bluegrass.

The most traditional-sounding number, her playfully named "Girl's Breakdown," complete with liberal use of Scruggs tuners, allows Brown to stretch out over a hard-driving grassy groove with Duncan, Sam Bush, Tony Rice and Jerry Douglas.

But "The Devil Went Down to Berkeley" traverses more typically adventurous waters harmonically, along with the core musicians of the old David Grisman Quintet, Rice with Darol Anger, Mike Marshall, and Todd Phillips (the latter three of whom also play with Brown, Tim O'Brien and Philip Aaberg in New Grange).

Brown is exceptionally generous at sharing the spotlight.

"I had never recorded anything with BŽla (Fleck) before, and I think David Grier I'd never recorded anything with either. Although we've probably played on the same tunes, on someone else's record, but not at the same time. And I've never recorded anything with Matt Flinner. So, there were a few folks that I've never recorded with before. Vince (Gill) is another one for sure."

Brown more than holds her own while showing off her own impressive guitar chops with the incredible guitarist Grier on "Deep Gap," and she re-records her earlier composition, "Leaving Cottondale" (first on "Simple Pleasures"), matching banjo rolls with Fleck himself.

"I went over to Japan in 1991 and ran into a Japanese banjo player named Taku Kawamata, and he had worked out a version for twin banjos for "Leaving Cottondale."

"And I thought it sounded great for two banjos, so I'd always had it in the back of my mind to redo it that way. So, BŽla was able to come in and play a twin banjo part. People haven't done a lot of twin banjo stuff recently, so that was another reason I thought it would be fun to do."

The all-star pairing continues as she makes way for mandolinists Bush and Marshall to square off on "Poe's Pickin' Party." She also shines on her own during the adventurous swapping of licks with fiddler Anger on the outro to "Everybody's Talkin'."

Brown included guest vocalists on otherwise-instrumental albums to new heights with "Fair Weather."

"All of my records have been all-instrumental with the exception of one track on my second record ("Sweet Thames Flow Softly" with Maura O'Connell from "Twilight Motel"). The reason I wanted to have vocals on this record is just because I think vocals are such an important part of bluegrass that to present a well-rounded take on bluegrass you sort of need to have the vocal stuff in there, too. And I felt that I had some interesting ideas, even though I'm not a vocalist. I thought there were some tunes that could make great bluegrass tunes. And three of the four we recorded, not including 'Fair Weather,' that folks probably really had never heard before, were taken from other genres and adapted to bluegrass music. And I felt that that was kind of an original thing and worthwhile in that way."

"Everybody's Talkin'," from "Midnight Cowboy," is sung here by Tim O'Brien, while Bush comes up with an intriguing rendition of Elvis Costello's "Everyday I Write the Book" and Claire Lynch adds her sweet and soulful voice to the song "Hummingbird."

"Those ideas came from Garry West, who produced the record. He's got a really good pop background, and he thought those tunes would lend themselves really well to bluegrass, and I think he's right. When I heard the Elvis Costello tune, there's a repeating riff in the original version that sounds just like a banjo lick. So, we incorporated that in, and I think they really worked out great. (As for "Everybody's Talkin'"), that's one of those nice mid-tempo tunes that suits a banjo really well. That's actually a really fun one to play."

But the most interesting story of all lies behind the title track. "Fair Weather" was written by Steve Libbea, brother of Nashville Bluegrass Band bassist Gene Libbea.

Back in Brown's younger days, she, Duncan, the Libbea brothers, and a guy by the name of Gill put together an ad hoc bluegrass quintet in order to enter (and, not surprisingly, win) a band contest at Knott's Berry Farm in California.

Steve Libbea died tragically at a young age in a plane crash, so Brown re-assembled the remaining members of that one-shot band on this recording to pay tribute to her late friend.

"It was great! I was thrilled that everybody was so excited about doing the tune. I think we all had a really good time in the studio together recreating that tune. I've always thought it was a great song. When I called Vince up and mentioned it to him, he remembered it and sang part of it back to me over the phone. So, it's a real catchy tune - even that many years later he remembered it. We had a great time doing it."

Brown's amazing musical talent can appear to overshadow the part of her that heads Compass. Though she attended Harvard and got her MBA from UCLA, her memories of her years working in the financial world yielded a quote from her that was widely circulated years ago, along the lines of, "The worst day on the road playing music is better than the best day in the business office."

Reminded of that statement in the context of her twin roles as musician and record company executive, she reflects, "Well, it's a constant challenge juggling the two. I love to get the opportunity to go out and tour. But my job's just so much more related to music when I'm in the office that that has a certain satisfaction to me that taxes and bonds never really had. And so, even when I'm sitting in the office and working on promoting somebody else's music and exposing the public to a great new artist that I think they're going to really like, that has a certain satisfaction, too. So, I probably wouldn't make an emphatic statement about it these days, just because the two things are much more tied together for me than they used to be."

So does this CD mark a significant new direction for Brown? On the contrary, "I didn't really make this record to be a touring event. It's more like a recorded event. And we may go out and do a couple of dates, maybe with Darol Anger and Mike Marshall, to play some of these tunes. But really, kind of the most interesting musical challenge for me is continuing to develop the music for my quartet. So, that's the next thing that I want to do and that's what I've started thinking about, is another quartet record, which I hope to have out in the next year or so. We're continually on the road with that group."

And Brown faces the rigors of the road with more than just her prodigious talent, determination and business acumen, but also with a sense of humor, as evidenced by her response when asked if she ever tells banjo jokes herself: "Sure, I do, yeah. I think it's important not to take yourself too seriously. I've always kind of been partial to 'How do you know that the stage is level?' ('The banjo player drools out of both sides of his mouth.') Or 'How do you know that there's a banjo player at the door?' 'The knocking speeds up.' There are a lot of good ones, and it never bothers me. I kind of like them."